Ninety Days (13 page)

Later, three months from that sip of wine in Miami, I will raise my hand in a meeting I rarely go to in Midtown and say, shakily but with great relief,
I have ninety days.
Three days later, at The Library, with Polly in the seat next to me, her hand on my back, I raise my hand and tell everyone in the room what happened. And now I’m telling you.

Five and a half years and then one day. For me, there are no finish lines. No recovered, just recovering. My sobriety, that delicate state that can, for years at a time, feel unshakable, is completely dependent on my connection to other alcoholics and addicts, my seeking their help and my offering it. I went to an island for a month where there were no rooms where alcoholics and addicts gather to stay sober. If we learn at the speed of pain, the painful lesson here was that I need those rooms, those addicts and alcoholics. I need them like oxygen. No matter how good, how sober, how in control I feel. There are many programs of recovery. Paid, free, anonymous, not anonymous. I don’t name here which one I go to because I don’t want that program held responsible for anything I do or say or write. I don’t want anything to get in the way of your finding it if it can help you. Alcoholics and addicts create enough obstacles to getting sober and I don’t want to add more.

If you are struggling with drugs and alcohol, go to the rooms where alcoholics and addicts go to get and stay sober. These rooms and the people in them are your best chance. Listen to them, be honest with them. Help them—even if you think you have nothing to offer. Be helped by them. Depend on them and be depended on. And if the only thing you can do is show up, do it. Then do it again. And when it’s the last thing you want to do and the last place you want to go,
go.
Just go. You have no idea who you might be helping just by sitting there or who might help you. I’ve heard many alcoholics and addicts describe a voice that tells them to drift, to detach, to follow their own counsel and cut off. It’s the same voice that told me I could be on an island for a month without meetings; suggested that a drink was better than all others—
the best
—because it happened to be in a hotel; that no good could come from telling the truth and that death was useful. In my experience only one thing has been able to quiet that voice: other alcoholics and addicts in recovery. Their voices have been louder than the one that lies, louder than my own. They have, one day at a time, guided me toward honesty, usefulness, and they have saved my life. Together, they stay sober. Together, they end years of agony and isolation. If you are struggling with drugs and alcohol, they can help you, too. Find them now.

Thanks to Pat Strachan, the wisest eye, for ongoing editorial guidance; Michael Pietsch and David Young for continued support; the Dream Team at Little, Brown—Michelle Aielli, Amanda Brown, and Heather Fain—for unflagging excellence; Raffaella DeAngelis, Tracy Fisher, and the foreign-rights team at WME for being the best; Robin Robertson and Luiz Schwarcz for their rigor and care and for their friendship; Julia Eisenman, Jill Bialosky, Chris Pomeroy, Jay Knowlton, Joey Arbagey, Adam McLaughlin, Jonathan Galassi, and Kelle Groom for their time and their meticulous notes; Cy O’Neal for thieving, for movies, for more; Shaun Dolan for never blinking no matter what; John Bowe for being in the next room; Jean Stein for every magnificent voice mail and for having faith; my family—Mom, Dad, Kim, Brian, Matt, Ben, Lisa, Mark, Lillian, and Sean—for
encouragement
, love, and for defying gravity; Van Scott for all the days, and Jennifer Rudolph Walsh—great force, friend, agent, boss —for everything.

Thanks most of all to all the drunks and addicts who helped me get and stay sober and all those who still do.

I did not see it coming; in fact I’d never felt more serene, and sober. I was on an island in southern Thailand for a month finishing
Ninety Days
(a book about recovery, of all things), and felt deeply relaxed and connected to my sobriety. But the feeling was not accurate. I was in fact the most far away (from sobriety) I’d been in the five and a half years of being sober. I was away from the AA meeting I’d go to every day, away from my sober community, not in touch with other alcoholics and addicts in recovery in the way that I am usually: by phone, over coffee, after and before meetings. I’d talked to my sponsor, and taken on a new sponsee while I was away, but basically I’d disconnected from my sober family for the first time in sobriety. There is an expression that people in recovery hear and say all the time: “Feelings aren’t facts,” and in this case it was all too true.

