That’s right—National Journal reporter David Morrison, whose anonymous chronicle of heroin addiction was published in this paper (“Me & My Monkey,” 1/13), has landed a book contract. Unexpectedly, on March 18, the Washington Post outed the rehabbed Morrison. Since then, he’s been assailed by everyone from Connie Chung to 60 Minutes, though he says he’ll reject all media appearances—until his book is complete, that is. “I was very unhappy when [Post writer] Howard Kurtz first contacted me,” Morrison says. He wasn’t quite ready for his name to be known, but he took the intrusion in stride and soon chose an agent—D.C.-based Gail Ross—to shop his story of drug abuse. After two days of bidding, Doubleday won the rights to the book, which is slated for publication in spring 1997.

Morrison calls the original “Monkey” a “template” for his yet-to-be- finished work, but he acknowledges that his take-no-prisoners prose style will have to be toned down for the mainstream. Besides, he says, “No one can take that for 60,000 to 80,000 words.” Still, he intends the book to be “very much my story, with more stuff about my life.” He plans to augment his own memoirs with accounts of other white-collar Washington junkies, to discuss drug laws, and to reveal how heroin can tempt any social class. “I want to show that other people have gone through the same experience,” Morrison explains. “I’m not an aberration.”