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After years of drink, drugs and debauchery in New York and San Francisco's wellknown Irish haunts author Colin Broderick finally cleaned up his act and wrote a searing new book about his life. Then, as though by magic, came Barack Obama's literaiy agent and a major book deal. He tells CAHIR O'DOHERTY about his close calls and the rocky road to the most unlikely venue of all: literary success.
SOME people live life as though it'll never end. They start out innocently enough, heaven knows, just a night out at the pub, then off to a club, until soon they're out every night burning the candle at both ends and smoking the middle.
It's an exhilarating way to live - for a while but oh, the come down is excruciating. So painful, in fact, that for many Irish lads who still live like this the only option seems to be to start the cycle all over again before you notice what you've been up to the week before, trading one sweet oblivion for another.
Writer Colin Broderick, 41, knows all about iL A veteran of almost two decades of drink and class A drugs, he knows what its like to wake up after a total blackout.
He's to been to prison for DWI, and he's even fermented his own prison hooch while banged up to keep his hand in while he was off the streets . . . and sure enough he's started the whole self-destructive cycle over again the moment he was released.
It's a mad way to live, he'd be the first to tell you, but for years it was the only way he knew how. And now he's written all about it in Orangutan, a highly touted new book which will be released in December by Three Rivers press, a division of Random House.
Equally impressive, Broderick is repped by one of New York's top literary agents, Jane Dystel of Dystel & Goderich literary Management. Dystel was also the agent for Barack Obama when he released his first best-selling book, Dreams From My Father.
Orangutan, is this columnist's pick for the book of the year and which can be preordered on Amazon.com tells Broderick's story in unflinching detail, sparing everyone except...