Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man

"It’s not easy to evoke on the page what is, to most people, the profoundly alien experience of a hard drugs binge. But where others fall short, Bill Clegg’s Portrait of an Addict as Young Man succeeds brilliantly, capturing the minute-by-minute horror of a near-lethal chemical spiral. A slim book whose main action covers just a few weeks, the short crack and vodka binge it describes is enough to destroy Clegg’s life, and very nearly end it. It makes for bracing reading, and spares us no detail at all: we’re immersed in the protagonist’s mind as he stalks from hotel to hotel, the money in his bank account rapidly draining away, his life becoming increasingly unreal and death beginning to seem attractive, if not inescapable. We see him on his knees when the drugs runs out and the dealers’ phones are off, desperately scrambling for one more shard of crack. We see him getting an extra hole punched in his belt as he rapidly loses weight, and then another a few days later. We watch him lie to, and hide from, his loved ones as, helpless, they are reduced to blind panic at his predicament. Clegg’s manic spiral is related in a relentless present tense, in a prose that’s sparse and detached—and lit up by little flares of lyricism to conjure each hit. Horrified and enthralled, we see the world through Clegg’s increasingly despairing gaze—and a part of us longs as much as he does for another fix to provide some relief from the horror. Portrait is often collected with its sequel, Ninety Days , which portrays the period after Clegg’s release release from the rehab that saved him (and ends by explaining how life complicated the book’s redemptive ending – as with De Quincey and Ditlevsen). Although both are worth reading, it’s the first I find myself returning to, marvelling at its ability to conjure the insanity of addiction from inside its diabolical reality. Well, of course I tried my best to steal from them whatever I could. I very consciously looked to Karr for inspiration in how to write candidly yet lovingly about an imperfect family. I learned a lot from Clegg—or I hope I did—about how to convey the terrifying experience of a runaway binge. I tried to be as brutally unsparing of my faults as both those writers. I’d like to think Jerry Stahl’s Permanent Midnight influenced me, too, particularly by encouraging me to try and be harrowing and funny at once. But naturally I wanted to write something original, so I hope my reading—as much as helping me imitate the virtues of good addiction memoirs—showed me how to avoid the form’s worst foibles. Instead of telling the story from the viewpoint of an enlightened paragon of recovery—which would have made it fiction, anyway—I decided to do something I hadn’t seen in addiction memoir: fashion an unreliable, often ignorant, sometimes even deranged narrator, who seems to have no idea how much he’s betraying his hypocrisies and self-deceptions. (Towards the end of the project, I read Ditlevsen and—although slightly disappointed to discover I hadn’t been as innovative as I thought—the success of her experiment encouraged me to think I was on the right track.) Then there’s my book’s ending and its ambivalent relationship with redemption—which I won’t say any more about, in case anyone’s interested enough to read it and find out what I mean, but which I think makes it a little different from other addiction memoirs. Although I don’t mind if the book’s called an addiction memoir, in the course of writing it I came to think that wasn’t quite right. I drew as much on another tradition: memoirs about loss of faith, like Edmund Gosse’s Father and Son and Jeanette Winterson’s Why Be Happy When You Could be Normal? And, in fact, drugs are absent from most of the book’s action, which is about my sometimes difficult childhood as the son of an evangelical preacher, growing up (or failing to), the catastrophe of losing my faith in my teens—and then my desperate search for salvation elsewhere. Drugs were just the most destructive of the several wrong places I looked; others were literature and women, or the fantasies I projected onto them. Ultimately I think my book’s about our relationship with the past that shaped us: how hard it is to move on, and how hard to return. And in that sense my story’s the usual one: we all grow up in what you could think of as more or less benign cults, indoctrinated in the worldview of the people who raise us. Then we leave, and we all have to try and learn how to see with our own eyes, and to decide what to try and keep and what to try and leave behind. If I have any faith now, it’s in literature’s ability to help us redeem even life’s darkest realities by bringing them into the light. I don’t like books that offer false optimism or glib solutions; give me authentic stories in which, as Blake says, “joy and woe are woven fine.” So my frequent experience while rereading these five wonderful books—as well as others by Stahl, Jamison and Liptrot—before this conversation was gratitude for their authors’ courage, honesty and skill. Having said that, I did—while reading Ditlevsen’s Dependency —occasionally need to put the book down and take a few deep breaths. Even the second time around I found it so viscerally powerful that at times I was overwhelmed. It was every bit as gruelling and heartbreaking as the truth required it to be. And I can’t think of a better compliment to a writer of addiction memoir – or, indeed, any writer – than that."