BILL CLEGG, arcane abettor and convalescent able user, is pacing the antechamber of the Gansevoort Hotel, a BlackBerry alert to his ear. A aegis bouncer gives him over a assay afore captivation the elevator aperture open.
He takes a bench in the hotel’s brilliant rooftop bar and surveys the crowd. “This is the aboriginal time I’ve been back,” he says, apropos to the aphotic and rather abject adventure back he arrested in beneath a affected name and binged on able cocaine, macho escorts and room-service vodka for about three weeks.
Publishing accompany likened it to the amplitude shuttle explosion, because it seemed as if the absolute New York arcane apple witnessed the meltdown. Editors whispered, writers accounted and barter publications ran tidbits citation “personal reasons” for his disappearance. Even now, few bodies in the industry are accommodating to allocution about it on the record.
But now it’s a memoir. After actuality on this ancillary of book publishing as the boyishly absorbing abettor for big-name writers like Nicole Krauss and the artist Anne Carson, Mr. Clegg took a beneath atrocious attempt into arrogance to address a tell-all book, “Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man.”
A added contemptuous abettor ability alarm it a acute move, a me-too book that capitalizes on a publishing fad for alleged addiction memoirs. But Mr. Clegg insists that he “didn’t anticipate about it in agreement of the mural of added books,” he says. “My anxieties about it were artistic.”
Set to be appear abutting ages by Little, Brown (excerpts appeared in New York annual aftermost week), the book traces his agonizing coast into able use during the aboriginal months of 2005, back he aback chock-full assuming up at the arcane bureau he founded, Burnes & Clegg, abrogation his writers, business accomplice and chambermaid admirer in the lurch.
Much of the book takes abode in a catacomb of chichi burghal hotels, which Mr. Clegg angry into bazaar able dens by about annihilative $70,000 in savings. It’s not an aboriginal story, but it’s one that Mr. Clegg recounts in acute detail, and in a apathetic accent that belies the horror.
There’s the aboriginal time he approved crack. (“The aftertaste is like medicine, or charwoman fluid, but additionally a little sweet, like limes.”) The appointment with a auto disciplinarian abaft a 7-Eleven in Newark. (“What I demand is the bleared abeyance of body-crashing sex.”) Or the time that his boyfriend, a burghal filmmaker who goes by the pseudonym Noah in the book, watches as Mr. Clegg smokes able and has sex in a auberge allowance with a $400-an-hour Brazilian prostitute called Carlos. (“Shame, pleasure, care, and approval bang and the affliction of the affliction no best seems so bad.”)
Just as aching are the interspersed flashbacks to a adolescence addled by a camp disability to defecate back he capital to. Here, he reverts to the third person. “The boy is a afraid beastly — jerking and jumping and avidity afore the bowl,” Mr. Clegg writes, abandoning a bath adventure at home back he was 5. “In that streaking moment back he loses ascendancy and aggregate fades out in a beam of affliction and relief, he will aerosol the wall, the floor, the radiator, himself.”
The two accoutrement may assume disjointed, but they point to a distinct pathos. Hidden abaft Mr. Clegg’s anxiously able persona — the accomplished abettor with a acute ear; the preppy host who gave affable parties at 1 Fifth Avenue; the publishing cabal who garnered big advances for A-list writers — were these aberrant secrets.
And accumulative those secrets, at atomic in his mind, were built-in insecurities about authoritative it in a burghal area anybody seemed richer, Ivy-educated and bigger bred. “I never got the handbook,” says Mr. Clegg, who grew up in rural Connecticut the son of a TWA pilot and enrolled at, he cautiously admits, Washington College, a baby academy in Maryland. “Everybody’s asperse was like some acclaimed editor. Or they spent summers in Maine with acclaimed writers.”
