The End of the Day

Bill Clegg’s New Novel Explores Friendships, Secrets, Longing, and Forgiveness

In a small New England town, six seemingly disparate characters—Dana, Jackie, Lupita, Hap, Alice and Floyd—come together and secrets of the past begin to unfold. Each character holds center stage in alternating chapters and becomes etched into the reader’s psyche. The End of the Day is both poignant, powerful and beautifully orchestrated in the hands of author Bill Clegg.

This is his second novel, following the success of Did You Ever Have a Family, which he wrote several years ago. Clegg will appear at Oblong Online via Crowdcast Thursday November 19th, 7PM, in conversation with Laura Zigman.

She is the author of several novels including Animal Husbandry, which was made into the movie Someone Like You, starring Hugh Jackman and Ashley Judd. She has been a contributor to the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Huffington Post.

Clegg was renowned in the publishing world prior to becoming an author. He is a successful literary agent, originally at William Morris Endeavor, followed by his partnership in Burnes & Clegg and now with his own Clegg Agency.

Stellar clients include Carly Simon, Diane Keaton, Lauren Groff, Christopher Bollen and David Levithan, to name a few. But Clegg’s history has fissures that almost derailed his life. Ten years ago, at the height of his thriving business as a go-to agent, Clegg revealed that he was a crack addict. The revelation, shocking to the literary world, was much talked about in the hallowed halls of the publishing industry.

Even those who didn’t know Clegg personally were mystified as to how someone so charismatic and successful could sink into the drug world. Legg had previously been in rehab and his relapse wreaked havoc on his entire life, costing him home, money and career. But Clegg finally kicked his habit and rebuilt his life and his relationships. He refers to June 11, 2005 as his sober date and he has maintained his sobriety ever since.

There are many men and women throughout the country who have experienced addictions, losses, and the trauma of having to start over again. Occasionally, the addictive experiences become best-selling memoirs. Clegg joined these numbers and wrote his own Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man in 2010. It garnered stellar reviews, with one critic calling it “…A startling, hair-raising, and compulsively readable account of one man’s descent into the hell of addiction…an instant classic.”

With a knack for writing and the ability to bare his soul, Clegg followed the success of his first memoir with another—Ninety Days: A Memoir of Recovery.

Clegg published these books as a way to help his recovery, reliving the nightmares he had brought upon himself, further to tell from his own perspective what many already knew.

Clegg recalls, “A friend said that when I cracked up it was like the Space Shuttle explosion: everybody saw it and there was nothing left. It was very public, the agency I co-owned was shut down and everyone knew why. I wasn’t employable; it was a disaster. As a result, at that point I gave up a certain kind of privacy that had to do with my sobriety.”

On the straight and narrow, Clegg continued writing, trying his hand at fiction. Did You Ever Have a Family, published in 2015, was longlisted for the prestigious Man Booker Prize and the National Book Award. Again, Clegg was lauded by peers and well-established writers alike for his ability to tell a story, albeit a depressing one.

The obvious question arises: Is it easier to write fiction or memoir?

“It might sound strange given how sad the events in the novel are, but the experience of writing this was more joyful,” Clegg said when the book was published. “It was exhilarating to discover these characters—their pasts, their particularities. With memoir there is much to be learned when you sit down to reoccupy and transcribe your past, but the events you remember are largely the events that can be remembered and the characters, too. What's so liberating about fiction is that the world you are creating, while you are creating it, can be changed and shaped. At a certain point, however, it becomes almost as fixed and real as your own past and allows for only so much adjustment.”

As might be expected, The End of the Day, his follow-up novel published this fall, has captured the attention of readers and reviewers alike.

The scene, as in his first novel, is rural Connecticut. Seemingly disconnected lives come together as secrets from half a century begin to come to light and challenge the lives of these six characters. In his writing, Clegg alludes to how choices we make to connect, betray or protect, become the legacy we leave behind.