Sam Lansky

I find myself at a loss for words after finishing this intense read, and that doesn't happen often.
Certainly not a memoir for the feint of heart, Lansky does not shy away from any detail of his lurid life under a horrible drug addiction. Yet his candid openness is what makes this such a profound and almost poetic read. How can you walk away from such an insane lifestyle such as his and not be completely open about it? To do so would certainly diminish his own experiences.
I am sure reliving show more those years in such detail was extremely hard. It was certainly difficult to read at times and uncomfortable.
Lansky is an amazing writer, and I can't recall a memoir about addiction told more beautifully than this one. He has just enough clarity to recall his life with a realistic sense of reflection and observation. Yet, I found myself struggling to understand his addiction as much as he was in the moment. I felt in it with him, almost as if he still didn't understand it and we were trying to learn together. That is powerful to me in a way that most memoirs are not. He could have simply told us the details of his experiences and and then mentioned the why's as an afterthought. Instead he took us on the journey with him, which involved not knowing why he was so self destructive, and trying so hard to understand his own behaviors.
This was such an intense read and I could not put it down. Often times uncomfortable, and certainly very graphic, but as mentioned before, I don't think there was any other way for him to tell his story. It is an uncomfortable story and a graphic one, and to tell it any other way would have been a lie.
This book will stay with me. Very, Very powerful memoir! show less

A well-written memoir of an addict who happens to be gay. Offspring of a broken home, Sam is a very intelligent young man who makes some poor choices. He relates a dissolute period in his life with a sort of panache and an attitude that takes the edge off of some of the darker aspects of his addiction. I surprisingly enjoyed the book probably because I appreciate good writing and the sex scenes were a bonus.

This book is very well written. The book is very imbalanced and ultimately unsatisfying. The author spends more than three quarters of the book explicitly describing his debauched lifestyle with more drugs and sexual partners than you can count and three (or is it four?) failed rehab attempts. Not until the last four pages does he go to his third 12 Step program meeting
and he is remarkably recovered! We don’t hear this key part of the story in any detail, he’s just suddenly recovered, show more end of book. Too bad Lansky didn’t spend more time on this aspect of his story giving it the detail he gave the sex and drug aspect of his horror story. It’s as though he reached recovery and ran out of steam leaving the reader to wonder what happened after that.
For all of his wonderful writing, the story structure was awful. show less

This memoir like novel finds a new angle to tackle self-loathing. At times it reads like a self-help book but with enough drama to make it entertaining medicine. The writing is excellent with good use of metaphors and observations. The use of a weekend get-away to let a Shaiman cure him is a mixed bag of acceptance by the reader. But Lansky pulls the ending off with brilliant gusto.