The Gilded Razor by Sam Lansky; Gallery Books, $26
As the 27-year-old culture editor at Time magazine, L.A.-based Sam Lansky has the opportunity to interview some of the pop world's premiere talent. Though Adele, Nicki Minaj, and Madonna have graced the magazine's pages beneath his byline in just this past year alone, he will be more intimately understood once the his searing, heart-wrenching memoir emerges.
To write a memoir in your late 20s says something about the kind of life you've already lived. Lansky's seamy history, embroiled in drug abuse and prostitution, scorches the pages of an autobiography so eloquently written it actually takes some of the hopelessness out of activities like freebasing crystal meth and downing a medicine chest-worth of Ambien and Xanax.
The book opens with the author at 17, "subsisting on a diet of cigarettes and Adderall for months." He is visiting "dream school" Princeton University with his divorced father, who, a year after moving from Oregon to Manhattan, is already ensconced in a new relationship. Lansky's father wants his son to excel academically, but never realizes that the boy would routinely spend his father's money earmarked for haircuts on street drugs. During a rest-stop break on the road, Lansky indulges in a dizzying smorgasbord of amphetamine derivatives crouched in a handicapped bathroom stall. His high school years spent in an exclusive prep school only served as a backdrop for more of the same.
This desperation permeates much of the narrative, as unsafe fucking in hotel steam rooms and a rampant succession of online hookups with older men blur into a fever dream of bad behavior, chemical dependency, and random sex. "Each time I hooked up with a stranger, some piece of me clung to a sad little flicker of hope that he would be the one to love me," Lansky admits. Years of diligent recovery and psychotherapy would eventually "fully untangle the snarl of pathological self-loathing that drove me into the beds of middle-aged men across Manhattan."
When cocaine becomes more difficult to obtain, new friend Jesse and an Italian heiress named Sahara become the pill-pushers of his dreams. When Princeton decides to pass on his admission, things darken even further before any shreds of light. A stint in "stoic, inhospitable" Boston ends with a relapse, where things like this happen: "A guy I didn't know stuck a syringe into the base of my groin because, he said, you keep going limp."
Some readers may want to stick their heads in the sand at the sheer volume of substance abuse, overdoses, episodes of vomiting on the backs of tricks (then laughing hysterically), and general misery. But his father's decision to force him to attend a wilderness rehab program in Utah proved beneficial, if short-lived. A second attempt at sobriety while a freshman at Vassar College failed, but a third dance with a 12-step recovery program in San Francisco finally stuck with him at 19, basically saving his life.
Exhaustive yet revelatory, Lansky's confessional is a raw, tough look at a boy who practically drowned in the airless world of pharmacological abuse, anonymous sex, and emotional emptiness. As a weary reader, I'm glad he lived to tell. As a human with a heart, I need a hug.
Sam Lansky will read from The Gilded Razor at Books, Inc. Castro, 2275 Market St., SF, on Fri., Jan. 15, at 7 p.m.