What Did I Do Last Night? A Drunkard’s Tale.

Sykes, Tom (author).

As a teenager, Sykes was expelled from Eton, which freed up time to focus on what he was really goodat: being wasted. As he made his way into his twenties, pot, booze, and cocaine abuse had become a lifestyle. Much to his delight, he was even able to finagle it into a living covering the nightlife and local bar scenes for newspapers in London and then New York. His anecdotes devolve into generally asinine behavior, blindly stumbling on increasingly creative ways to make an ass of himself and spending more and more blacked-out hours per day feeding his addictions until the inevitable bottoming out. Sykes’ reflective humor, which never quite veers all the way into self-effacing, and his rapid, easy pacing keep this telling crisp, riotous, and not entirely unrepentant. Sykes manages through his literary mugging to glorify the very conduct he intends to disparage. After all, he got a book deal out of it, didn’t he?