“Glancing at a faded pile of recent addiction memoirs, here’s a salient truth: No one wants to read one of these things by a grizzled or potato-shaped or even middle-aged writer. We want our addiction memoirists to nearly die young and definitely stay pretty. ” —Times book reviewer Dwight Garner, casually skewering his colleague, reformed crackhead and Night of the Gun author David Carr, with his own favorite metaphor in a review of “clear-eyed,” “clean-cut,” “J.Crew catalog model”–esque Bill Clegg’s Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man.
