"Junk turns the user into a plant. Plants do not feel pain since pain has no function in a stationary organism. Junk is a painkiller. A plant has no libido in the human or animal sense. Junk replaces the sex drive. Seeding is the sex of the plant and the function of opium is to delay seeding. Perhaps the intense discomfort of withdrawal is the transition from plant back to animal, from a painless, sexless, timeless state back to sex and pain and time, from death back to life."

Reality television's got nothing on William Burroughs. This novel tells stories of lurid adventures and serious drug abuse—all from the junkie's point of view. And trust us: it's not pretty.

The book was thought by many to be unpublishable. After many rejections, Burroughs kind of gave up on the idea of seeing this book in print. Really, he would have given up on writing entirely if it weren't for Allen Ginsberg.

Allen doggedly helped Burroughs edit and sell the work. When Allen met Carl Solomon in a mental hospital, he insisted that Carl put the manuscript in front of his uncle, A. A. Wyn—the owner of Ace Books. Such an honest and unflinching account of addiction needed to be heard, Allen insisted.

Though Ace Books really only published comics and crime thrillers at the time, they bought the manuscript. The rest is, well, history.

We can thank Burroughs for the slew of confessional writing we enjoy today. It's nearly impossible now to find a novel or non-fiction book that doesn't have characters confessing their deepest, darkest sins. But Burroughs was an iconoclast; he's the O.G. confessional writer.

In Junkie, his descriptions of drug withdrawal dig deep. They even have us dive into the pores of the junkie's skin… and needless to say, things get real weird, real quick.

In this passage, Burroughs describes a junkie using a plant metaphor. Why? He wants to illustrate how a person is stripped of his humanity when he becomes drug-dependent. When you become a junkie, you become dumb as a daffodil.

And, just like a plant, the heavy drug user doesn't feel pain and doesn't move much—unless he needs more drugs. He doesn't even desire sex. He just kind of exists in the most basic of ways.

Now, this is not your average way of thinking of a drug user. Then again, Burroughs was not your average drug user.

Burroughs loves to keep us on our toes with bizarre and unexpected metaphors. Like, here, we have drug user = a plant. With this metaphor, Burroughs aims to have us ask the most profound of all questions: what does it mean to be human?

Burroughs seems to think being human has something to do with passion, pain, and mobility. Take those things away, and you're just a… plant, evidently.

One reason this metaphor is so interesting is that literature often romanticizes our botanical friends. We love to think of plants as beautiful, miraculous, sunshine-eaters and self-sustaining food-makers. But Burroughs imagines them as sedentary, sexless, emotion-less things.

In doing so, he defies all of our poetic associations with plants—like, roses are for love and lovers, plants help show us the harmonious circle of life, and so on. His writing, then, works to disrupt how we understand language and meaning.

And that, in a nutshell, is why Burroughs was such an important writer. Ta-da.