Pour Me a Life
A.A. Gill
Oct 2016 · Ascent Audio · Narrated by Tim Andres Pabon
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7 hr 51 min
Unabridged
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An astounding and brilliant memoir, 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.
Best known for his hysterically funny and often scathing restaurant reviews for the London Sunday Times, journalist Adrian Gill writes about his near-fatal alcoholism in this extraordinary lucid memoir. By his early twenties, at London’s prestigious Saint Martin’s art school, Gill was entrenched in his addiction. 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.
Best known for his hysterically funny and often scathing restaurant reviews for the London Sunday Times, journalist Adrian Gill writes about his near-fatal alcoholism in this extraordinary lucid memoir. By his early twenties, at London’s prestigious Saint Martin’s art school, Gill was entrenched in his addiction. 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.
About the author
Adrian Anthony Gill was born in Edinburgh, Scotland on June 28, 1954. He studied at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in London and at the Slade School, but did not graduate from either. A series of odd jobs followed as he descended into alcoholism. After entering a rehabilitation program in 1984 and joining Alcoholics Anonymous, he taught cooking classes. He wrote a short article about his recovery for Tatler's Good Rehab Guide and was hired as a food writer and essayist. In 1993, he was hired by The Sunday Times. He wrote about television, travel, and politics before taking over Table Talk, the newspaper's weekly restaurant column. His travel writing and foreign reporting were collected in A. A. Gill Is Away and A. A. Gill Is Further Away. His other books included Sap Rising, The Ivy: The Restaurant and Its Recipes, Le Caprice, Breakfast at the Wolseley: Recipes from London's Favorite Restaurant, Grand Cafe, The Golden Door: Letters to America, and Table Talk: Sweet and Sour, Salt and Bitter. His autobiography, Pour Me: A Life, was published in 2015. He died from lung cancer on December 10, 2016 at the age of 62.
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