Bill Clegg - Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man

He’s almost two. Walking now. Chubby and cheerful, eats everything put in front of him and always wants more. He disappears into daydreams and collapses into fits of uncontrollable laughter. His sister is skinny and fair, his father is dark and smells of smoke, and his mother is every color in between, every shape, every smell. She has the bluest eyes. She plants flowers, plants them everywhere — in rock gardens that rise from the lawn into the woods, along walkways, in pots that sit on windowsills, on steps.

She is planting flowers now, and he is nearby, on a blanket littered with toys. They are on the lawn behind the house, just at its edge, where it rises and descends into what they call the hollow, a low, damp bowl of lawn spotted with outcroppings of granite ledge. Along the ridge and down along the hollow, there are thickets of blueberry bushes and, behind those, the woods.

His mother calls to him in her singsong way from behind an enormous straw hat. The two cats sit at the edge of the blanket and watch him. He can hear them purring and he wants to hold them and somehow bring their softness and their sounds closer, into him. He reaches for them and they meow, slink patiently away, and settle in the just-far-enough-away grass.

Past the cats the dark green lawn stretches toward the woods. These things, these places, the whole world beyond the immediate perimeter of his blanket and his mother, have only lately begun to occur to him. Each new miracle hatches alive, new and beguiling. A bee, a plane flying overhead, an anthill at the edge of the blanket, a great wind roaring in the trees. He wants to see it all at once and right away.

This is the first summer he can walk. The first summer he can move himself closer to what he wants. Away from what he does not want. He is still in diapers but those will be gone soon. He looks up past the little ridge, beyond the hollow, and sees a great shimmering of branches and leaves rising from an army of tree trunks. A gust of wind sends the leaves into hysterics, and he hears the sound, like water thundering from the faucet when his mother draws him a bath. But this new sound is greater, wilder, more thrilling than anything he’s ever heard.

His mother, in her flowers, hums a song, swats flies from her face. He stands up from the blanket and rocks on his dimpled legs. A blast of wind in the trees stirs up another momentary chaos. His heart races, and he tilts toward the tree line on the other side of the hollow and begins to move. The swooping birds, the cresting green lawn, the buzzing insects, the tufts of seed and summer flotsam drifting in slow motion through the air, the blueberry bushes at the edge of the wood — all of it dazzles before him. Every gorgeous new inch of it beckons as he walks faster, more deliberately, faster still, until walking isn’t fast enough and he begins to run. He’s running now, to the top of the lawn, toward the creaking branches, the flashing leaves, the avalanche of sound.

He clears the ridge and, all at once, the slope on the other side is steeper than he expects. His legs whirl beneath him and he struggles not to fall. He’s running faster than he has ever run before, and for a second he feels a distance between himself and his body — as if one has departed from the other and is a witness to its new speed and not its cause. The lawn, his legs, his body all blur below him, and he begins to let go, to allow the momentum to carry him.

A great wind pounds through the hollow and he feels on the verge of flight, that the earth will release him and he will surge beyond the lawn, over the vegetable garden and swing set, to the treetops. His mother calls out from somewhere. She is shouting his name, but her voice is small and known and behind him now. Everything that once held his attention, every little and large thing he has remembered, disappears as he races ahead, legs pumping under him, air rushing at his face, terror and wonder bursting from his small heart.

As he careens down the slope, another first, another new magic: calm, like peaceful lightning, flashing through his rioting limbs, stilling every streaking inch of him, caressing him in the half seconds before he stumbles, before he scrapes his elbows and knees and face on the outcropping of granite ledge. Before he wails with shock and his mother descends on him in a flap of hat and tears. Before she gathers him into her and he forgets his fright because he is held in familiar arms that smell of potting soil and flowers. Before all this, a God-kissed, God-cursed calm, debuting at the zenith of his velocity, the peak of his want — a moment that’s over before it’s even a moment, the one he will scrape his skin hundreds of times to recapture. Before, despite, and because of all the things he senses await him, he leans, then leaps, into the wind, away.

Great Force Who Came: Jennifer Rudolph Walsh; Perfect Editor: Pat Strachan; Brilliant Publishers: Michael Pietsch, David Young; Wise Comrade: Robin Robertson; Right Hand: Matt Hudson; Beloved Team: Jonathan Galassi, Nick Flynn, John Bowe, Jill Bialosky, Christopher Potter; Care and Counsel: Adam McLaughlin, David Gilbert, Lili Taylor, Cy O’Neal, Julia Eisenman, James Lecesne, Chris Pomeroy, Laura Gersh, Courtney Hodell, Eliza Griswold, Lee Brackstone, Lisa Story, Roger Manix, Susannah Meadows, Ally Watson, Monica Martin; Love: Jean Stein; Hero: Kim Nichols; My Enduring Family: Mom, Dad, Kim, Lisa, Sean, Matt, Ben, Brian.

Reading Group Guide

BILL CLEGG

A Conversation with Bill Clegg

The author of

Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man

talks with Rebecca Bates of

Guernica

Bill Clegg’s memoir Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man documents a two-month crack binge that saw the literary agent fleeing from hotel to hotel in a labyrinth of paranoia as his wallet — and waistline — shrank. Interrupting the narrative frame are stories from Clegg’s childhood, memories that foretell the downward spiral to come and expose a terrifying affinity for death. Below, Clegg answers a few questions about the process of preserving his experiences in print.

What makes this addiction story different from the slew of others (David Carr’s, Susan Cheever’s, Elizabeth Wurtzel’s, etc.) we’ve seen?

I haven’t read the books you mention so I have no idea how it differs; but to the extent that the experience of alcoholism and addiction has certain commonalities — the failed struggle to manage the progression, the decreasing pleasures, the increasing amounts, the wreckage, the resulting despair — I suspect in some ways there are similarities. But the particulars of each story, and, one hopes, their expression, are specific to each.

How do you feel this book plays with the conventions of narrative, if at all? Does a story of addiction have to follow a journalistic formula? Does presenting the scenes in such a matter-of-fact way lend validity to the story? Does an addiction narrative need that to seem “real”?

I’m sure there are at least as many ways one can write a memoir as there are lives to write about — addict, Catholic, strawberry farmer, hostage. I wouldn’t dare make generalizations about the genre or how one should go about writing within it. As a reader I’m much more interested in books that tell stories in new ways, so I tend not to think of literature in terms of rules or parameters or generalizations.