The book you write when you were too coked up to get into Princeton

SAM LANSKY’S RICH KID TALE OF ADDICTION INSPIRES EQUAL PARTS COMPASSION AND LOATHING

THE AUTHOR APPEARS STILL SLIGHTLY SMITTEN WITH HIS RAKISH, ADDICTED TEEN SELF

The Gilded Razor Sam Lansky Gallery Books 320 pp; $35

Researchers have dubbed the phenomenon of what wealth does to the brain The A--hole Effect. At the University of Berkeley, psychologist Paul K. Piff and his team looked at people from a range of economic backgrounds and found that the wealthiest among us are more likely to behave rudely while driving, take more than their share of candy and agree with statements like “I honestly feel I’m just more deserving than other people.” Or, as Mark Kingwell succinctly wrote, in the most recent issue of The Walrus, “Some people are born on third base and think they’ve hit a triple.”

Researchers also found that you don’t even technically need to be rich for the ego enlargement to take effect; simply the ability to perceive yourself as more wealthy is enough to turn you into an entitled dingus. A dingus like Sam Lansky, who in The Gilded Razor, has arrived with an unforgiving memoir about his teen years spent as a latchkey kid with a gargantuan appetite for snorting drugs. At age 16, Lansky is uprooted from his hometown of Portland, Oregon to live with his father in New York City after his parents’ divorce. He attends Dwight, a costly prep school — Paris Hilton’s alma mater, and the school whose name is often jokingly cited as an acronym for “Dumb White Idiots Getting High Together.” He may not be as wealthy as his classmates, the offspring of investment bankers and UN ambassadors, but he wears his blue blazer as a security blanket, reminding him who he’s supposed to be. He regularly stays out partying until 4 a.m., only to return to school at 7 a. m. for detention. The whole book reads like tourism into the lives of overprivileged, undersupervised teens, whose dramatic escapades seem tailor- made to shock adults. An alternate title of this book might as well be Gossip Girl: The Memoir.

Lansky is clearly suffering from inner demons, vividly describing his insides as “rotting and tumescent,” and he takes to addiction as a means to press out all the wrinkles in his ill- fitting human suit. While the source of his self-loathing is unclear — “I could point to a dozen little threads of dysfunction that I’d teased out over the course of years in therapy” — the lengths through which he is willing to slough off his disliked self is both frightening and sad. Lansky describes a rail of Dexedrine as “the vertiginous rush of getting everything I had wanted all at once,” and the euphoria of drugs and anonymous sex with mucholder men (both often in large quantities!) serve as a welcome distraction and a flimsy curtain separating him from the inner demons that threaten to consume his life.

While Lansky’s depiction of drug addiction is harrowing — I felt the battery acid taste of vomit creep up my throat when he described track marks so abscessed that he couldn’t lift his arms above his head for a week — my sympathies played racquetball over the course of the book, going back and forth from compassion to loathing. Lansky writes with the smugness of someone who is fairly used to getting what he wants. His absentee father is always leaving around his credit card and envelopes of cash around for him to take. While Lansky admits responsibility for his faults, describing himself as “selfish, entitled, manipulative, addicted,” it doesn’t curb the involuntary cringes that come from watching him spin out of control, like the frothing- at- the- mouth cartoon Tasmanian Devil.

It’s much tougher to be a drug addict when you’re a father of two trying to hold down a high- flying job as a reporter, like David Carr in Night of the Gun, or an adult woman enduring the double whammy of losing a parent and going through a divorce, like Cheryl Strayed in Wild. Comparably, the worst thing that happens in Sam Lansky’s life is that he’s too doped up to get into Princeton.

The most compelling part of the book is when Lansky gets shipped off to a wilderness boot camp in Utah. In the woods, there are simple repercussions for bad behaviour. If you can’t make a fire, you can’t have hot food. Any attempts to sabotage the program will make it longer to complete. As the camp therapist tells him, “The narcissism and manipulation that have served you in your life thus far aren’t going to work here, so you better start getting honest.” For the first time, Lansky is not being pandered to, and it’s like swimming in a cold, clean body of fresh water, whereas the rest of the book is like taking a shallow dip in a scuzzy hotel pool full of pee.

But some gilded memories weave their way into the book; Lansky has a habit of name-dropping the costly designer clothing labels he wore — he packs a Helmut Lang sweater to attend rehab — and he is constantly memorializing the attractiveness of the hard-bodied men he takes to bed. While he acknowledges the bad times his drug addiction led to, it appears he’s still slightly smitten by his own teenage rakishness.

Everyone is the protagonist of their own story — I defy you to find a person who hasn’t listened to a sad song while staring out the window of a moving vehicle, and pretended they were starring in a film adaptation of their own life — but what we find compelling or dramatic about our own lives doesn’t always translate. What reads as brutally honest to some may just look like another example of the a--hole effect to others.