Pour Me, a Life

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 Lifeis 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-lifeBright Lights, Big City.Eric Ripert, chef and co-owner of Le Bernardin, and author of theNew York Timesbestseller32 Yolks

Best known for his hysterically funny and often scathing restaurant reviews for the London Sunday Times, A.A. Gills Pour Me a Life is a riveting memoir of the authors 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 Londons prestigious Saint Martins 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 centerthen a rare and revolutionary concept in Englandand 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.