I think these two books say more than I ever expected to say on addiction and recovery. If there is anything more I’ll tell my cat, Benny.

I listened to Rachael’s first album,
Happenstance,
during the year I spent unemployed, going to three meetings a day, getting sober. They were sad songs about loss and grief and moving on, and they sounded like I felt…especially in the first few months of returning to New York after rehab.

I was in a coffee shop on Jane Street and heard the first few notes on a piano to a song of hers called “Quiet,” and they were the saddest, most mournful notes I’d ever heard. I thought: There I am; that’s me. And I went home and downloaded
Happenstance
and listened to that album until I couldn’t anymore.

I didn’t listen to
Happenstance
for a long time after I got sober and went back to work. When I was writing
Ninety Days,
I began to listen to those songs again as a way of remembering. So I went back in for a while, and wallowed.

I met Rachael recently to do a reading and interview at Barnes and Noble. The format was that I would read a little, she’d play some songs, and we’d be interviewed in between. The first song she played was “Reason Why,” which was one of the songs I listened to over and over. It begins with the lyrics, “I think about how it might have been…,” which, in the early period of sobriety, was a haunting speculation I’d torture myself with. If I hadn’t relapsed, if I’d stayed sober and not spiraled into the two-month bender that ruined everything. What if, What if…There is another lyric later in the song, “So I will head out alone and hope for the best, we can pat ourselves on the back and say that we tried…” I imagined many times that I’d have to leave New York, that I’d return to the small town in Connecticut I’d started out in, or go to live with my sister in Maine, and that I’d have to give up on New York, that I’d blown my chance here.

I was obsessed with Bob Dylan throughout high school and college. I still am.

I was pretty strict in high school about who I would listen to. Musicians like Neil Young, Cat Stevens, Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell…who were, in my opinion, great writers. The music mattered, but it held hands with the lyrics, and the personality was, overall, unsullied. In the little rural town I grew up in, I missed out on the pop music of the time, the eighties, and now enjoy it in retrospect. It’s as an adult that I’ve opened up to dance, hip-hop, R&B, and even big pop songs. But I guess I’m still drawn to singer-songwriters who have the voice, and conjure the lyrics and music into songs that seem like soul cries. Lately I listen a lot to Justin Vernon, Antony, Martha Wainwright, Brandi Carlile, and Feist.

It helps, though it wasn’t the reason or goal in writing the books. I spent the first thirty-three years of my life with secrets, and lots of them. I spent a great deal of energy worrying over what people thought and obscuring the things I was ashamed of…trying to appear what I thought was normal. My relationship to drugs and alcohol, and the depths my dependency on them brought me to, were the last things I ever wanted to be exposed. By writing about these things I not only lightened a long-carried load but, I hope, became of use to people who have, and who still do, struggle in the way that I struggled. In my first year of getting sober, I learned that being of use to other alcoholics and addicts (seeing how my experience could be helpful) was not only the surprising benefit of everything that led to my getting sober, but also the way I stayed sober. Writing these books was not something I initially thought would be part of my ongoing sobriety, but over time, as I get letters and e-mails about how something in one of them was helpful to someone, it reminds me of the usefulness I feel when working with others in recovery. Anything that reconnects me to the feeling that by staying clean I can be helpful to another alcoholic or drug addict helps keep me sober.

This interview appears courtesy of Yale Breslin.

1. Bill Clegg’s friend Lotto was in rehab for drug use ten times before he was twenty-two. Finally, a successful recovery in Georgia led him to move there from a privileged life in Manhattan. What does his story tell you about the tenacity of addiction? Does it give you more empathy toward addicts?
   

    
   

2. One reviewer praised
   Ninety Days
   for being singular as a recovery book that is also about relapse. Did you think in the end that any of the people introduced in the book were fully recovered? Were you surprised by Asa’s relapse?
   

