Part memoir, part manifesto, Drawing Blood finds one of America's most-talked-about young artists looking back on our tumultuous decade-and offering an inspiring take on how art can save us all. This is the story of how art saved me. When the world watched me hardest, when my brain burned itself bloody, I could draw. No matter what, I had that. It was all I needed. For more than a decade, the underground artist and journalist Molly Crabapple has chronicled our changing world-from the glamorous burlesque dancers and piggish coke-fueled bankers of pre-2008 New York City to the idealistic protestors and thuggish riot police of Zuccotti Park during the heyday of Occupy Wall Street, from Syrian fighters opposing ISIS to prisoners, guilty and innocent, at Guantanamo Bay. Drawing Blood is Molly's candid, witty, defiant, and wise memoir of how an angry-and precociously talented-girl from Long Island found salvation, and mission, in her work. Raised by an illustrator mother and a Marxist father, Molly was a rebel in search of a cause.

Diagnosed with oppositional defiant disorder at school, kicked out of the seventh grade, she spent her adolescence resisting the quotidian. When she graduated at seventeen, she began her love affair with travel, bumming though Europe and becoming one of George Whitman's favorites-his "tumbleweeds"-at the legendary Shakespeare & Co bookstore in Paris. She began learning Arabic, drawn to the culture of the Near East, and traveled to Turkey and Turkish Kurdistan, where she was subjected to repeated assault yet came to love the people. Back in her beloved New York City, after witnessing the attacks of 9/11, Molly steadfastly pursued a career as an artist, supplementing her life and fledgling career by working as a life model, a burlesque performer, and an early member of the famous Suicide Girls. Eventually she landed a gig as house artist at Simon Hammerstein's legendary nightclub The Box, the epicenter of decadent Manhattan nightlife before the financial crisis of 2008. "The men who wrecked the American economy drank champagne four nights a week at The Box," she writes. "New York was shiny the way a bubble is, the moment before it bursts. The skin of the city stretched taut.

The colors were bright, and all we could see were our own reflections." Then, all at once, it was gone. Molly's decade of experience-at home and abroad-had radicalized her, and in the wake of the crash she turned her eye to the Occupy Wall Street protests, getting arrested along with the protestors, creating many of the iconic images of the movement, and publishing her first journalistic accounts of the protests. Her "Poster for the May Day General Strike" would eventually be acquired by the Museum of Modern Art. Suddenly her artistic eye, an instinct for injustice, and her interest in the cultures of the Near and Middle East converged, and she would become an indispensable voice in contemporary journalism-bearing witness, in words and pictures, to everything from prisoner conditions in Guantanamo to the surveillance state in our own desktops and mobile phones. The Guardian has called Molly Crabapple "equal parts Hieronymus Bosch, William S. Burroughs and Cirque du Soleil." Now, in this gorgeously packaged memoir-teeming with new sketches-Molly reveals herself as a memoirist of extraordinary gifts: witty, self-aware, fiercely perceptive, and endlessly inspiring.