Michael Benanav speaks on Himalaya Bound at Travel Bug

though he never makes excuses for his behavior, Davis has a tendency of minimizing its repercussions. The question of the audience fully embracing Gucci Mane, who has rapped about doing and selling drugs, presents necessary challenges, despite what for him has been a story of redemption and success.

Davis began writing his book from prison in 2014. Incarcerated a total of seven times, his latest stint, for illegal possession of a firearm, was spent in a federal penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana. The experience was a catalyst for Davis. Upon his release in 2016, he emerged 80 pounds lighter, determinedly sober, and more focused than ever. His autobiography, published in September 2017, debuted on the New York Times’ bestseller list in fourth place; a few weeks later, his 11th studio album, Mr. Davis, snagged number- one spots on multiple Billboard charts, and in October he married his longtime girlfriend Keyshia Ka’oir on live television.

So why is it that Gucci Mane, who’s been in the rap game for nearly two decades, feels like he’s finally in the spotlight? It might have something to do with his long-term preoccupation with getting high. For years, Davis was addicted to lean — also called drank or syrup — a stupor-inducing concoction of prescription cough syrup and Promethazine that is typically mixed into soda and has been a fixture of Southern rap for years. 2009’s “Lemonade,” one of Davis’ breakout hits, “came from me running out of Sprite to pour my lean into ... and instead using lemonade,” he writes. By 2012, he admits, “I was always high.”

Davis was born in Bessemer, Alabama, in 1980. Describing his father Ralph, Davis writes,“Everything about the man was smooth. Even his hands, they were softer than my momma’s.” Ralph was a clotheshorse, the original “Gucci Man” (“man” became “mane” via “some country, Alabama twang,” Davis wrote) a hustler whose peregrinations ultimately left Davis fatherless. When he was nine, Davis’ mother moved him and his older half- brother Victor to Atlanta’s drug-infested Eastside neighborhood. As a middle schooler, his mother gave him $50 — a rare gift of cash — and Davis headed to a dealer’s house and spent the money on crack cocaine, which he then sold for profit. “The dope game was on and poppin’ from that moment on,” he writes.

His first arrest came in 2001, for possession of crack cocaine. Once released, he started focusing on music, selling drugs on the side to finance his f ledgling rap career. Often, the rapper’s triumphs are followed closely by pitfalls. Immediately after appearing on BET’s Rap City in 2005, for example, the FBI released a warrant for his arrest on a murder charge. He beat the case and released a commercially successful album, but for years his life was peppered with arrests. A major pitfall of the book is how challenging it is to keep up with Gucci’s imprisonments, and also with his trajectory as a musician.

For anyone who follows hip- hop, particularly Southern rap, The Autobiography of Gucci Mane reads at times like a tabloid. Disses abound, from Davis’ well-documented issues with rapper Jeezy, who Davis raps “couldn’t make a hit with a Louisville Slugga,” to digressions on the coke-addled producer Scott Storch, who he calls “lame.” Producer Rick Ross “didn’t seem so smart to me,” Mane writes, and Davis’ protégé Waka Flocka Flame is characterized as “just a nineteen-yearold kid whose mother was worried about him.”

On 2017’s “Made It,” Davis raps, “Have you been so broke you had to serve a pregnant lady/ Feeding crack rock to a baby and you really just a baby?” By all appearances, Gucci Mane has indeed “made it,” and really, his motivations were simple enough. “As far back as I can remember, I really just wanted to get me some money,” Davis writes. To what extent does it matter how he made it? Maybe it doesn’t. To appreciate Gucci Mane’s success, at least, we have to set judgment aside. — Iris McLister