Four years agoI was offered seven figures to name names in this book. The real players in this story include senators, congressmen, celebrated newscasters, and powerful businessmen. They were—and are—people at the highest level of government and industry. The 2007 blockbuster movie, Charlie Wilson’s War, starring Tom Hanks, opened with a detailed mention of this scandal.

…Because no one is who they were thirty years ago, and errors of youth should stay in the past, I declined the big bucks offer. And for personal reasons, certain names and events have been changed, some characters drawn as composites of several people, and factual liberties taken (in other words completely fictionalized, as I don’t wish this to become A Thousand Little Pieces fiasco);  however, many events in this book are true. What you’re about to read is the story of what came to be known as the Capitol Hill Cocaine Connection.  It chronicles the first time in the history of the United States that the government investigated its own members for drug use.

It’s also the story of a young woman caught up in money, power, and the diabolical lure of dealing drugs in the bedrooms of the rich and famous to the corridors of the United States Capitol.  It’s a story of personal corruption—of dysfunction, the fast lane, hard life, and yes, Witness Protection. The woman is now much older and admits freely that she lied under oath in  congressional testimony to the House Ethics Committee.

To let go and to go on, I am now ready to tell my story.

Feather Harrington sits on an airplane with a pound of cocaine taped to her body. The Quiet Sound of Disappearing by Ryan Rayston is a tense, gritty, unorthodox, bizarrely funny, fictionalized story of one woman’s descent into drugs and dealing, her arrest, and her daring struggle to find her way back.

This engrossing account of the hedonistic drug culture of the early eighties provides humorous and searing testimony to the literal trials and tribulations of that time. She bottoms out in a pivotal moment that leads her to try—and fail—rehab. After getting sober on her own, Feather is arrested and indicted as a co-conspirator in a large DC drug scandal. Shockingly brave and honest, this gorgeously written, stream of consciousness novel gets at the gritty heart of what it is like to battle a disease and carry a shameful secret. The Quiet Sound of Disappearing is an emotional rollercoaster about love, loss, need, and managing to survive the unsurvivable.