Ninety Days

by Bill Clegg

  Acknowledgments

  Thanks to Pat Strachan, the wisest eye, for ongoing editorial guidance; Michael Pietsch and David Young for continued support; the Dream Team at Little, Brown—Michelle Aielli, Amanda Brown, and Heather Fain—for unflagging excellence; Raffaella DeAngelis, Tracy Fisher, and the foreign-rights team at WME for being the best; Robin Robertson and Luiz Schwarcz for their rigor and care and for their friendship; Julia Eisenman, Jill Bialosky, Chris Pomeroy, Jay Knowlton, Joey Arbagey, Adam McLaughlin, Jonathan Galassi, and Kelle Groom for their time and their meticulous notes; Cy O’Neal for thieving, for movies, for more; Shaun Dolan for never blinking no matter what; John Bowe for being in the next room; Jean Stein for every magnificent voice mail and for having faith; my family—Mom, Dad, Kim, Brian, Matt, Ben, Lisa, Mark, Lillian, and Sean—for encouragement, love, and for defying gravity; Van Scott for all the days, and Jennifer Rudolph Walsh—great force, friend, agent, boss —for everything.

  Thanks most of all to all the drunks and addicts who helped me get and stay sober and all those who still do.

  Reading Group Guide

  Ninety Days

  A Memoir of Recovery

  by

  Bill Clegg

  A conversation with Bill Clegg

  The author of Ninety Days talks with Yale Breslin of GQ.

  You’ve said that the day after you finished writing Ninety Days, you relapsed. Did you feel it coming? What factors do you attribute to your relapse?

  I did not see it coming; in fact I’d never felt more serene, and sober. I was on an island in southern Thailand for a month finishing Ninety Days (a book about recovery, of all things), and felt deeply relaxed and connected to my sobriety. But the feeling was not accurate. I was in fact the most far away (from sobriety) I’d been in the five and a half years of being sober. I was away from the AA meeting I’d go to every day, away from my sober community, not in touch with other alcoholics and addicts in recovery in the way that I am usually: by phone, over coffee, after and before meetings. I’d talked to my sponsor, and taken on a new sponsee while I was away, but basically I’d disconnected from my sober family for the first time in sobriety. There is an expression that people in recovery hear and say all the time: “Feelings aren’t facts,” and in this case it was all too true.

  Do you feel that you’re finished (for now) telling your story about addiction and recovery? Or do you see another book that documents another phase of the puzzle?

  I think these two books say more than I ever expected to say on addiction and recovery. If there is anything more I’ll tell my cat, Benny.

  Your musical tastes changed and progressed throughout the years, and you’ve mentioned that Rachael Yamagata’s music had a profound influence on your recovery. How so?

  I listened to Rachael’s first album, Happenstance, during the year I spent unemployed, going to three meetings a day, getting sober. They were sad songs about loss and grief and moving on, and they sounded like I felt…especially in the first few months of returning to New York after rehab.

  What was your first introduction to her as an artist?

  I was in a coffee shop on Jane Street and heard the first few notes on a piano to a song of hers called “Quiet,” and they were the saddest, most mournful notes I’d ever heard. I thought: There I am; that’s me. And I went home and downloaded Happenstance and listened to that album until I couldn’t anymore.

  In some ways, is it hard now to listen to her music?

  I didn’t listen to Happenstance for a long time after I got sober and went back to work. When I was writing Ninety Days, I began to listen to those songs again as a way of remembering. So I went back in for a while, and wallowed.

  You have formed a relationship with her—when did this start? How did you meet?

  I met Rachael recently to do a reading and interview at Barnes and Noble. The format was that I would read a little, she’d play some songs, and we’d be interviewed in between. The first song she played was “Reason Why,” which was one of the songs I listened to over and over. It begins with the lyrics, “I think about how it might have been…,” which, in the early period of sobriety, was a haunting speculation I’d torture myself with. If I hadn’t relapsed, if I’d stayed sober and not spiraled into the two-month bender that ruined everything. What if, What if…There is another lyric later in the song, “So I will head out alone and hope for the best, we can pat ourselves on the back and say that we tried…” I imagined many times that I’d have to leave New York, that I’d return to the small town in Connecticut I’d started out in, or go to live with my sister in Maine, and that I’d have to give up on New York, that I’d blown my chance here.

  Have you always been into music?

  I was obsessed with Bob Dylan throughout high school and college. I still am.

  If you look back on your life—addiction, recovery, relapse, documentation, sobriety—how have you seen your musical tastes change?

  I was pretty strict in high school about who I would listen to. Musicians like Neil Young, Cat Stevens, Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell…who were, in my opinion, great writers. The music mattered, but it held hands with the lyrics, and the personality was, overall, unsullied. In the little rural town I grew up in, I missed out on the pop music of the time, the eighties, and now enjoy it in retrospect. It’s as an adult that I’ve opened up to dance, hip-hop, R&B, and even big pop songs. But I guess I’m still drawn to singer-songwriters who have the voice, and conjure the lyrics and music into songs that seem like soul cries. Lately I listen a lot to Justin Vernon, Antony, Martha Wainwright, Brandi Carlile, and Feist.

