The Gilded Razor: A Book Club Recommendation! - Couverture rigide

Lansky, Sam

Couverture rigide

ISBN 10 : 1476776148 ISBN 13 : 9781476776149

Editeur : Gallery Books, 2016

A propos du livre

Revue de presse :

"This raw, beautifully observed memoir both terrifies and inspires." (People Magazine)

“Lansky’s recounting of the prescription-drug addiction that over-whelmed his last years at an elite prep school—and subsequent boot camps and psych wards he slogged through—is as funny as it is dark.” (Entertainment Weekly (Must List))

“Sam Lansky is a beautiful writer. If he weren’t an addict, his first book would be about something else, but I have no doubt it would be great, as is his memoir The Gilded Razor. But Sam Lansky is an addict, and he has made something fine and useful and lasting from his struggle. His account of using, hitting bottom and getting sober at an astonishingly young age is a powerful addition to the literature of active addiction and recovery. I look forward to seeing what more he makes.” (Bill Clegg, New York Times bestselling author of Did You Ever Have a Family and Portrait of the Addict as a Young Man)

"A gut-wrenching exposé...The writing is raw and haunting, encouraging readers to keep turning the pages as the author describes countless situations where he shouldn't have made it through the night but did... A candid, eye-opening memoir." (Kirkus)

“There is something in Lansky’s story that—wait for it—can be called addictive. . . . Lansky’s command of language never wavers. . . . Even those who find another addiction memoir a bitter pill to swallow can’t deny Lansky’s writing
chops or storytelling skills.” (Publishers Weekly)

"Dark but brutally honest." (US Weekly)

“In this wonderful, compelling book, Sam Lansky has created a charismatic teenage narrator who shows that addiction is no respecter of class, education or intelligence. If you’re a parent this book will scare you, even as you enjoy its charming, spritely brilliance. The Gilded Razor is one of the best portraits I’ve read about the implacable power of addiction.”   (Susan Cheever, bestselling author of Drinking in America: Our Secret History)

"Sam Lansky in his memoir The Gilded Razor--a peripatetic tale of pills and promiscuity--turns Manhattan into a kind of Bret Easton Ellis Island. Lansky guides us, with a voice all his own, through the chaos of his addiction into a clearing where sobriety awaits him. It is a book filled with, to quote Lansky at one point in his narrative, ‘too many beautiful people doing too many ugly things.’ Yet, through the beauty of Lansky's writing, the ugliness subsides and a kind of hard-won hope takes its place. 'You're a miracle,' his mother tells him at one point. He is." (Kevin Sessums, New York Times bestselling author of I Left It on the Mountain)

"Sam Lansky is too young to have lived through all he’s lived through—and too young to have written about it with such insight. The Gilded Razor takes the reader on a painfully evocative journey from which too many never return. With virtuosic prose, he shows you how he tries and fails and tries and tries until he finally survives--at age 19. His story moves and compels, but it’s the writing that keeps you reading.”  (George Hodgman, New York Times bestselling author of Bettyville)


"From the first page I was so staggered by this young man's extraordinary voice I burst into tears. The Gilded Razor is so exquisitely crafted, so devastatingly moving, so brutally honest I found myself torn between overwhelming admiration and seething jealousy that I didn't write it. This is far from your average addiction memoir. It's just a goddamn brilliant book." (Kristen Johnston, New York Times bestselling author of Guts: The Endless Follies and Tiny Triumphs of a Giant Disaster)

Extrait :

The Gilded Razor Prologue

For many years after it was over, there were songs I could not listen to, for fear they would take me back there; certain photographs that made me clench my jaw in a particular way; and street corners where, crossing from a subway exit to reach an appointment or a restaurant, I would flash back momentarily to a long-forgotten winter night years earlier and see myself, seventeen years old and spectral in the lamplight, stumbling out of a brownstone with a runny nose and my fly unzipped. My hair would have been too long, probably, from always taking the money my father gave me for a haircut and using it to buy drugs. (“What do you mean, ‘It doesn’t look any different’?” I’d ask, always doe-eyed.) My hands would have been wedged into my pockets because I always forgot to wear gloves. And I would have been walking briskly back to my father’s apartment, eager to get into bed and pretend it never happened.

I say that I would have done so because so often I did, but if I could, I would do it differently. Memory is a funny type of haunting. The subconscious keeps chewing away at sins atoned for long ago. Even after everything has been set right, the body doesn’t forget the places it’s been.



Stockholm. I sleep badly, tossing and turning in my hotel room. In the night, I awake from strange, listless dreams. The furniture turns to gold when I touch it, then crumbles into dust, silken as ash. I’m just tired, I tell myself; it’s just jet lag—the foreignness of a new place. One morning I wake up and the bed is full of glitter. I fall back asleep, and when I awake again, the sheets are crisp and white as fresh snow.

At a fancy party, there’s a champagne toast; I hold my glass up to the light, watching the bubbles fizzle and break as they meet the surface. I set it down on the table unsipped. I am used to that by now. It may not always get better, but it will always get different. That was the promise—the only promise.

There are ghosts around every corner. At a cocktail bar in Södermalm: I am alone at a table, writing in a notebook, when I see a man I recognize, although I can’t say from where. He smiles at me—he knows me, too, and more intimately than I know him. He has a handsome, doleful face. Faces like that all blur together for me now. His name could be Jim, or Steve. He could be an investment banker or a surgeon or a congressman.

He approaches me. Slowly, he reaches out to touch my face and presses a finger against my cheek. I want to ask what he’s doing, but instead I just sit there, frozen. He raises his hand to show me. On the tip of his thumb, there is a speck of glitter.

“Where did that come from?” I ask. We both begin to laugh.

I don’t go home with him because things are different now. But that night, alone in my room, I dream of falling down the stairs in a town house in Boston. I dream that I’m running through the ruddy desert of Utah, with no shoes on, under a silver moon.

I dream that my apartment is full of snow, and there are wolves at the foot of the bed, nipping at my ankles.

À propos de cette édition

• Éditeur: Gallery Books
• Date d'édition: 2016
• ISBN 10: 1476776148
• ISBN 13: 9781476776149
• Reliure: Relié
• Nombre de pages: 320