Cracking Up

In 2005, Bill Clegg, the handsome, gay cofounder of a thriving Manhattan literary agency, went on a two-month crack spree that destroyed his life. He was 33. It was, as he put it in his first memoir, 2010’s Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man, his “Jesus year.” That book is a stylish record of his swan dive to rock bottom. It’s very readable, in the sense that you’d have to be a Martian to find it boring. It’s short, there’s lots of sex, and whenever a worried friend pops up or remorse sets in there’s always a “thick cloud of crack smoke” to put things in perspective. Mr. Clegg spends much of the book half-naked in hotel rooms, getting high and drinking vodka with “my towel cinched low on my hips.” Usually he has a “partner in crime,” and when he doesn’t he turns to porn. Crack makes him paranoid: he sees DEA agents everywhere, hears footsteps, infers conspiracies. He believes the cabdrivers of Manhattan are malevolently leagued against him. “Lose nothing or lose everything,” he thinks, but ultimately he just loses a lot. As well as $40,000 in savings, he loses his friends, his clients, his business, his reputation, his libido, his boyfriend and 40 pounds. The debauchery is punctuated by bathetic episodes in which he tries to get new holes pierced in his belt; his pants don’t fit him anymore.