“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