by Jonathan Van Meter
Vougue
Literary agent Bill Clegg was talented, successful and secretly addicted to crack. His arresting new memoir is a portrait of having—and losing—it all.When Robert Downey, Jr., was in the grip of his downward spiral many years ago and was asked in an interview about his drug of choice, he answered, simply, "More." That one word would have made an apt title for William Morris literary agent Bill Clegg's haunting, visceral new memoir, Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man (Little, Brown and Company). The first line—"I can't leave and there isn't enough"—is meant to sum up the insidious pull of crack, the drug that lays him low and nearly destroys his life. But it could just as easily be a warning to the reader: You won't be able to stop reading until it's all gone—and you will crave more. What makes Clegg's book especially riveting is the remarkable speed of his vertiginous fall from grace. Clegg was a New York golden boy, a young, good-looking gay man with a successful literary agency, Burnes & Clegg, that represented such A-list writers as Susan Choi and Nicole Krauss. Clegg was also a social animal, known for throwing lively parties at the chic apartment on One Fifth Avenue that he shared with his filmmaker boyfriend, whom he calls Noah in the book. But all of this was just barely masking a terrible secret: drug addiction, yes, but more to the point, crippling feelings of inadequacy. About one of his first trips to New York shortly after college for an interview with an editor at a publishing house, Clegg writes of being "nauseous with shame" after being told he doesn't have the academic training, let alone the Ivy League education, to get him in the door. At Brooks Brothers later that day, he is convinced that the security guards can see that he doesn't belong, "that this is a place for a sleeker, smarter, better-educated, and altogether finer grade of person." Flash-forward eight years, and despite the fact that his publishing dreams have come true, he still feels the same way. Clegg describes a 2001 party in a Brooklyn Heights brownstone to celebrate the launch of his agency, a party where, as usual, he drinks too much and tries to control his urge to call a drug dealer. "As I finally catch a gentle buzz, I look around the table and wonder how on earth I ended up here. Nights like these are for other people, people like Kate [his business partner] and Noah who—with their Ivy League degrees and supportive families—seem born for toasts and congratulations."
As an agent, Clegg had a reputation for being a bit of an operator, brokering high-profile book deals with big advances. Who knew that underneath the bravura he was a gifted writer himself? Portrait is a spare, elegant book, one that shows admirable restraint in the face of extreme, even pathological behavior. (A Million Little Pieces this is not.) Clegg may not have been able to control his demons, but he is utterly in charge of this material, with a voice that is knowing and self-deprecating in exactly the right measure. Though the book flickers with quick scenes from his difficult childhood (his complicated relationships with his mother, a distant woman who struggles with cancer, and father, a disapproving, verbally abusive figure), his college years, his triumph in New York City as he builds his agency with a friend, and his eight-year relationship with Noah, most of the action—indeed, the howling center of the book—is located during Clegg's final paranoid descent into squalor and self-destruction, a several-month period in which he holed up in downtown boutique-hotel rooms and went on epic crack and vodka (and anonymous-sex) benders that lasted for days. His friend the writer Cintra Wilson once described Clegg's meltdown as like "watching the space shuttle explode." He lost everything: his agency, his boyfriend, his clients, his good looks, his health. In the opening scene, Clegg recounts a six-day binge in a fellow fiend's crack den of an apartment with nightly visits from a dealer: "I don't know yet that I will push through these grim, jittery hours until evening, when Happy will turn his cell phone back on and deliver more. I don't yet know that I will keep this going—here and in other places like it—for over a month. That I will lose almost forty pounds, so that, at 34, I will weigh less than I did in the eighth grade." It is a relief, then, to meet Clegg, nearly 40, at the little café a couple of blocks from his apartment in Greenwich Village that makes an appearance in the book during the depth of his misery. ("We sit in the window at Marquet . . . and the day outside and everyone in it flashes like a taunt. This is a shiny world, I think . . . for people whose lives I can only see as unblemished and lucky. A place where I've been allowed to visit but cannot stay. A place I've already left.") Today he is greeted warmly, like the regular he still is. At five years into his sobriety, he is fit and tan, having just gotten back from a two-week trip to Mexico with John Bowe, one of his writers and a sober friend with whom he shares a house in upstate New York, where he did the bulk of the work on his memoir. Blond, blue-eyed, and wearing baggy brown cords and a black short-sleeved Izod on a beautiful spring day, he comes across as a bit of a surfer dude—but from New England (he grew up in Connecticut). He orders a giant chocolate-chip cookie and eats it in a way that tells you he's a man who has worked very hard to control his voracious appetites: one little bite at a time. Indeed, he makes the whole cookie last over an hour. When the waitress assumes he is done, he practically swats her hand. Every last crumb. It is one of the book's motifs. He