Famed restaurant critic A. A. Gill writes about his early years, his alcoholism, the collapse that followed, and the slow reconstruction of a life through sobriety and work. 

What distinguishes the book from more familiar addiction memoirs is voice. Gill’s prose carries the same bite as his criticism — observational, cutting, alert to hypocrisy, including his own. The memoir consults the temperament of an addict, and how a personality forged in bravado and self-destruction adapts to constraint.

For readers interested in literary memoir, addiction writing that avoids uplift, and the figure of the critic as subject rather than observer. 

It's a first edition hardback, but missing the dust jacket. Otherwise in great condition.