I’m not really into addiction memoirs, but this one, Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man by literary agent Bill Clegg looks fascinating. NYTimes article about Bill Clegg’s memoir
There’s the first time he tried crack. (“The taste is like medicine, or cleaning fluid, but also a little sweet, like limes.”) The tryst with a taxi driver behind a 7-Eleven in Newark. (“What I want is the blurry oblivion of body-crashing sex.”) Or the time that his boyfriend, a downtown filmmaker who goes by the pseudonym Noah in the book, watches as Mr. Clegg smokes crack and has sex in a hotel room with a $400-an-hour Brazilian prostitute named Carlos. (“Shame, pleasure, care, and approval collide and the worst of the worst no longer seems so bad.”)
I talked to one of his clients when he was in rehab. Even though he had basically just abandoned all of his writers and the agency he founded, he was still highly regarded because of his genius with nurturing literary talent and brilliant negotiation with editors.