  Now that sobriety is one of your marked characteristics, do you feel that that helps or deters you from keeping sober?

  It helps, though it wasn’t the reason or goal in writing the books. I spent the first thirty-three years of my life with secrets, and lots of them. I spent a great deal of energy worrying over what people thought and obscuring the things I was ashamed of…trying to appear what I thought was normal. My relationship to drugs and alcohol, and the depths my dependency on them brought me to, were the last things I ever wanted to be exposed. By writing about these things I not only lightened a long-carried load but, I hope, became of use to people who have, and who still do, struggle in the way that I struggled. In my first year of getting sober, I learned that being of use to other alcoholics and addicts (seeing how my experience could be helpful) was not only the surprising benefit of everything that led to my getting sober, but also the way I stayed sober. Writing these books was not something I initially thought would be part of my ongoing sobriety, but over time, as I get letters and e-mails about how something in one of them was helpful to someone, it reminds me of the usefulness I feel when working with others in recovery. Anything that reconnects me to the feeling that by staying clean I can be helpful to another alcoholic or drug addict helps keep me sober.

  This interview appears courtesy of Yale Breslin.

  Questions and topics for discussion

  Bill Clegg’s friend Lotto was in rehab for drug use ten times before he was twenty-two. Finally, a successful recovery in Georgia led him to move there from a privileged life in Manhattan. What does his story tell you about the tenacity of addiction? Does it give you more empathy toward addicts?

  One reviewer praised Ninety Days for being singular as a recovery book that is also about relapse. Did you think in the end that any of the people introduced in the book were fully recovered? Were you surprised by Asa’s relapse?

  Have you had experiences in your own life that didn’t involve substance abuse but compared in some ways to addiction?

  “It’s the jaggedness of getting off the drugs—finding the language for that—that gives Ninety Days its stark power,” wrote Michael Klein in Lambda Literary. How did Bill Clegg’s prose style contribute to your response to his memoir?

  Do you think Ninety Days can serve as a cautionary tale? Or that it can help readers who are dealing with past or current drug or alco
hol addiction? If so, how?

  What fundamental shift in the way he related to other people and himself did Bill Clegg make to attain sobriety? How did Polly and others in “the rooms” save his life—and he theirs, for whatever length of time?

  The author still attends meetings at least once a day to maintain his years of sobriety. How can a person with an important career and many friends find time for such a commitment? Do you think the time consumed by addiction is any less demanding?

  In an interview, Bill Clegg has said, “That first burst of sobriety, which people in recovery often describe as a pink cloud—I have never felt more exhilarated in my life.” Could breaking any habit or addiction of your own lead you to such happiness?

  About the Author

  Bill Clegg is a literary agent in New York. He is also the author of Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man.

  bill-clegg.com

  Also by Bill Clegg

  Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man

  Praise for Bill Clegg’s

  Ninety Days

  Named one of the Best Books of 2012

  by the Huffington Post

  “A raw, honest, and very well-written tale of alcoholism and drug abuse.”

  —Andrew Losowsky, Huffington Post

  “Addiction is a lethal business, and we often forget, reading a survivor’s account, the frequent mortal cost of drug use. Bill Clegg doesn’t forget that the addict’s will to live must be committed to each day. His memoir of crack use and recovery is written to fellow users dead or no longer around, the disappeared and soon-to-be-gone, as well as to those who have re-emerged with him.…Clegg’s need to connect saves him.…What he has now—fewer secrets, gratitude, relief, an acknowledgment of his vulnerability, time out from his dance with death—adds up, like days.”

  —Michael Stein, San Francisco Chronicle

  “Honest and earnest.”

  —Mike Vilensky, Wall Street Journal

  “Relationships, rather than high drama, are the real focus of Ninety Days, and as a result there is a tenderness at its heart.…Clegg reveals it is people…that keep him afloat.”

  —Molly Creeden, Vogue.com

  “Bill Clegg drops the reader inside the mind of a man desperately hoping to stay clean, navigating a city that once was so hospitable to his urges, and finding a community of road-sharers who he learns to trust and shoulder. A lot can go wrong with a recovery memoir, but Clegg has a direct, spare style and an engaging voice that is reminiscent, at least to me, of Jean Rhys in her fictional addiction book Good Morning, Midnight. It is because of this immediacy that Ninety Days turns out to be such an exhilarating story of ascent.”

  —Christopher Bollen, Interview Magazine

  “With his dazzling new memoir, Ninety Days, the literary wunderkind discovers that hitting rock bottom can be the easiest part of addiction. The tricky part is staying in recovery.… An intimate view of what happens after rehab, as the young addict returns to his old stomping grounds and struggles to let go of everything he lost…and press reset.”

