The Gilded Razor: A Memoir - Hardcover

"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

Sharply funny and compulsively readable, " The Gilded Razor" is a dazzling and harrowing memoir from debut author Sam Lansky. "The Gilded Razor" is the true story of a double life. By the age of seventeen, Sam Lansky was an all-star student with Ivy League aspirations in his final year at an elite New York City prep school. But a nasty addiction to prescription pills spiraled rapidly out of control, compounded by a string of reckless affairs with older men, leaving his bright future in jeopardy. After a terrifying overdose, he tried to straighten out. Yet as he journeyed from the glittering streets of Manhattan, to a wilderness boot camp in Utah, to a psych ward in New Orleans, he only found more opportunities to create chaos--until finally, he began to face himself. In the vein of Elizabeth Wurtzel and Augusten Burroughs, Lansky scrapes away at his own life as a young addict and exposes profoundly universal anxieties. Told with remarkable sensitivity, biting humor, and unrelenting self-awareness, "The Gilded Razor" is a coming-of-age story of searing honesty and lyricism that introduces a powerful new voice to the confessional genre.