While the themes of The Albertine Notes encompass a web of complex ideas, I found Moody’s treatment of drug use to be noteworthy in its range of literary functions. It’s easy and formulaic to personify addiction as an antagonistic, destructive force that entices, grips, and destroys indiscriminately – and often, in literature and other mediums, it is reduced to such portrayals. I found Moody’s approach to be divergent from oversimplification, and his Albertine exists as an illicit substance but also as a pathway to something far more sinister and perplexing within our own understanding of the past, present, and future.