I Wrote This for Attention by Lukas Gage
“At the end of sixth grade, I killed a kid.”
Great opening line to the next big mystery-thriller, right? Something layered in hardboiled neo-noir from the likes of Elmore Leonard or Jim Thompson. Except it’s really the opening line of I Wrote This for Attention from rising young star Lukas Gage’s autobiography.
Not many 30-year-olds have lived enough to spin out a memoir. But Gage, recognizable from any number of roles including the Road House remake and Season One of The White Lotus, lays out his life so far in a manner so rivetingly effective that the book reads like, well, a thriller. The mystery we’re left to solve being how he managed to make it in an impossible industry after enduring an even more impossible childhood. Immensely skilled as a writer as well, Lukas takes us on a twisted, twisting journey that makes it feel like his memoir belongs in the fiction aisle next to The Catcher in the Rye.
I Wrote This for Attention is frank, fun and fascinating. It’s almost like we’re not reading the book so much as Lukas is in the room telling his soul-baring story. As a ghostwriter, I wish he had reached out to work with me, except I don’t think I could have fashioned anything this good. A cautionary tale that’s an absolute blast to read.