writes, "There will never be a time when I smoke crack that doesn't end with me on my knees, sometimes for hours . . . fingering the floor, like a madman, for crumbs." One of the reasons Portrait of an Addict is so intense and so disturbing—and makes you feel like you yourself have gone on a binge—is that all of the druggy scenes are written in the present tense. This has mostly to do with the fact that when Clegg was in rehab, he began writing things down in composition notebooks. "At first, before I ever thought of this as a book," he tells me, "I wanted to reinhabit that time so I could remember what was said, what I saw, how it felt—so that I wouldn't forget. At that time those memories were so fresh, so vivid and yet they felt perishable. I had this sort of urgent fear that if I didn't write down everything I remembered from that time—and by 'that time' I mean the period when I had disappeared into hotel rooms and did drugs day and night—they'd be lost forever." (One can't help wondering why he wouldn't prefer to just let those memories fade. It is as if he doesn't want to completely disown them; that those awful days and nights still exert some sort of pull.) When the pages began to pile up and a couple of years later he realized he wanted to turn them into a book, he left those scenes as he originally wrote them. Clegg checked out of the Retreat, a rehab facility in White Plains, New York, in 2005. He came back to the city, moved out of his boyfriend's apartment, and rented a little studio, his living expenses paid for by the sale of some William Eggleston photographs he had bought during headier times. He gave himself a year to "just get sober." Entering what he calls "a fellowship of recovery," he attended meetings two or three times a day. "That piece of my life is still the most important thing, actually. . . . Everything else after that—my job, the book, relationships, even my family—is kind of the gravy that I get for staying sober. And what I do now to stay sober is also one of the most joyful parts of my life. Some people can't wait to get to their yoga class like I can't wait to dive into my routine. It's lucky that I love it as much as I do." It would be easy to imagine that some feelings of shame related to his sexuality played a role in Clegg's addiction, but he is reluctant to pin his problems on that. "Straight and gay people both come to New York to transform themselves," he says. "And I think a lot of people get here and wind up dealing with feelings of being a fraud after having success through luck or other circumstances. I thought at any given moment it would be revealed that I wasn't half as smart as I might seem to be. A lot of my fears, my anxieties, came from being very concerned about what people thought of me. But the fact is, I don't think people thought of me even a fraction of the amount I imagined they did." Not long after Clegg got through the first difficult stage of sobriety, he made a brief attempt to start up a new agency. But in December 2005, William Morris executive VP Jennifer Rudolph Walsh offered him a job, and slowly but surely many (though not all) of his writers came back to him. In August 2008, he told his boss that he had been writing something on and off for the past few years and wondered if she would take a look at it. He dropped pages off at her house on Labor Day, and that evening Walsh sent him an E-mail. "I just finished your breathtaking pages," it began. "They are pitch perfect—thrilling, relatable, funny, original, terrifying, poetic, heartbreaking, and totally riveting. I don't think I blinked for the entire time I was reading." Within a few days, Walsh submitted the manuscript to publishers. "So I went from this gentle bubble of a few friends who had read it," says Clegg, "to pretty much everybody I know in book publishing reading it. All the things that one might be worried about other people reading were in that chunk of pages, and it all happened so fast that I didn't have time to stew in the fear. But it was overwhelming, probably one of the toughest things ever. But now that the book is coming out, in a weird way, I feel like that Band-Aid's been ripped off my skin already." Clegg says that the people in his life who loved him even through his darkest days—his boyfriend, his family—have read the book and have all been "incredibly supportive." His mother, who has survived her cancer and is living in Maine, could not bring herself to get past the first few pages. One night over a family dinner she declared that she was never going to read it. Not surprisingly, their relationship remains "unresolved," he says. But it is his relationship with his father that has been redeemed by his near-death experience—and the subsequent documentation of it. "I spoke with him a lot on the phone when I was in rehab," he says, "and it was sort of from that conversation forward that we got to know each other as adults. You know, we are not going on golfing vacations like a lot of fathers and sons, but we talk every week. Where we are now is amazing." But it is perhaps Clegg who had the hardest time forgiving himself for the pain and suffering he caused everyone he knew. It has been more than five years ("both like yesterday and another lifetime ago," he observes) since he "left my life and everyone and everything in it—besides drugs and the desire to die." Getting sober and writing about the process seems to have brought Clegg some of the clarity that he'd been searching for all along. "If I help anyone with something I say or do or write or by just staying clean and being alive instead of dead," he says, "I can look back across the wreckage and begin to make peace with it."
May 25, 2010 2:23 p.m.
