Pour Me, a Life

Book excerpt: Serialized in Esquire, A.A. Gill's Pour Me a Life is a riveting meditation on the author's alcoholism, seen through the lens of the memories that remain, and the transformative moments that saved him from a lifelong addiction and early death. “Pour Me a Life is an unapologet­ically honest, raw, and often har­rowing account of the life of a man who, up until now, we only thought we knew. Here is A.A. Gill at his best. A real-life Bright Lights, Big City.” —Eric Ripert, chef and co-owner of Le Bernardin, and author of the New York Timesbestseller 32 Yolks Best known for his hysterically funny and often scathing restaurant reviews for the London Sunday Times, A.A. Gill’s Pour Me a Life is a riveting memoir of the author’s alcoholism, seen through the lens of the memories that remain, and the transformative moments in art, food, religion, and family that saved him from a lifelong addiction and early death. By his early twenties, at London’s prestigious Saint Martin’s art school, journalist Adrian Gill was entrenched in alcoholism. He writes from the handful of memories that remain, of drunken conquests with anonymous women, of waking to morbid hallucinations, of emptying jacket pock­ets that “were like tiny crime scenes,” helping him puzzle his whereabouts back together. Through­out his recollections, Gill traces his childhood, his early diagnosis of dyslexia, the deep sense of isolation when he was sent to boarding school at age eleven, the disappearance of his only brother, whom he has not seen for decades. When Gill was confronted at age thirty by a doctor who questioned his drinking, he answered honestly for the first time, not because he was ready to stop, but because his body was too dam­aged to live much longer. Gill was admitted to a thirty-day rehab center—then a rare and revolu­tionary concept in England—and has lived three decades of his life sober. Written with clear-eyed honesty and empathy, Pour Me a Life is a haunting account of addiction, its exhilarating power and destructive force, and is destined to be a classic of its kind.