Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man and Ninety Days

Destined to become a cult classic of writing on drug addiction.

Irvine Welsh [Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man]

It's an honest and wonderfully crafted book by a man as intoxicated by language as he was by crack – A.L. Kennedy.

Guardian [Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man]

I loved Bill Clegg's Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man because of its unflinching honesty... There is a passage in it in that is among the most tender and desperate I have ever read. It is also extremely funny.

Observer [Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man]

Bill Clegg is the author of the bestselling memoirs Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man and Ninety Days. His first novel, Did You Ever Have a Family, was longlisted for the Booker Prize.

What makes one of the most gifted, charismatic and successful young literary agents in New York fall into full-blown crack-addiction: a collapse that would cost him his business, his home, many of his friends and - very nearly - his life? In his utterly compulsive narrative, Bill Clegg leads us through the grimiest back-rooms of Manhattan's underbelly, through scenes of blank-eyed sex and squalor, into the febrile paranoia of a mind gone out of control. 
 
Ninety Days begins where Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man ends - and tells the wrenching story of Bill Clegg's battle to reclaim his life. The goal is ninety: just ninety clean and sober days to loosen the hold of the addiction. But as any recovering addict knows, hitting rock bottom is just the beginning. . . 
 
Published for the first time in one volume: Bill Clegg's unflinching account of the addiction that nearly ended everything.

Did You Ever Have a Family

We all have families. What do you do when your family has just been destroyed?

Full of small-town secrets and whispers, Bill Clegg has woven a richly textured tale of loss and healing. This is a deeply optimistic book about the power of human sympathy to pull us from the wreckage of our fate.

Anne Enright, winner of the Man Booker Prize

The force, range, and scope of Bill Clegg’s Did You Ever Have a Family grab you with its opening line, and don’t let go until its final one. I can’t recall another novel that so effortlessly weds a nuanced, lyrical voice to an unflinching vision of just how badly things can go for people. I read it deep into the night, all the way through, telling myself it was getting late, I could finish the book in the morning. I finished it that night, however, slept a few hours, and then, in the morning, started reading it again.

Like the question it poses, Did You Ever Have a Family is brutally direct yet it’s got an enormous symbolic power. You hold in your hands a great book of kindness – every restrained, exquisite sentence comes loaded for bear. It’s been a lot of years since a novel has so moved me. Number Bill Clegg among that endangered species: major American writer.

Darin Strauss, author of Chang and Eng and Half a Life

This devastating novel is almost the definition of a literary pageturner and somehow it escapes being too bleak: a dark tale of family secrets shot through with glimmers of light and hope.

Clegg has produced a moving, clever novel that subtly dissects the relationships between mothers and their children, lover, neighbours and strangers.

A tale of prodigious tenderness and lyricism.

Beautifully paced… it approaches grief gently and, in the end, its gentleness is its triumph.

It’s the kind of book which will sneak up on you when you least expect it, and remain in your mind for weeks after reading it.

This is a remarkable novel, that rare kind where you both want to reach the end for answers but also to savour every page. I cannot recommend it enough.

Cleverly constructed, carefully written and deservedly longlisted for this year’s Booker Prize.

At times a harrowing read, the slow and deliberate manner with which connections are revealed and questions answered is genuinely satisfying. By the time Clegg’s narrative strands converge, the glimpse that he grants of a brighter future feels earned.

A moving lament on guilt and grief, not to mention a gripping thriller.

A sad yet hopeful novel built from both suffering and kindness.

Clegg shows an impressive depth and range of voice as he tells a story of friendships, broken families, burgeoning love, and the aftermath of grief.

Clegg is committed to unravelling the complexities of human nature.

Through distinctive and instantly recognisable characters, this novel finds beauty in pain, grief and regret.

Clegg writes with warmth and a deep understanding of grief.

Wonderful narrative of chance, grief, and the ways we feed on and nourish each other.

Told its heart-breaking tale with tenderness and verve.

A work full of secrets, shame and scandal.

A story of what can be found when so much has been snatched away.

A meditation on enduring the unendurable… This is a wonderful and deeply moving novel.

A beautiful, heart-rending novel of quiet, understated tragedy… Sensitive and insightful, heart-breaking and hopeful… [A] tender, wise and hopeful novel.

Bill Clegg is a literary agent in New York and the author of the bestselling memoirs Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man and Ninety Days. He has written for the New York Times, Esquire, New York magazine, the Guardian and Harper’s Bazaar.

