Sex, drugs, nose jobs and nihilism: millennial coming of age story reveals former Weinstein employee’s ugly truth about growing up in Los Angeles

Fourteen-year-old Alexander is picked up from school in Malibu, California, by his work obsessed father and taken to correctional therapy. His parents are divorced; his mother a failed actress, his father a wealthy businessman. Alex has been taking the study-drug Adderall, but it’s stopping him sleeping and makes him feel nauseous. At therapy, Alex is strapped in to headphones and placed in front of a TV where he must clap to the sound of a cowbell for two hours in the dark. Alex’s friends, Beau and Ocean, are similarly affluent but afflicted, their absentee parents a source of deep unhappiness and rejection. Divorce, wicked stepmothers, eating disorders and the pressure to perform, both at school and online, weigh heavily on the three boys, causing them to act out. After Alex is arrested for slashing tires his father sends him to boarding school in England. A new school and a new culture help wean Alex off drugs but not the LA-born anxiety and apathy he feels. With no sense of self, only one of self-pity, he cannot reconcile the man he is becoming with the city in which he was raised.

Inspired by its author’s own experiences of growing up in Los Angeles, We Might Take Some Getting Used To follows a group of lonely, unsupervised adolescents, spoilt by their parents’ money but spared their attention, as they fall into a spiral of disaffection, competing against each other to be the most traumatised as they grapple with their lack of identity and purpose in life. LA, with its starry-eyed, power-hungry, fame-obsessed veneer masks a dangerous underground of teenage drug culture—the use of weed, cocaine and prescription drugs like Ritalin and Adderall are endemic—along with their ready exploitation at the hands of adults wanting a taste of their parents’ money. Anton Brisinger delivers a teenage Less Than Zero underscored by the pernicious power of social media.

Much like the characters in his novel, Brisinger took drugs during his adolescence to numb the pain of parental rejection and to escape his feelings of nihilism and depression. He has partied with Charlie Sheen, played cards with Sean Penn, Julia Roberts and Charlize Theron, shared a pizza with Leonardo DiCaprio and once drove Emma Thompson home from the beach because her feet were hurting. His life is littered with casual anecdotes of the rich and famous yet broken by a uniquely West Coast malaise.

We Might Take Some Getting Used To is a dark, jaded and timely novel about teenage nihilism in the most vacuous city in America. It will appeal to fans of Lauren Greenfield, Jay McInerney, J.D. Salinger.

About the author: Anton Brisinger was born in Los Angeles, California, to Swedish parents. As a teenager, he was packed off to the notorious Sigtuna Skolan Humanistiska Läroverket boarding school outside Stockholm, which became notorious for the extreme hazing rituals which saw older pupils terrorising younger boys; Brisinger says he was beaten while a student there. He spent several months living and working in Brazil as a missionary until he was robbed at gun point by a ten-year-old child. Returning to LA, Brisinger worked at The Weinstein Company before the downfall of its owner, Harvey Weinstein; along with other employees he was questioned by the FBI as they built their case against the shamed film producer. Brisinger studied English and Film at Exeter University before moving to Shanghai, China, to teach English, returning to LA just before the pandemic. Brisinger has endured a lengthy battle with depression and addiction which resulted in a suicide attempt. Now using writing as a powerful creative and cathartic outlet, he lives and works in London.

We Might Take Some Getting Used To by published by Olympia Press, RRP £8.99 paperback, £3.99 ebook, is available from online retailers and can be ordered from all good bookstores. Follow him @antonbrisingerr