What happens after rock bottom? In Ninety Days: A Memoir of Recovery (Little, Brown and Company), a follow-up to 2010’s riveting Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man, literary agent Bill Clegg recounts the years following his decision to get sober after a decade plagued by alcohol and drugs. Like his count of days clean, Clegg starts from zero—his bank accounts, from rehab and binges are empty, his job and boyfriend are gone, the circles in which he previously moved are off-limits. In a manner that recalls a fledgling New Yorker’s first days in the city, Clegg pieces together a new life, a new apartment, routine, and friends, always in the shadow of his personal transgressions and the lure of the cell-phone numbers and apartments that still hold the promise of a high.
Whereas Portrait was a thrashing, high-octane bender of a narrative, Ninety Days, it may come as no surprise, is a somber, steadier progression, marked by tiny victories and frenetic dips into relapse. Like many tales of recovery, Clegg’s account emerges out of basements filled with strangers on squeaky folding chairs, friendships always tenuously tethered to the possibility of falling off the wagon, and unimaginable amounts of coffee. Relationships, rather than high drama, are the real focus of Ninety Days, and as a result there is a tenderness at its heart that balances out the navel-gazing intrinsic to the genre. And indeed, Clegg reveals it is people, not a program, that keep him afloat.
Read Jonathan Van Meter’s profile of Bill Clegg on the occasion of the publication of Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man.