How long does it take to read Permanent Midnight?
A Memoir
Jerry Stahl
Permanent Midnight by Jerry Stahl takes about 7 hours 2 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 7 hours 2 minutes
A weekend read
First published 1995. 384 pages, about 105,600 words.
15 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 11 hours 44 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 7 hours 2 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 4 hours 24 minutes |
The page count is the median across 8 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
Permanent Midnight is not just the story of how success destroyed Jerry Stahl, but how Stahl destroyed his own success. Starting life as the prototypical "middle-class kid," he endured his father's early death, his mother's descent into major depression, and life on his own from the age of sixteen. In spite of his own bad habits, he penetrated the far-flung, sometimes exotic worlds of magazines, movies, pornography, and television. His byline appeared everywhere from Esquire and Playboy to L.A. Style, Hustler, and The Village Voice, while he penned scripts for twisted cult film classics like Cafe Flesh and Dr. Caligari. Eventually, he ended up in the big-buck world of network television, banging out shows for mega-hits like Moonlighting, ALF, and thirtysomething. But even when he was making five grand a week, he was shooting six. . Beneath the successful front ran a toxic undercurrent of betrayal and madness, hard narcotics and hardcore sex. Permanent Midnight captures the crazed reality of this double and triple life. Careening daily from his luxury home to L.A.'s most hellacious neighborhoods, from the rankest methadone clinic to the backlot at Twentieth Century-Fox, he financed a heroin habit that brought on the soothing hiss of oblivion, even as it stole his health and trashed his career. Until, in a private apocalypse straight out of Day of the Locusts, Jerry Stahl kicked smack and emerged clean.
Subjects: Drug addicts, Journalists, Biography, Television writers, Authors, biography, Authors, american