This book of dark secrets opens with a blaze. On the morning of her daughter’s wedding, June Reid’s house goes up in flames, destroying her entire family – her present, her past and her future. Fleeing from the carnage, stricken and alone, June finds herself in a motel room by the ocean, hundreds of miles from her Connecticut home, held captive by memories and the mistakes she has made with her only child, Lolly, and her partner, Luke. 
 
In the turbulence of grief and gossip left in June’s wake we slowly make sense of the unimaginable. The novel is a gathering of voices, and each testimony has a new revelation about what led to the catastrophe – Luke’s alienated mother Lydia, the watchful motel owners, their cleaner Cissy, the teenage pothead who lives nearby – everyone touched by the tragedy finds themselves caught in the undertow, as their secret histories finally come to light. 
 
Lit by the clarity of understanding that true sadness brings, Did You Ever Have a Family is an elegant, unforgettable story that reveals humanity at its worst and best, through loss and love, fracture and forgiveness. At the book’s heart is the idea of family – the ones we are born with and the ones we create – and the desire, in the face of everything, to go on living.

Ninety Days

A stark and moving account of relapse and recovery, from the acclaimed author of Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man.

Bill Clegg is a literary agent in New York. He is also the author of Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man. He lives in New York.

The goal is ninety: just ninety clean and sober days to loosen the hold of the addiction that caused Bill Clegg to lose everything. With seventy-three days in rehab behind him he returns to New York and attends two or three meetings each day. It is in these refuges that he befriends essential allies including the seemingly unshakably sober Asa, and Polly, who struggles daily with her own cycle of recovery and relapse. 
 
At first, the support is not enough: Clegg relapses for the first time with only three days left, turning his calendar back to day one. Written with uncompromised immediacy, Ninety Days begins where Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man ends - and tells the wrenching story of Bill Clegg's battle to reclaim his life. As any recovering addict knows, hitting rock bottom is just the beginning.

A Memoir

Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man

A masterful account of a crack-addict's freefall.

Beautifully measured and adroitly paced ... mixing a matter-of-fact eye for detail with just enough emotion to unsettle and engross ... Addictive and masterful

A gripping, graphic memoir that pounds relentlessly to its climax

It has the power and precision of the best contemporary fiction. It does what the best writing always does, which is to make Clegg's experience part of your own

It's a remarkable achievement when a writer can evoke the most desperate episodes of addiction with the unflinching honesty required to make such a memoir worth reading, yet somehow manage to completely transcend sleaze, sordidness and vapid self-justification. Bill Clegg's story of a man - largely locked in hotel rooms, engaged in a desperate, heart-wrenching battle with himself - is destined to become a cult classic of writing on drug addiction

Beautifully written and elegantly frank... lyrical, funny and shattering

Bill Clegg's Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man stands up to Frederick Exley's great memoir of alcoholism, A Fan's Notes. It is perhaps even higher praise to think of Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man as Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye on crack. But really, finally, forget the comparisons. Read the book

A gripping, graphic memoir that pounds relentlessly to a climax.

Dark, engrossing...proves that addiction stories do not have to be gratuitous and unashamedly confessional

A very, very good book...told in perfect, beautifully clear, Bret Easton Ellis-type prose

A beautifully written and elegantly frank memoir... A lyrical, funny and shattering narration of a long, hard path.

A short book that pulls you in and spits you back out... He can certainly write

Loved A Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man

It's an honest and wonderfully crafted book by a man as intoxicated by language as he was by crack.

Mesmerising: as well as being beautifully written, it illuminated addiction in a frank and useful fashion, and tied childhood experience into adult problems insightfully.

Bill Clegg is a literary agent in New York. He is also the author of Ninety Days. He lives in New York.

What makes one of the most gifted, charismatic and successful literary agents in New York fall into full-blown crack-addiction: a collapse that would cost him his business, his home, many of his friends and - very nearly - his life? 
 
In his utterly compulsive narrative, Bill Clegg leads us through the grimiest back-rooms of Manhattan's underbelly, through scenes of blank-eyed sex and squalor, into the febrile paranoia of a mind gone out of control.

Bill Clegg

'A writer with a profound comprehension of emotional destruction, loss and redemption' Sunday Times 
 
A retired widow in rural Connecticut wakes to an unexpected visit from her childhood best friend whom she hasn't seen in forty-nine years. 
 
A man arrives at a Bethlehem, Pennsylvania hotel to introduce his estranged father to his newborn daughter and finds him collapsed on the floor of the lobby. 
 
A sixty-seven-year-old taxi driver in Kauai receives a phone call from the mainland that jars her back to a traumatic past. 
 
These seemingly disconnected lives come together as half-century-old secrets begin to surface over the course of one fateful day...

Bill Clegg

The End of the Day

Select a format:

Retailers:

Summary

More books from this author