Books by Bill Clegg
“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.” Read more...
Matt Rowland Hill, Memoirist
Interviews where books by Bill Clegg were recommended
The Best Addiction Memoirs, recommended by Matt Rowland Hill
The author and recovering addict Matt Rowland Hill dissects the ‘addiction memoir’—its literary potential, its formal conventions and its offer of hope and catharsis—as he recommends five books that exemplify the form, from Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater to Mary Karr’s bestselling Lit.
