Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man
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—Mickey Rapkin, GQ
“Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man is an instant classic. Anybody who knows anything about addiction will feel morally altered by this book. To an extraordinary degree, it has both beauty and truth. It goes beyond its own revelations to become a book for everybody, a work of art. I suppose we live for the magic of these things.”
—Andrew O’Hagan, author of Be Near Me
“You’d be hard-pressed not to be captivated by the prose of Bill Clegg, a fallen angel (now redeemed—not least by this book) of the New York literary scene…. Beautifully measured and adroitly paced… mixing a matter-of-fact eye for detail with just enough emotion to unsettle and engross…. The great achievement here is that the story, told as if it were a novel only loosely grounded in fact, is no less satisfactory for leaving questions hanging…. The rhythms of Clegg’s addiction are so hypnotic, his prose billowing in the same beguiling way as the plumes of smoke from his crack pipe enthrall him, that the tension, paranoia, and ecstasy he experiences from it seems somehow restrained. This tautness is the product of honesty; there is no sensationalism…. The resolution sees Clegg empathize with all those his addiction has forced him to neglect and the empathy floods him as if it were another drug; all incredibly moving without trying to overwhelm the reader…. Addictive and masterful.”
—Julian Hall, The Independent
“Like Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City, it’s a portrait of a city and of a self-conscious intellectual’s self-invention. It’s a sublime new cover of a very old song.”
—Lea Carpenter, BigThink.com
“I devoured Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man, couldn’t put it down. The writing throughout is beautiful, and all the while it is reportorial and efficient and honest—a rare combination of feats!”
—Elinor Lipman, author of Then She Found Me
“Adopting an admirable warts-and-all approach, Clegg presents eyebrow-raising facts and figures with an almost clinical detachment indicative of his mind-set at the time…. Clegg’s prose… is graceful and poetic, maintaining an inverse relationship with his sanity. The most heightened, elegant descriptions are of his descent into drug-fueled hysteria…. Like Clegg himself feels at so many points throughout the book, the reader is left wanting more.”
—Liz Raftery, Boston Globe
“Clegg can have few writers in his stable as gifted as he…. I stepped into Clegg’s story sympathetic and curious, and emerged from it grateful.”
—Tim Pfaff, Bay Area Reporter
“Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man… rings true in brutal, blunt strokes. We can all take some measure of happiness that Clegg’s durability and his talents have left him as a literary agent with big-name authors at a big-name agency.”
—David Carr, New York Times Book Review
“Many first-time memoirists are motivated by self-serving desires: to make the world notice them or to make the world like them. Neither can be said of Bill Clegg.”
—Jennie Yabroff, Newsweek
“Bill Clegg… has written a streamlined, hair-raising, high-torque memoir…. Even though we know how the story must end, it’s hard to believe Clegg will survive the ordeal he describes in such horrific detail.”
—Jay McInerney, Vanity Fair
“Bill Clegg was a crack addict, and all those outward trappings of success collapsed over a period of two months in 2005 when his addiction took over his life. He tells the story in a powerful new memoir.”
—Guy Raz, All Things Considered, NPR
“Bill Clegg’s memoir is a startling, hair-raising, and compulsively readable account of one man’s descent into the hell of addiction. That Clegg lived to tell his story is amazing. That he has captured the details of his experience with such beauty is even more so. Unforgettable.”
—Danielle Trussoni, author of the memoir
Falling Through the Earth
“If you relish a tough-to-read story with edge, you’ll want this one. Like any craving, Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man will be impossible to let go of.”
—Terri Schlichenmeyer, Leader Times
“Shockingly eloquent…. An Orphean account of Clegg’s descent into the compulsive, shattering world of crack addiction.”
—Gabriel Bloomfield, Lambda Literary
“I highly recommend Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man. I haven’t read a book at a single sitting for a long while, but this held me for the duration—it’s an honest and wonderfully crafted book by a man as intoxicated by language as he was by crack. Not at all the standard recovery memoir, it has real literary depth and complexity of construction without seeming in any way contrived.”
—A. L. Kennedy, The Guardian
Copyright
Copyright © 2010 by Bill Clegg
Reading group guide copyright © 2011 by Bill Clegg and Little, Brown and Company
Excerpt from Ninety Days © 2011 by Bill Clegg
All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
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Originally published in hardcover by Little, Brown and Company, June 2010
Second eBook Edition: August 2011
Back Bay Books is an imprint of Little, Brown and Company. The Back Bay Books name and logo are trademarks of Hachette Book Group, Inc.
This book is a work of nonfiction. The names and descriptions of some of the people in it have been changed.
The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.
ISBN: 978-0-316-08450-5