by Bill Clegg
—Malcolm Forbes, The Rumpus
Praise for Bill Clegg’s
Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man
“Riveting.…You won’t be able to stop reading until it’s all gone—and you will crave more.”
—Jonathan Van Meter, Vogue
“Mesmerizing.…Reading it is like letting the needle down on a Nick Drake album. Clegg tells his story in short, atmospheric paragraphs, each separated by white space, each its own strobe-lighted snapshot of decadent poetic memory.…Clegg can write.”
—Dwight Garner, New York Times
“This narrative of addiction is itself addictive, and strangely beautiful.”
—Maggie Fergusson, The Economist
“Both harrowing and hopeful: a triumph.”
—People
“Beautifully rendered in spare and elegant prose, a rumination on the human condition that recalls William Styron’s memoir of depression, Darkness Visible.”
—Kirk Davis Swinehart, Chicago Tribune
“Clegg…cuts through the addiction-memoir noise, recounting the glamour and pathos of self-destruction with efficiency and disturbing clarity.”
—Details
“Bill Clegg has produced a lyrical, moving crack addiction memoir that is utterly frank and utterly readable.”
—Out
“It turns out there is room on the shelf for one more addiction memoir.…Clegg spares no one’s feelings, least of all his own; it’s not the brutality that makes this worthwhile but rather the strange beauty of the stream-of-consciousness prose. We’re voyeurs, as helpless to stop the carnage as the author himself.”
—Mickey Rapkin, GQ
“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
“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
“Stands up to Frederick Exley’s great memoir of alcoholism, A Fan’s Notes.…But really, forget comparisons. Read the book.”
—Michael Cunningham, author of The Hours
“Rings true in brutal, blunt strokes.”
—David Carr, New York Times Book Review
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Contents
Title Page
Welcome
Dedication
Epigraph
Borrow Mine
Home
Speck in Streetscape
Re-entry
One Day
The Rooms
The Mother Lode
Use
Goners
Done
Pink Cloud
Shoulder to Shoulder
Close
Acknowledgments
Reading Group Guide
A conversation with Bill Clegg
Questions and topics for discussion
About the Author
Also by Bill Clegg
Praise for Bill Clegg
Newsletters
Copyright
Copyright © 2012 by Bill Clegg
Reading group guide copyright © 2013 by Bill Clegg and Little, Brown and Company
Cover design by Kapo Ng. Cover illustration by Sam Chung@A-Men Project
Cover copyright © 2013 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.
All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher constitute unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher at [email protected]. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.
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First ebook edition: April 2012
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Excerpt from Seasonal Rights by Daniel Halpern, copyright © 1979, 1980, 1981, 1982 by Daniel Halpern. Used by permission of Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
ISBN 978-0-316-20192-6