    
   

3. Have you had experiences in your own life that didn’t involve substance abuse but compared in some ways to addiction?
   

    
   

4. “It’s the jaggedness of getting off the drugs—finding the language for that—that gives
   Ninety Days
   its stark power,” wrote Michael Klein in
   Lambda Literary.
   How did Bill Clegg’s prose style contribute to your response to his memoir?
   

    
   

5. Do you think
   Ninety Days
   can serve as a cautionary tale? Or that it can help readers who are dealing with past or current drug or alcohol addiction? If so, how?
   

    
   

6. What fundamental shift in the way he related to other people and himself did Bill Clegg make to attain sobriety? How did Polly and others in “the rooms” save his life—and he theirs, for whatever length of time?
   

    
   

7. The author still attends meetings at least once a day to maintain his years of sobriety. How can a person with an important career and many friends find time for such a commitment? Do you think the time consumed by addiction is any less demanding?
   

    
   

8. In an interview, Bill Clegg has said, “That first burst of sobriety, which people in recovery often describe as a pink cloud—I have never felt more exhilarated in my life.” Could breaking any habit or addiction of your own lead you to such happiness?
   

Bill Clegg is a literary agent in New York. He is also the author of
Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man
.

bill-clegg.com

Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man

“A raw, honest, and very well-written tale of alcoholism and drug abuse.”

—Andrew Losowsky,
Huffington Post

“Addiction is a lethal business, and we often forget, reading a survivor’s account, the frequent mortal cost of drug use. Bill Clegg doesn’t forget that the addict’s will to live must be committed to each day. His memoir of crack use and recovery is written to fellow users dead or no longer around, the disappeared and soon-to-be-gone, as well as to those who have re-emerged with him.…Clegg’s need to connect saves him.…What he has now—fewer secrets, gratitude, relief, an acknowledgment of his vulnerability, time out from his dance with death—adds up, like days.”

—Michael Stein,
San Francisco Chronicle

“Honest and earnest.”

—Mike Vilensky,
Wall Street Journal

“Relationships, rather than high drama, are the real focus of
Ninety Days,
and as a result there is a tenderness at its heart.…Clegg reveals it is people…that keep him afloat.”

—Molly Creeden, Vogue.com

“Bill Clegg drops the reader inside the mind of a man desperately hoping to stay clean, navigating a city that once was so hospitable to his urges, and finding a community of road-sharers who he learns to trust and shoulder. A lot can go wrong with a recovery memoir, but Clegg has a direct, spare style and an engaging voice that is reminiscent, at least to me, of Jean Rhys in her fictional addiction book
Good Morning, Midnight
. It is because of this immediacy that
Ninety Days
turns out to be such an exhilarating story of
ascent.
”

—Christopher Bollen,
Interview Magazine

“With his dazzling new memoir,
Ninety Days,
the literary wunderkind discovers that hitting rock bottom can be the easiest part of addiction. The tricky part is staying in recovery.… An intimate view of what happens after rehab, as the young addict returns to his old stomping grounds and struggles to let go of everything he lost…and press reset.”

—Mike Guy,
The Fix

“Clegg has done something singular and unique in the literature of recovery. He has made
relapse
the subject and not
recovery
the subject. That self-proclaimed emphasis is this book’s great strength because the question posed from the very beginning of whether or not he’s going to do crack again or drink again is never really answered. In a large way, this is a book about
not
finding the answer, when most memoirs are poised to do the exact opposite.…Sobriety isn’t promised, nor is it unattainable, and Bill Clegg knows better than any writer I’ve ever read on the subject the delicate difference between the two.”

—Michael Klein,
Lambda Literary

“Clegg follows his gut-wrenching
Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man
with an equally stark tale of the hard and ongoing work of recovering from addiction.”

—Vanessa Bush,
Booklist

“The author writes with astonishing honesty, infusing the intensely interior narrative with powerful imagery and penetrating insights. Even the short journeys to his daily support groups sound like heroic odysseys.…The outcome is never assured, and there are casualties among the sharply drawn characters, most of whom the author seems to know as intimately as his own psyche. Three scant months may not seem like a long time, but for all involved it was an epic period of transformation. At turns cautionary and inspirational, Clegg’s saga embraces both the weaknesses and strengths of human nature, while only alluding to the possibility of salvation. A gritty, lyrical, and potent portrait of what it really means to be addicted.”

