I Wrote This for Attention

Lukas Gage was having one of the shittiest weeks of his life. His beloved grandmother was dying. And Lukas was sitting next to his father, a man who had been mostly absent in his son's childhood--except when talking to Lukas about tits because he loved nothing more than tits, and listening to Howard Stern on the radio. They were across the street from a building in Century City, where months prior, Lukas signed a prenup--paperwork for a marriage that crumbled spectacularly and publicly. This week had it all: death, divorce, and daddy issues.

In that room, Lukas did the smartest thing anyone can do in a crisis: doom scroll to see what random people on the internet were saying about him. People were calling him an attention whore--and they were absolutely right. Lukas Gage was no stranger to going viral. He loved attention. As a toddler, he set his room on fire. As a child, he hugged and flirted with women at Hooters to his father's delight. As a teen, he stole handles of alcohol and cherry cough syrup. He had sex at a restroom in Chili's, and fell hopelessly in love with a girl who wore an ankle monitor. He became an actor and filmed that scene in White Lotus (if you know, you know). Lukas was scared of attention and yet he craved it more than anything in the world.

I Wrote This for Attention is a riveting, exquisite memoir full of heart that chronicles Lukas's coming of age in the haunting underbelly of San Diego and clawing his way to stardom. Lukas captures the universal anxieties of transitioning from innocence to adulthood, of feeling too much and nothing at all. Sex and death, fame and familial strife, drug abuse and Raya, I Wrote This for Attention is a remarkable achievement of healing, of vaping through therapy sessions, and of having the courage to forgive the family that hurt you and set yourself free.