Bill Clegg

If you're going to be a gay crack addict, just be sure to start out with $70,000 in the bank and lots of toney New York friends and lovers who will find you posh apartments to crash in (One Fifth Avenue) and boutique rehab centers (Silver Hill) for your reluctant detours into detox. Good looks will help you, too. That's the lesson of Bill Clegg's Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man, this season's memoir du jour. That said, Clegg's description of his paranoid break-down at Newark airport is the best deterrent to drug abuse I've ever read, and I've read a lot. Just wish it had been written by someone the reader could feel more sympathy for, like maybe someone who didn't row for Harvard.