The Agony of Ecstasy Author:Olivia Gordon The English daughter of two South African-born Oxford Dons, Olivia Gordon returned to South Africa at seventeen. In the Cape Town rave world of the late 1990s, teenagers took ecstasy in forests, raves and the desert as well as in the clubs of the Cape. As one of them, Olivia Gordon went to hell as well as heaven in her experience of the drug ecs... more »tasy. This book is the story of a breakdown and recovery that many will recognise: the seldom-described yet common experience of ecstasy depression. A central theme of the book is the quest for meaning of a secular generation. Drugs are a religion and a moral code to searching, impressionable young people. Olivia Gordon found herself questioning, as a user, the drug ecstasy and the ideals it has brought into mass popular culture: ideals like love, happiness, unity, beauty, and other fashionable things like repetitive beats, burning up, plastic, and mindlessness. Her ecstasy-induced depression was a dark night of the soul, completely alien to the corporate/atheistic mentality of her world and yet its direct product. Olivia Gordon writes in detail of her recovery: her return to 'normality' took eighteen months, a passage through many cognitive mechanisms. Olivia Gordon was born in 1978. She read English Literature at Cambridge University and now lives in London. She has written for a number of newspapers and magazines, and this is her first book.« less