USA Today News Of Course I Was a Nightmare : Lukas Gage on His, Mental Illness, and New Memoir
Lucas Gage briefly fears he might faint. It’s the last Friday of summer in New York City, and I’m having lunch with the actor at a restaurant that’s actually a boat docked on a pier along the Hudson River. For some reason, neither of us understood that this meant we’d be able to feel the boat rocking as we ate. “I was just wondering, ‘Am I going to faint, or are we going to sway?'” he says. Gage has fainted “a couple of times” before, and he’s afraid of it happening again, but he promises he won’t faint during our interview. “You know what? This book is very fluid. I’m very fluid too. It’s perfect,” he says, smiling. “We’ve become one with the water.”
Disguising his neurosis with a quirky, Californian cool facade is perhaps one of Gage’s greatest talents. He does the same during our conversation and in the pages of his new memoir, also titled “I Wrote This for Attention.” Yes, the book’s title, while humorous and slightly self-deprecating, doesn’t prepare you for the book’s harrowing details, which begin with the eyebrow-raising opening sentence: “At the end of sixth grade, I killed a child.” Don’t worry, the actor was speaking figuratively. But this sentiment certainly sets the tone for the rest of the book. He speaks openly about the countless traumas he endured in his youth: family addiction, father’s absence, sexual assault on children, to name just a few. As a teenager, he details his relationship with substance abuse and subsequent connections with the so-called “troubled teen industry,” a term used to refer to a controversial network of “treatment facilities” for at-risk teenagers. Many participants have described its methods as abusive, and Gage’s own story is no exception. By the end, these stories prove the memoir’s title true; in Gage’s words, “Of course I was a nightmare. Of course, I was crazy. Of course, I was that little boy crying because I didn’t have tools. Of course, I was a liar.”
Beyond the unexpected peace of mind the book provided, it also had another surprising effect: it helped Gage’s friends and family understand him better. “My relatives, my mom, my brother, my best friend, they all say, ‘All the weird things you do and all the things I don’t like about you suddenly make a lot of sense,'” he says. However, that doesn’t mean it wasn’t initially difficult for his loved ones, especially his mother, to read. “She found it very difficult to read and felt like a failure as a mother because all her children were struggling, and she was struggling too,” he tells me. “I think after she read it a little longer, she realized there were no villains or perfect angels. Everyone has their good and bad qualities, and I do too, and there’s a lot of love hidden in the honesty about some of people’s weaknesses.” I tell Gage that I believe honesty and seeing people in their entirety is also a form of love, which he agrees with “100 percent.”
“And it’s not like I would change anything. I wouldn’t go back in time and say, ‘I wish I’d been paid more attention,’ or ‘I wish you hadn’t gone to the casino so much,'” Gage says. All his struggles ultimately helped him develop the qualities that allowed him to break into Hollywood without any family ties—”being completely self-sufficient, not dependent on anyone, being creative, and not having attention-seeking behavior.” He also emphasizes that he deeply empathizes with his parents—”They didn’t have the resources we did, and they were doing the best they could with their parents, so I just wanted to let them know that this isn’t meant to criticize your parenting. We’re all just doing the best we can.”
Having faced his family’s initial reactions to the book, Gage is now tasked with facing public opinion. Although he can admit that “anyone’s opinion of me or the book is really none of my business,” he is understandably apprehensive. When Gage is criticized for his acting, he can blame it on a number of factors completely beyond his control: the direction, the crew, the editing, or perhaps he was just unwell that day. However, with this memoir, “it’s just me and my editor telling me what to do. So there’s really no one to blame but myself.” However, his biggest fear is being misunderstood. His intention was simply “to be honest; it wasn’t meant to be inspirational.” “Hopefully that’s the goal, that someone reads it and feels seen and understood and can relate and connect with it,” he says. “But I can’t say I wrote it to be a helpful book or an inspirational book. I wrote it to be honest and spontaneous, and people may or may not like it.”