Felicia “Snoop” Pearson’s memoir is out and our regular readers at Grand Central Publishing were good enough to acknowledge our plea a few weeks back and drop us a copy, thank you very much.

Snoop Pearson, the current memoirist and former dealer, plays Snoop, the crazy hitwoman and dealer-soldier, on The Wire— HBO’s cinema verité experiment on the “war on drugs” that’s now in its fifth season. The Wire, as much as anything ever will, documents the systematic failures and hypocritical philosophy of America’s long-running disastrous anti-drug crusade and draws on as much real-life reporting as it can to tell the story. Most of the writers on the show are ex-cops and city lawyers and many of the actors have been pulled from the drug corners in Baltimore where the series is set. Snoop Pearson is one of them. Her memoir, Grace After Midnight, is essentially the back story for one of the coldest, most real, oddly sympathetic TV characters ever.

The book is a very fast read intended for young people, a “coming of age cautionary tale” that also speaks directly to the ills plaguing our country’s reviled overwhelmingly black underclass. In fact Snoop’s story is a cultural cliché, so predictable, so made for TV, it would be laughable if it weren’t also a cultural reality that we seem politically intent to extend forever without end.

In brief: Felicia Pearson was a crack baby born to an addict and raised in a foster home. The good people in her life had no money or power. The bad people ran the streets. She was a good student, smart as a whip, an open lesbian, a street tough and, soon enough, a dealer. She watched people get robbed and jailed and murdered and then, at 14, committed murder and got jailed, for eight years. When she came out, she tried to go straight, was intent to go straight, felt a divine light leading her straight. She got a job at an auto plant and then at a book warehouse and then at a car wash. But her record followed her to each. She was fired from the first two for being an excon and walked out after one too many hassles at the last. At 22 she had $500 in honest money saved and had had enough of it all. In her mind there was no choice: she went “Back to the dog-eat-dog world. Back to get it when you can. Back to the goddamn block.”

Take that $500, buy me a half-ounce of coke and work off that. That’s it. That’s the start. Put that Mickey Mouse go-straight shit out of my head. Think like I used to think. Think ahead. Start dealing with this coke and move up to heroin. More money in heroin. Got one thought and one thought only: start slow, stay cool, but wind up the biggest drug dealer in East Baltimore. This time fuckin’ go for it. I know the game. Now I’m playing to win.

The way her commitment to the “Mickey Mouse go-straight shit” melts after repeated humiliation is the story at the heart of the book. Snoop seems a good person with good intentions. She’s amazingly brave and resilient. And she’s painfully young throughout. But the book, like her life, leads inevitably toward the world of the game.

There’s little arguing with the logic. She goes from earning tens to earning thousands of dollars a day. That she was also destined to be murdered by her rivals or jailed for life by the authorities doesn’t really lessen the rationality of the choice. East Baltimore, like Washington DC, like Hollywood, is a one-industry town: you get in or you fall out; you either take your shot at getting paid or you resign yourself to invisibly scraping at the dregs of the American dream while ignoring the great money machine buzzing all around you. Only a fool or a hypocrite or a privileged outsider would expect young people to choose the latter.

The fact that Snoop was saved from the fruits of her success as a dealer by The Wire makes her a crazy exception that proves the rule. That there was ever a TV show with the payroll and the plotline and the will to hire Baltimore corner kids is something beyond the realm of fairytale. Michael K Williams, who plays Omar in the show, saw Snoop in a bar and asked her to come to the set and meet the producers. She did. Only later, after she was hired and getting paid, did she quit her corners. In the book, she does an incredible job of capturing the absurdity of the deus-ex-television turn of events that changed her life:

Suddenly… real is pretend and pretend is real. Snoop is real and Snoop is a TV character. The script is flipped. I wake up, get dressed, leave my work on the block to walk into a world about make-believe work on the block. But because I ain’t sure the make-believe work is real, I keep my real-life work. My shops stay open… TV cats talking about We want real people on this show. We want to show your reality. But by showing my reality, these motherfuckers are changing my reality. The shit’s confusing. By showing who I really am, they’re changing who I really am.

It’s pretty much guaranteed that Grace After Midnight won’t change any policymaker positions. But it should. The book is another dispatch from the land that for decades it seems only popculture artists and social workers have been willing to sincerely approach. It’s one of a mountain of American cultural artifacts currently begging the question: Why the disconnect between what we appreciate as true as music and paperback and screenplay consumers and what we have come to accept as tolerable bullshit as neighbors, voters and citizens?