As Needed for Pain: A Memoir of Addiction

In this frank confessional, former Details editor-in-chief Peres recalls his opioid addiction. Starting with a debasing story of crawling on his hands and knees in search of lost pills on a urine-soaked men’s room floor, Peres flashes back to his awkward 1980s adolescence in upper-middle-class Pikesville, Md., where he indulged his obsessions with magic and magician David Copperfield (who later became a close friend). In the 1990s, the “decidedly unchic” NYU graduate was hired as a reporter for Women’s Wear Daily; around this time, Peres injured his back and first felt “the warm tingling sensation” of Vicodin. He cultivated his addiction quietly for several years; but when Condé Nast tapped the perennially insecure, 28-year-old Peres to lead Details in 2000, the pressure eventually drove him to take more than three dozen pills daily (“as uncontrollable as my drug use had become, there was a fair amount of control involved. I knew exactly how many pills I needed to get buzzed”). Peres hit bottom in 2007, when Sarah, his pregnant wife, threw him out. Peres is a self-effacing writer—and becomes even more so when he tells how, with the support of Copperfield, he gets clean through an outpatient rehab program. By the time his son Oscar was born in 2008, Peres had been sober for 92 days. At times both harrowing and charming, Peres’s story bracingly captures the struggles of addiction. (Feb.)