Gonzo Neurotic (The Best (and Not So Best) of Jerry Stahl)

“Jerry Stahl should either get the Pulitzer prize or be shot down in the street like a dog.” —Anthony Bourdain

Fifty years of sex, drugs, show business, and bad behavior from the inimitable laureate of American excess, Jerry Stahl.

Long before descending into the underworld of addiction in Permanent Midnight—the memoir, and later film, that made him famous—Jerry Stahl had built a singular literary career reporting from America’s psychic gutters and cultural sideshows. Ricocheting from porn sets, beauty pageants, televangelists, celebrity implosions, recovery culture, and Hollywood grotesquerie to darker territories of illness, addiction, Jewish identity, and survival, Stahl’s writing has always been electric—but much of it has never been digitized.

Now, in Gonzo Neurotic, Stahl brings together the magazine work that made him with the fiction, memoir, and screenwriting he has honed over decades, interleaved with his own mordant present-day commentary on youthful lunacy and catastrophic life choices. Spanning the 1970s to the 2020s, the book takes readers from the “wet heart of Pageantland” at the Miss America pageant to the post-nuclear sets of cult erotica and the surreal writers’ rooms of ALF and Moonlighting. Stahl charts his rapid mental and physical decline alongside profiles of figures like Marlon Brando, Samuel L. Jackson, and Benicio del Toro. The result is a sharp, wickedly funny, and ultimately cathartic reckoning through a half century of cultural and personal upheaval.