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. They were also across the street from a building where, months prior, Lukas had to grapple with the dissolution of his marriage.

Naturally, Lukas did the smartest thing anyone can do in a crisis: doomscroll to see what random people on the internet were saying about him. People were calling him an attention whore – and they were right. As a toddler, he set his room on fire. As a child, he flirted with women at Hooters. As a teen, he fell hopelessly in love with a girl who wore an ankle monitor. And as an adult, he became an actor and filmed that scene in TheWhite 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 an exquisite memoir that details Lukas’ coming of age in the haunting underbelly of San Diego. Capturing universal anxieties – of transitioning from innocence to adulthood, of feeling too much and nothing at all, of sex and death, of fame and familial strife – this book is a remarkable achievement of healing, vaping through therapy sessions and having the courage to forgive the family that hurt you.