William Leith
Bits of Me Are Falling Apart: Dark Thoughts from the Middle Years



 




A hilarious, horrendous, and ultimately helpful memoir about hitting middle age and trying to hit back.

William Leith, well-known for his jaw-droppingly candid columns about his dysfunctional and dissolute life, is no longer young. Given what he used to put his body through, before he gave up bingeing on drugs and drink and bad food, he is in fairly good shape. There is no getting past it, though: he’s getting past it. And bits of him are falling apart.

What is happening to him? And what can be done about it? In his extraordinary chronicle The Hungry Years, Leith turned his merciless eye and magpie mind on his addictions and the chemistry, psychology, and philosophy behind them. Bits of Me Are Falling Apart is an even more ambitious and mordantly funny book, in which an unflinching memoir of his own, unique voyage into later life becomes an examination of the aging process in all humans - what science tells us about it and might be able to do to arrest it.




Praise for William Leith's The Hungry Years:

“A corrosively honest, often darkly comic memoir of an
out-of-control life.”—Maclean’s

“The Hungry Years [is] an engaging and truly funny book… It is a rare author who can turn a diet into a comic epic.”—The Globe and Mail

“The subject of this book is compulsion and it is compulsively readable.
It is a powerful memoir with areas of real depth...a fast read, well-packaged, full of guilty pleasures, [with] unusual qualities of heart and daring.”
—The Daily Telegraph (UK)

“As a memoir and as comedy, it succeeds beautifully…as a confessional, it is pretty much a masterclass—frank, tough-minded, funny, generous.”
—New Statesman (UK)

“Wincingly honest... [A] brilliant sort-of memoir”—Time Out (UK)

“This hilarious, self-lacerating memoir of a compulsive eater is a superb book. I feel about The Hungry Years the way William Leith feels about buttered toast: I couldn't get enough and I panicked when I was reaching the end.”
—Jon Ronson (author of Them: Adventures with Extremists and
The Men Who Stare at Goats)

“The Hungry Years is a confessional, satirical, wise, tragic, truly original book about addiction, food and what’s really inside a fat man that’s trying to get out. It’s the first real book about body image for men, and it breaks taboos, breaks new ground, and breaks your heart. I loved it.”—Tim Lott

“A wonderfully inventive, typically candid account of a life lived through consumption…a desperate and funny despatch from the front line of binge culture.”—The Observer Magazine (UK)




Length: 288 pp
Genre/Category: Memoir
Publication Date: February 2009


Canadian rights, Doubleday Canada
UK rights, Bloomsbury

For all other rights contact Greene & Heaton.


  Photo Credit: Harry Borden
William Leith is one of Britain’s best-known journalists. He has written about subjects as divergent as cosmetic surgery, Palestine, Hollywood directors, and drugs. He writes regularly for the Guardian, the Observer, and the Daily Telegraph.
 









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