In the late 1980s, during the first phase of the self-destructive drinking years recounted in this debut memoir, Colin Broderick was in the habit of leaving a raucous bar in the Bronx, jumping into a gypsy cab and taking a drive on the even wilder side. As a writer, he's a bit like the driver of one of those illegal taxis, taking you at high speed to some very dark places.

An actuary reading "Orangutan" (Three Rivers Press, 341 pages, $14) might well have a statistically inspired heart attack. It's a midsized miracle that Broderick is alive to tell his tale, and he knows it. He has survived a visit to a South Bronx "drug fort," physical attacks, car crashes and a determined assault on his own liver. During a long period of sobriety in the 1990s, he spent about a year in a body cast after being run over on a New York street. Months after that accident, still "sick as a small hospital," Broderick "tightened the bolts of [his] cage" and went off to get married for the first time.

That relationship and a subsequent marriage would both end in divorce. Broderick makes no excuses for himself when it comes to analyzing the wreckage of his personal life during his "first eighteen years living in America as an Irish immigrant." The orangutan of the title is a metaphor through which Broderick explains his fierce, alcoholic, antisocial self, as much to himself as to the reader. But it's not a question of Dr. Jekyll shrugging and saying, "Blame Mr. Hyde." Broderick has done a full reckoning -- as much as a history of blackouts will allow -- of the damage done when "the orangutan was loose," and he acknowledges that he must be the creature's keeper.

In fact, Broderick is much more than the wild man the title would suggest. Though he doesn't give himself much credit for it, he has a practical side, gutting and renovating old apartments and businesses. Between benders, he helped run a theater and a cafe/bookstore. He also became a handy carpenter. It's a knack for craftsmanship that he finally applied to his writing.

He writes especially well on the psychology of addiction: "We are all addicts at heart. Some people just haven't found the key that unlocks their heaven. ... I, on the other hand, am like an old janitor. You can hear my bundle of keys jangling from a mile away."

Describing the sensation of a car crash, Broderick says, "There's a moment of calm" right before impact. "Everything is accounted for." In "Orangutan," not quite everything is accounted for. Broderick, deliberately, writes little about his childhood in Northern Ireland during the Troubles. So watch out for a prequel.

Robert Cremins is an Irish writer in Texas and the author of the novel "A Sort of Homecoming."