For those of you who were around in the early ’90s for the Elvis Room punk scene heyday, you might pick up Lisa Crystal Carver’s new book, “Drugs Are Nice: A Post-Punk Memoir,” in hopes that your name gets mentioned. For the rest of us, Carver crafts an addictive account of her performance art “band” Suckdog, the birth of her nationally acclaimed zine Rollerderby, and the various relationships she has with underground celebrities like industrial music cult figure Boyd Rice and indie rock’s beloved first son Bill Callahan (a.k.a. Smog).

Carver is often accused of having multiple personalities, and one could argue from her past works that she is at least three different people: the intellectual humorist of “Dancing Queen”; the animalistic, disconcerting performance artist of Suckdog; and the erotic modern-day Anais Nin of “The Lisa Diaries.” In “Drugs Are Nice,” her various personalities and legendary exploits are married between two covers.
Carver’s elegant conclusions about herself and the world compel the reader toward the destination even though the main character could be doomed.

While she’s often credited as an underground cultural anthropologist, it would be more accurate to say that Carver is the culture that she documents, breaking down boundaries through violence, sexuality, theatrics, writing and plain old motherly love. Rollerderby becomes a reference point for freaks, outcasts and the mentally disturbed. Suckdog questions the public and the private by physically terrorizing the audience, leaving them confused and (ideally) reborn by the end.

Her relationships are also a form of art, and, like we learn in “The Lisa Diaries,” the one with her father is the most defining. He tells her when she is young that one of his biggest accomplishments in life is not beating her. His implied violence becomes an obsession for Lisa, one that she continues to revisit over the course of her first marriage to Jean Louis Costes and her relationship with Boyd Rice, the father of her first child.

On the surface, girls like Lisa are a dime a dozen in alternative culture, and the iconography of the stereotype (see the cover) should be good for book sales. What sets Lisa apart from the typical bad-childhood- turned-punk-artist cliché is that unlike what the title suggests, Carver does not use the lifestyle to escape life. She has turned her alienation wildly outward, aggressively questioning everything, even the culture she helped to create.