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One Irishman's journey from addict to literary star

Colin Broderick has cleaned up his act and written a searing new book about his life

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Writer Colin Broderick

Photo by Nuala Purcell

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 it. A veteran of almost two decades of drink and class A drugs, he knows what it’s like to wake up after a total blackout.

He’s 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,” this columnist’s pick for the book of the year, which can be preordered on Amazon.com, tells Broderick’s story in unflinching detail, sparing everyone except himself in a story that’s so vividly written that at times you feel like you’ve living it alongside him.

Asked what he remembers from the lost years (lost decades, in fact), he tells IrishCentral’s sister publication the Irish Voice, “It’s always been strange to me that we have this stigma around drug use, and meanwhile people are staggering down the streets and falling in front of traffic and somehow that’s okay. It’s bizarre that it’s accepted as a social norm when guys who are also involved with drugs are suspect, you know?”

Drugs were always easy to find. And there was no shortage of young Irish lads looking to score some.

Cocaine, for example, may be the drug of choice for Wall Street tycoons, but quite a few Irish carpenters and construction workers like to add it to their nights out too.

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