Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man: A Memoir by Bill Clegg

I have a friend who is wired the same way I am. Let’s call her Merry, not her really name. I’m 99 percent certain that Merry and I will never do crack. But there is this one percent inside of us that worries about it. What if it happens? What If someone makes us do it? What will it look like? How will we beat the addiction? Will our families leave us? What steps will we take to get clean? We fully acknowledge that this is our anxiety speaking and not reality, but nonetheless we worry all the time about things that will likely never happen given that we are 53 years old. So in the mean time, we read books like this one: “Portrait of a Drug Addict as a Young Man” by Bill Clegg. Please pause right now and Google a picture of Bill Clegg, and you will find a dashingly handsome man about as far from a crack addict as you could imagine. He looks like a model from the J. Crew catalogue. However, he was never a model, but instead was a crack addict for a very long time. In reality he was a New York literary agent, and now also is a fiction author, too. Clegg’s memoir is a journey into the underbelly of upper crust white-collar drug addiction. There is a particular section of the book in which he describes trying to get on an airplane to Europe for a very important business trip, but continually getting side tracked by crack bender fieldtrips in and around the airport. This section of the book is so haunting, and paints a startling picture of how crack and other drugs make repeat users lose all common sense and reason. This kind of book is not for every reader, but for worrywarts like my friend Merry and I, it is like watching a great horror film, or having a nightmare. You wake up and thank god it is not your story, but are grateful for having survived the trip to the dark side. To purchase this book on Amazon click here.