  —Mike Guy, The Fix

  “Clegg has done something singular and unique in the literature of recovery. He has made relapse the subject and not recovery the subject. That self-proclaimed emphasis is this book’s great strength because the question posed from the very beginning of whether or not he’s going to do crack again or drink again is never really answered. In a large way, this is a book about not finding the answer, when most memoirs are poised to do the exact opposite.…Sobriety isn’t promised, nor is it unattainable, and Bill Clegg knows better than any writer I’ve ever read on the subject the delicate difference between the two.”

  —Michael Klein, Lambda Literary

  “Clegg follows his gut-wrenching Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man with an equally stark tale of the hard and ongoing work of recovering from addiction.”

  —Vanessa Bush, Booklist

  “The author writes with astonishing honesty, infusing the intensely interior narrative with powerful imagery and penetrating insights. Even the short journeys to his daily support groups sound like heroic odysseys.…The outcome is never assured, and there are casualties among the sharply drawn characters, most of whom the author seems to know as intimately as his own psyche. Three scant months may not seem like a long time, but for all involved it was an epic period of transformation. At turns cautionary and inspirational, Clegg’s saga embraces both the weaknesses and strengths of human nature, while only alluding to the possibility of salvation. A gritty, lyrical, and potent portrait of what it really means to be addicted.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “Clegg has rebuilt his career as an agent and become one of the best-known faces of addiction recovery.…Ninety Days, written in straightforward, readable prose, is an often-vivid testament to the difficulties of overcoming addiction and the value of companionship.…Clegg comes across as a deeply troubled but perceptive and sympathetic man, learning lessons about addiction in some very difficult ways.”

  —Thomas Rogers, Salon

  “A prescient, superbly crafted glimpse of the frighteningly long-shot odds.…Sharp, taut block paragraphs in a stripped-down present tense that creates an unflinching immediacy.…Clegg re-ups and delivers one last sucker punch in the book’s final pages, one last reminder that recovery never really ends. If anything, this bleak meditation on human frailty serves as a much-needed reminder that as easy as it is to stumble, there will always be a pair of hands that have been bruised just as badly waiting to pull us back up.”

  —Christopher Vola, PopMatters

  “Clegg’s spare, nearly minimalist style complements the drama inherent in his material: it’s addition through subtraction.…​With understated craft, Clegg has written a harrowing story.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “When Bill Clegg’s first memoir, Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man, came out in 2010, it resonated because it was the story of a relatable, successful man…who lost it all to crack addiction. And, then, somehow, managed to write a book that seemed less manipulative, far more earnest, than many addiction memoirs on bookshelves today.… As a follow-up to his first book, Ninety Days describes recovery and eventual relapse, stopping short of 2012, when he seems to have put the pieces pretty squarely back together.”

  —Kurt Soller, Esquire

  “This is a memoir about how difficult it is to achieve and maintain sobriety, and Clegg’s ultimate realization that it cannot be accomplished on one’s own. Standing out among the many similar works on addiction and recovery, Clegg’s intellectual story of his never-ending struggle for sobriety and his heartfelt, passionate revelations will directly touch the hearts of readers. ”

  —Library Journal

  “Whatever you know about addictions, Ninety Days will broaden your knowledge and understanding. There are no excuses or minimizing of the problems; Clegg opens himself up as is necessary for long-term recovery.”

  —Maggie Harding, Bookreporter.com

  “Perhaps most affecting is the advice he takes from his sponsor in a moment of desperation: ‘Pray,’ the man urges him, ‘because whatever you’ve been doing isn’t working.’”

  —Mallory Rice, Nylon

  “In Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man, Clegg detailed his descent from high-powered literary agent to full-time alcoholic and crackhead. This sequel is about his recovery—the circular pattern of stupefyingly tedious rehab and harrowing relapse. And yet it’s suspenseful: We come to care about Clegg, whose voice is engaging and who never gets mired in self-pity.”

  —Mike Doherty, National Post

  “More than the saga of his recovery, Ninety Days is the story of his embrace of the methodology of recovery: its mores, credos, precepts. In the final pages of Portrait, he had noted a stirring of his feelings toward ‘something less self-​concerned.’ He has delivered on this stirring by writing a memoir that is an ode to a community. It is ‘the flip side’ of his crack paranoia. He does not ‘count days�
�� alone.”

  —James Camp, New York Observer

  “Despite the squalor and the stupors and the black maelstroms of self-doubt, Clegg’s prose is mercifully limpid. His whole account is clear-eyed, rarely foggy on recollection and never once unstinting in presentation. This warts-and-all approach renders his memoir plausible and helps transform it into a cautionary tale, though one that doesn’t lecture, just bluntly states its sad case. Ninety Days is memoir as journey, and we find ourselves rooting for Clegg all the way—every last lucky, lonely, destructive, delusional, selfish, wretched, insane, desperate second of it.…We appreciate it all the more for being a bumpy ride: it is sobering, yes, but also superb, and…utterly redemptive.”