Memories are often hard to retrieve at the best of times. But when alcohol contaminates, distorts and then washes away entire chunks of life, the prospect of digging into "the mille-feuille of experience", as Adrian Gill describes it, might seem like an impossible challenge. And yet in this chilling, exquisitely moving book, Gill defines the seductive, addictive and destructive power of drink.Best known for his restaurant and television reviews in The Sunday Times in the UK, Gill's trademark is slamming the truth down hard on the page. It is his honesty that accounts for the intensity of this haunting memoir. And yet ever since he learnt to disguise his neediness at school by reinventing his outer persona, "like a spy in deep cover", he has been playing a part, refining a distinctive act.Exactly half his lifetime ago, he found himself without direction professionally, newly wifeless, battered by a sense of his own worthlessness. Apart from his beloved dog Lily, what kept him going was the drink or drug on which he depended to combat his fears of "being alone and being lost". His literary dexterity is all the more remarkable for his dyslexia. And yet his inspirational passage on the joy of the English language, a thing "of peerless beauty and elegance", should become a school-curriculum essential.The book begins with an ending, as Gill reaches a point at which existing without the numbing effect of alcohol is his only chance of survival: a GP has given him six months to live. For an addict, the prospect of abstinence is overwhelmingly daunting. "It's not death that terrifies," Gill explains, "it's life." But Pour Me is about much more than those first shaky detox days.Gill's memoir returns to his upbringing with his successful, affair-prone parents, then to the transforming influence of his English teacher, his years as an art student at the Slade, his love of cooking, his first marriage, his friends.Built into the narrative are the riffs and detours with which his weekly readers will be familiar, on a variety of subjects ranging from sex to class, paint to animals, photography to the history behind an obscure London statue.There is no room for distorting sentimentality in this memoir, no place for the deceptive balm of nostalgia. When his unreliable ego edges uncomfortably towards showiness, he pulls you up with a passage of such painful longing about the mysterious disappearance of his brother Nick, his sense of bewilderment at his father's loss of memory, the intensity of his own parental pride in his children, and confirms how "kindness, like comedy, is all in the timing".And although he says this is not a funny book, it is. Just when you are close to feeling crushed by bleakness, he pulls "a Playboy Bunny from Balham" out of the hat and makes you laugh.It is the demon itself, or rather the ability to describe his incarceration in the drying-out clinic, that saves Gill and jump-starts his journalistic career in 1991. From the moment he is introduced to an editor at Tatler magazine who commissions him to write a piece about his experience in rehab, Gill, once encouraged by a despairing careers office to take up hairdressing, is off and running. Columns, success, money, adventure, fame and yet more girls follow as he embarks on a life of sobriety, but rarely sombreness.Gill emphasises that he has no self-help lessons to teach and indulges in no sermonising. However, almost despite himself, his post-drinking life cannot fail to give hope to "those who still stagger" and despair.A book that began by discussing lost time becomes one of recovered time, of a new way of life that is worth not only living but also celebrating."Pour Me: A Life" by AA Gill is published by Weidenfeld and Nicolson, R487 hardback at Exclusive Books..