—
Kirkus Reviews

“Clegg has rebuilt his career as an agent and become one of the best-known faces of addiction recovery.…
Ninety Days,
written in straightforward, readable prose, is an often-vivid testament to the difficulties of overcoming addiction and the value of companionship.…Clegg comes across as a deeply troubled but perceptive and sympathetic man, learning lessons about addiction in some very difficult ways.”

—Thomas Rogers,
Salon

“A prescient, superbly crafted glimpse of the frighteningly long-shot odds.…Sharp, taut block paragraphs in a stripped-down present tense that creates an unflinching immediacy.…Clegg re-ups and delivers one last sucker punch in the book’s final pages, one last reminder that recovery never really ends. If anything, this bleak meditation on human frailty serves as a much-needed reminder that as easy as it is to stumble, there will always be a pair of hands that have been bruised just as badly waiting to pull us back up.”

—Christopher Vola,
PopMatters

“Clegg’s spare, nearly minimalist style complements the drama inherent in his material: it’s addition through
subtraction
.…​With understated craft, Clegg has written a harrowing story.”

—
Publishers Weekly

“When Bill Clegg’s first memoir,
Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man,
came out in 2010, it resonated because it was the story of a relatable, successful man…who lost it all to crack addiction. And, then, somehow, managed to write a book that seemed less manipulative, far more earnest, than many addiction memoirs on bookshelves today.… As a follow-up to his first book,
Ninety Days
describes recovery and eventual relapse, stopping short of 2012, when he seems to have put the pieces pretty squarely back together.”

—Kurt Soller,
Esquire

“This is a memoir about how difficult it is to achieve and maintain sobriety, and Clegg’s ultimate realization that it cannot be accomplished on one’s own. Standing out among the many similar works on addiction and recovery, Clegg’s intellectual story of his never-ending struggle for sobriety and his heartfelt, passionate revelations will directly touch the hearts of readers. ”

—
Library Journal

“Whatever you know about addictions,
Ninety Days
will broaden your knowledge and understanding. There are no excuses or minimizing of the problems; Clegg opens himself up as is necessary for long-term recovery.”

—Maggie Harding, Bookreporter.com

“Perhaps most affecting is the advice he takes from his sponsor in a moment of desperation: ‘Pray,’ the man urges him, ‘because whatever you’ve been doing isn’t working.’”

—Mallory Rice,
Nylon

“In
Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man,
Clegg detailed his descent from high-powered literary agent to full-time alcoholic and crackhead. This sequel is about his recovery—the circular pattern of stupefyingly tedious rehab and harrowing relapse. And yet it’s suspenseful: We come to care about Clegg, whose voice is engaging and who never gets mired in self-pity.”

—Mike Doherty,
National Post

“More than the saga of his recovery,
Ninety Days
is the story of his embrace of the methodology of recovery: its mores, credos, precepts. In the final pages of
Portrait,
he had noted a stirring of his feelings toward ‘something less self-
​concerned
.’ He has delivered on this stirring by writing a memoir that is an ode to a community. It is ‘the flip side’ of his crack paranoia. He does not ‘count days’ alone.”

—James Camp,
New York Observer

“Despite the squalor and the stupors and the black maelstroms of self-doubt, Clegg’s prose is mercifully limpid. His whole account is clear-eyed, rarely foggy on recollection and never once unstinting in presentation. This warts-and-all approach renders his memoir plausible and helps transform it into a cautionary tale, though one that doesn’t lecture, just bluntly states its sad case.
Ninety Days
is memoir as journey, and we find ourselves rooting for Clegg all the way—every last lucky, lonely, destructive, delusional, selfish, wretched, insane, desperate second of it.…We appreciate it all the more for being a bumpy ride: it is sobering, yes, but also superb, and…utterly redemptive.”

—Malcolm Forbes,
The Rumpus