A Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man

"I wanted to write exactly what I did and what I saw and who I did it with and how it felt. But I did not include every instance of my smoking crack. It would take an encyclopedia to tell that story," says Bill Clegg on a recent, resplendent June evening.

As a literary agent in 2005, Bill represented some of the country's luminary writers, like Nick Flynn (Another Bullshit Night in Suck City) Nicole Krauss (The History of Love), Susan Choi (American Woman), and Andrew Sean Greer (The Confessions of Max Tivoli). And he homesteaded with his filmmaker boyfriend in plush digs at One Fifth Avenue. A charismatic fixture on New York's media scene, Clegg appeared to be publishing's golden boy.

But his crack addiction emulsified him. The hellish cyclone of singed fingers, brute hustlers, emotional bankruptcy, parking-lot sex, white-hot industry gossip, and his failed boutique literary agency, is lyrically chronicled in his new memoir, Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man.

In June 1993, what feels like an eternity ago, I enrolled in an editorial and publishing course in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In the sweaty, hormone-raging dorms, a stone's throw from Harvard Yard, the youngster occupying the room next to mine was a dimpled, mop-top, secretive kid named Bill Clegg. Who could've predicted the afflictions that would later pursue him like furies?

In 2006, fresh from rehab, Clegg re-surfaced at William Morris Endeavor Entertainment, where he still represents prominent writers. Today, Bill, sporting tan cords and a blue polo shirt that accentuates his enormous blue, smoky-grey eyes, floats into DiFiore Marquet, a genteel cafe in the East Village. We discuss his buzzy new memoir, as he munches a beet salad.

Rich Benjamin: How did you come to write Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man?

Bill Clegg: I left the emergency room and psych ward at Lennox Hill Hospital and ended up in rehab in White Plains, New York. When I was in rehab I had a couple of notebooks that a friend who drove me their had given me. I used them to transcribe what I could remember from that two-month period when I was in hotels smoking crack. That period was so dark and intense and ended in a suicide attempt. I regarded that period like a dark dream.

All that stuff came out like a gusher. I wrote not for anything other than to remember. In the same way that one wakes from a nightmare and remembers certain aspects of it, I had a sense of urgency to write it down and to even speak it, so that it didn't disappear.

Benjamin: But what inspired you to actually publish this writing?

Clegg: The decision came later. Re-reading those pages re-acquainted me with how lonely I was, not just as an adult in New York struggling with a crack addiction, but as a kid. I arrived at a point where I wanted to die. But if readers would recognize themselves in my experience, if people could identify with my shame or my embarrassment, then whatever discomfort that I might feel going through the book's publication would be worth it. That's when I decided to have it published.

Benjamin: Of all the book's dramatic episode, which is the most meaningful to you?

Clegg: None is the "most meaningful." I think of it just like one dark episode. So it's all meaningful to me. It was all necessary. It's one big long, dark, sad, destructive, painful episode that led to me getting sober.

Benjamin: How does this book differ from other addiction memoirs?

Clegg: I have no idea, because I haven't really read any of them.

Benjamin: You haven't read junkie memoirs?

Clegg: No, I haven't. And I've read memoirs. I love memoirs. Love them. But for whatever reason I haven't read them. Except for Augusten Burroughs' Dry, which is about his recovery really.

Benjamin: What inspired you to become a literary agent?