The Basketball Diaries

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This article is about the book. For the film of the same name, see The Basketball Diaries (film).

The Basketball Diaries is a 1978 book written by American author Jim Carroll, in which he chronicles the decline of a promising young basketball player in New York City in the 1960s.

The novel consists of Carroll's diaries from the age of 12 to 16. They detail his daily life, sexual experiences, Cold War paranoia, the counter-culture movement, and, especially, his addiction to heroin, which began when he was 13.

He begins using heroin "once in a moon," but, in the last entry, he talks about staying high for four days straight on a "ratty mattress," with his "two sets of gimmicks right along side me in the slightly bloody water in the plastic cup on the crusty linoleum, probably used by every case of hepatitis in upper Manhattan by now." However, the diaries are not only about heroin. They are also about the coming of age of an independent, strong-willed youth on the dirty New York streets and its characters.

"I thought I could deal with, perhaps even come to understand my obsessions through some strained eloquence. I thought I could eventually pierce every veil through chance metaphor, but how many flowers can serve as metaphors for that initial mingling of blood and water encased in the barrel of a syringe? ... The fact is that instead of freeing myself through language, the language itself has become a hostage, and the room where we are held becomes smaller every day."