Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man

March 15, 2010
A rising publishing industry star trashes his life during a bender in this intense but callow confessional. Clegg, a literary agent with William Morris Endeavor, tells the story of a two-month crack binge in which he smoked away his literary agency partnership, his $70,000 bank account, 40 pounds (he's forever cutting new holes in his belt to cinch it to his wasting frame), and his relationship with his devoted long-suffering boyfriend. There's crazed excess and tawdry sex, but also a sharply etched portrait of the addict's mindset: the veering between paranoia and a compulsive sociability with the random crackheads he picks up to party with; the shrinkage of the planning horizon to the search for the next hit; the bliss of the high (“the warmest, most tender caress... then, as it recedes, the coldest hand”); the bender's unstoppable acceleration until, like a cartoon character running off a cliff, it has nothing left to sustain it. The author's efforts to impart psychological depth to his addiction—he writes of wan collegiate debauches and a childhood complex about urinating—are less convincing; it's clear that the binge will end when his money runs out. Though richly rendered, Clegg's crack odyssey feels like an epic bout of self-indulgence.

June 1, 2010
Clegg was a partner in a thriving literary agency and was involved in a long-term, loving relationship when he succumbed to cocaine addiction. For two months, he went on a crack binge that emptied his bank account, ruined his business, destroyed his relationship, and nearly took his life. Clegg alternates between recollections of his slow and steady decline into addiction and his youthful discovery that he was gay, humiliated by his fathers taunts and his mothers distance. As his addiction escalated, he frantically chased the high, endlessly starting over after binges of drinking and smoking crack, running away from every intervention effort by his family or his lover, indulging in anonymous sex with a string of fellow users. When his disheveled appearance prompts a hotel to reject his attempt to register, he realizes he has fallen into the purgatory between citizen and nobody, between fine young man and bum and begins a slow and painful recovery. This is a heartbreaking and completely absorbing look at the wreckage of cocaine addiction.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2010, American Library Association.)