Chez Pazienza

Dead Star Twilight: a Memoir Chez Pazienza

"Everything is a blur." Chez Pazienza has just awakened from his first deep sleep in months to find himself in a strange hotel room. As he tries to piece together the details of how he got there -- which come back to him only as confusing fragments -- he steps over to the window, pulls open the curtain and is shocked to his senses. He realizes that he has a front row seat to the smoking wreckage of Lower Manhattan. It's September 13th, 2001. What led him to be at the epicenter of the darkest event in American history turns out to be a personal catastrophe that cost him everything that mattered most to him. Just a few months previously, Chez had been a successful television producer living in Los Angeles with his beautiful new wife. But he harbored a secret that was destroying him from the inside out: a monstrous heroin habit. As his life spiraled out of control, with his marriage crumbling, he made the decision to escape L. A. and get clean. Now, fresh out of rehab, with nothing to lose and walking an emotional tightrope, Chez Pazienza has made another decision -- possibly the craziest one of his life. He's come to New York City in the wake of a terrorist attack that shattered the nation. He's going to go to work for NBC News. He's going to find his humanity again under inhuman conditions -- and rebuild his life in the shadow of death. Told in three intersecting storylines that barrel along with dizzying ferocity, "Dead Star Twilight" is a relentlessly exhilarating memoir that Arianna Huffington calls "fierce, funny, disturbing, but ultimately uplifting... the book 'A Million Little Pieces' dreamed of being."