Confessions of an English Opium-Eater and Other Writings : Penguin Classics : 9780140439014 : 0140439013 : 27 Mar 2003 : The first literary addiction memoir, featuring the autobiographical Suspiria de Profundis, the inspiration for the 2018 horror film Suspiria, starring Dakota Johnson and Tilda Swinton and directed by Luca Guadagnino In this remarkable autobiography, Thomas De Quincey hauntingly describes the surreal visions and hallucinatory nocturnal wanderings he took through London?and the nightmares, despair, and paranoia to which he became prey?under the influence of the then-legal painkiller laudanum. Forging a link between artistic self-expression and addiction, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater and Other Writings seamlessly weaves the effects of drugs and the nature of dreams, memory, and imagination. First published in 1821, it paved the way for later generations of literary drug users, from Baudelaire to Burroughs, and anticipated psychoanalysis with its insights into