Vougue
Literary agent Bill Clegg was talented, successful and secretly addicted to crack. His arresting new memoir is a portrait of having—and losing—it all.When Robert Downey, Jr., was in the grip of his downward spiral many years ago and was asked in an interview about his drug of choice, he answered, simply, "More." That one word would have made an apt title for William Morris literary agent Bill Clegg's haunting, visceral new memoir, Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man (Little, Brown and Company). The first line—"I can't leave and there isn't enough"—is meant to sum up the insidious pull of crack, the drug that lays him low and nearly destroys his life. But it could just as easily be a warning to the reader: You won't be able to stop reading until it's all gone—and you will crave more. What makes Clegg's book especially riveting is the remarkable speed of his vertiginous fall from grace. Clegg was a New York golden boy, a young, good-looking gay man with a successful literary agency, Burnes & Clegg, that represented such A-list writers as Susan Choi and Nicole Krauss. Clegg was also a social animal, known for throwing lively parties at the chic apartment on One Fifth Avenue that he shared with his filmmaker boyfriend, whom he calls Noah in the book. But all of this was just barely masking a terrible secret: drug addiction, yes, but more to the point, crippling feelings of inadequacy. About one of his first trips to New York shortly after college for an interview with an editor at a publishing house, Clegg writes of being "nauseous with shame" after being told he doesn't have the academic training, let alone the Ivy League education, to get him in the door. At Brooks Brothers later that day, he is convinced that the security guards can see that he doesn't belong, "that this is a place for a sleeker, smarter, better-educated, and altogether finer grade of person." Flash-forward eight years, and despite the fact that his publishing dreams have come true, he still feels the same way. Clegg describes a 2001 party in a Brooklyn Heights brownstone to celebrate the launch of his agency, a party where, as usual, he drinks too much and tries to control his urge to call a drug dealer. "As I finally catch a gentle buzz, I look around the table and wonder how on earth I ended up here. Nights like these are for other people, people like Kate [his business partner] and Noah who—with their Ivy League degrees and supportive families—seem born for toasts and congratulations."
As an agent, Clegg had a reputation for being a bit of an operator, brokering high-profile book deals with big advances. Who knew that underneath the bravura he was a gifted writer himself? Portrait is a spare, elegant book, one that shows admirable restraint in the face of extreme, even pathological behavior. (A Million Little Pieces this is not.) Clegg may not have been able to control his demons, but he is utterly in charge of this material, with a voice that is knowing and self-deprecating in exactly the right measure. Though the book flickers with quick scenes from his difficult childhood (his complicated relationships with his mother, a distant woman who struggles with cancer, and father, a disapproving, verbally abusive figure), his college years, his triumph in New York City as he builds his agency with a friend, and his eight-year relationship with Noah, most of the action—indeed, the howling center of the book—is located during Clegg's final paranoid descent into squalor and self-destruction, a several-month period in which he holed up in downtown boutique-hotel rooms and went on epic crack and vodka (and anonymous-sex) benders that lasted for days. His friend the writer Cintra Wilson once described Clegg's meltdown as like "watching the space shuttle explode." He lost everything: his agency, his boyfriend, his clients, his good looks, his health. In the opening scene, Clegg recounts a six-day binge in a fellow fiend's crack den of an apartment with nightly visits from a dealer: "I don't know yet that I will push through these grim, jittery hours until evening, when Happy will turn his cell phone back on and deliver more. I don't yet know that I will keep this going—here and in other places like it—for over a month. That I will lose almost forty pounds, so that, at 34, I will weigh less than I did in the eighth grade." It is a relief, then, to meet Clegg, nearly 40, at the little café a couple of blocks from his apartment in Greenwich Village that makes an appearance in the book during the depth of his misery. ("We sit in the window at Marquet . . . and the day outside and everyone in it flashes like a taunt. This is a shiny world, I think . . . for people whose lives I can only see as unblemished and lucky. A place where I've been allowed to visit but cannot stay. A place I've already left.") Today he is greeted warmly, like the regular he still is. At five years into his sobriety, he is fit and tan, having just gotten back from a two-week trip to Mexico with John Bowe, one of his writers and a sober friend with whom he shares a house in upstate New York, where he did the bulk of the work on his memoir. Blond, blue-eyed, and wearing baggy brown cords and a black short-sleeved Izod on a beautiful spring day, he comes across as a bit of a surfer dude—but from New England (he grew up in Connecticut). He orders a giant chocolate-chip cookie and eats it in a way that tells you he's a man who has worked very hard to control his voracious appetites: one little bite at a time. Indeed, he makes the whole cookie last over an hour. When the waitress assumes he is done, he practically swats her hand. Every last crumb. It is one of the book's motifs. He writes, "There will never be a time when I smoke crack that doesn't end with me on my knees, sometimes for hours . . . fingering the floor, like a madman, for crumbs." One of the reasons Portrait of an Addict is so intense and so disturbing—and makes you feel like you yourself have gone on a binge—is that all of the druggy scenes are written in the present tense. This has mostly to do with the fact that when Clegg was in rehab, he began writing things down in composition notebooks. "At first, before I ever thought of this as a book," he tells me, "I wanted to reinhabit that time so I could remember what was said, what I saw, how it felt—so that I wouldn't forget. At that time those memories were so fresh, so vivid and yet they felt perishable. I had this sort of urgent fear that if I didn't write down everything I remembered from that time—and by 'that time' I mean the period when I had disappeared into hotel rooms and did drugs day and night—they'd be lost forever." (One can't help wondering why he wouldn't prefer to just let those memories fade. It is as if he doesn't want to completely disown them; that those awful days and nights still exert some sort of pull.) When the pages began to pile up and a couple of years later he realized he wanted to turn them into a book, he left those scenes as he originally wrote them. Clegg checked out of the Retreat, a rehab facility in White Plains, New York, in 2005. He came back to the city, moved out of his boyfriend's apartment, and rented a little studio, his living expenses paid for by the sale of some William Eggleston photographs he had bought during headier times. He gave himself a year to "just get sober." Entering what he calls "a fellowship of recovery," he attended meetings two or three times a day. "That piece of my life is still the most important thing, actually. . . . Everything else after that—my job, the book, relationships, even my family—is kind of the gravy that I get for staying sober. And what I do now to stay sober is also one of the most joyful parts of my life. Some people can't wait to get to their yoga class like I can't wait to dive into my routine. It's lucky that I love it as much as I do." It would be easy to imagine that some feelings of shame related to his sexuality played a role in Clegg's addiction, but he is reluctant to pin his problems on that. "Straight and gay people both come to New York to transform themselves," he says. "And I think a lot of people get here and wind up dealing with feelings of being a fraud after having success through luck or other circumstances. I thought at any given moment it would be revealed that I wasn't half as smart as I might seem to be. A lot of my fears, my anxieties, came from being very concerned about what people thought of me. But the fact is, I don't think people thought of me even a fraction of the amount I imagined they did." Not long after Clegg got through the first difficult stage of sobriety, he made a brief attempt to start up a new agency. But in December 2005, William Morris executive VP Jennifer Rudolph Walsh offered him a job, and slowly but surely many (though not all) of his writers came back to him. In August 2008, he told his boss that he had been writing something on and off for the past few years and wondered if she would take a look at it. He dropped pages off at her house on Labor Day, and that evening Walsh sent him an E-mail. "I just finished your breathtaking pages," it began. "They are pitch perfect—thrilling, relatable, funny, original, terrifying, poetic, heartbreaking, and totally riveting. I don't think I blinked for the entire time I was reading." Within a few days, Walsh submitted the manuscript to publishers. "So I went from this gentle bubble of a few friends who had read it," says Clegg, "to pretty much everybody I know in book publishing reading it. All the things that one might be worried about other people reading were in that chunk of pages, and it all happened so fast that I didn't have time to stew in the fear. But it was overwhelming, probably one of the toughest things ever. But now that the book is coming out, in a weird way, I feel like that Band-Aid's been ripped off my skin already." Clegg says that the people in his life who loved him even through his darkest days—his boyfriend, his family—have read the book and have all been "incredibly supportive." His mother, who has survived her cancer and is living in Maine, could not bring herself to get past the first few pages. One night over a family dinner she declared that she was never going to read it. Not surprisingly, their relationship remains "unresolved," he says. But it is his relationship with his father that has been redeemed by his near-death experience—and the subsequent documentation of it. "I spoke with him a lot on the phone when I was in rehab," he says, "and it was sort of from that conversation forward that we got to know each other as adults. You know, we are not going on golfing vacations like a lot of fathers and sons, but we talk every week. Where we are now is amazing." But it is perhaps Clegg who had the hardest time forgiving himself for the pain and suffering he caused everyone he knew. It has been more than five years ("both like yesterday and another lifetime ago," he observes) since he "left my life and everyone and everything in it—besides drugs and the desire to die." Getting sober and writing about the process seems to have brought Clegg some of the clarity that he'd been searching for all along. "If I help anyone with something I say or do or write or by just staying clean and being alive instead of dead," he says, "I can look back across the wreckage and begin to make peace with it."
May 25, 2010 2:23 p.m.
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