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“Accountability is sexy, and ownership is how you run away from victimhood.” What a soundbite.
Lukas Gage is on my screen—as he so often has been over the last few years, with his roles on everything from Euphoria, You, and The White Lotus to Overcompensating, Road House, and Smile 2. This time, however, he’s talking to me: eye mask in place, laptop on his lap, and hair slightly disheveled—the latter in an I’m-just-vibing-at-home way, rather than in the someone-spent-20-minutes-fluffing-it style that Hollywood heartthrobs like him tend to wear.
We are discussing his new memoir, I Wrote This for Attention, out October 14, though it feels like I’m FaceTiming a friend. In full transparency, I’m not not: Gage and I have known each other for some time now. We met a few years ago, while filming the final episode of HBO Max’s Gossip Girl reboot. Gage was then just breaking out, his buttocks having recently gone viral after a scene in The White Lotus with Murray Bartlett.
On Gossip Girl, I was to interview Gage, who was playing himself, as he walked into the show’s version of the Met Gala. We were introduced outside his trailer a few moments before walking on to the set. I remember a charming, chill, fun guy who told me to relax and assured me I’d do great. Don’t get too attached to the lines, he said, “’cause I won’t!” I listened and we had a fun time.
Of all the things that made it into his memoir, our day together did not. But that’s fair enough—Gage has lived a life. I Wrote This for Attention is hilarious, painful, and reflective, covering his search for a sense of self as a young gay boy, his relationship with drugs and ego, and finally entering adulthood. Above all, it’s a story of queer self-invention, of what it takes to make something of oneself.
Ahead of the book’s release next week, Gage spoke frankly and openly about what he put into it—and what he left out.
Vogue: I just finished reading your book—as in, four minutes ago. I don’t know why, but I love memoirs. Do you read memoirs?
Lukas Gage: Thank you for reading it. I do too. Demi Moore’s is one of the top ones for me, and Julia Fox’s. She’s so raw and so honest, and she’s a beautiful writer.
When you start writing a memoir, do you think of other memoirs? As in, Julia did this, Demi did that…
I think what comes to mind is what worked and which ones stuck with me. And I think in particular, Demi and Julia’s books were the two that I just completely loved. They both had a cohesive story. It wasn’t just rambling: they [told] a story with an arc. Both of them had themes that I wasn’t expecting from them. I think with Julia’s especially, to me the story was about how female friendship and all these female figures in her life had saved her. And it was refreshing to read a book that [seemed like] a love story about her friendships, not about her partners.
The first thing that comes to mind with yours is family—how you threaded in your relationship with your mom, dad, and brothers, and your brother’s late girlfriend Tessa. You expect it at the beginning of a memoir, but a lot of people, particularly celebrities, then move on. How did you decide how much to say or not say about your family? Was that a conversation you had with them at all?
I do think the underlying theme in this book is family. And it’s funny, I feel like the entertainment and acting, that part, is to me 10% of this book—which hopefully is unexpected, especially with this title. And it was a conversation I had to have. There’s definitely things that I had to leave out, and I was getting their permission, of course. I think everyone, when they first read it, was a little bit scared that they were going to be villainized or they were going to be painted in a bad way. I think that we’re all flawed, and just like my favorite roles in movies, in real life no one’s all good and no one’s all bad. Once they read the book, they felt a lot better about it.
It seemed like you extended a lot of grace, but did not let anyone, including yourself, get away with anything. When I read a memoir, I always take into account the unreliable narrator of it all. You establish early on that you are a self-proclaimed liar, which we’ll get to, but it is interesting that at the same time, you don’t spare yourself.
I think that’s important. Accountability is sexy and ownership is how you run away from victimhood. And I’m not going to not take accountability for my parts in things and where I fucked up. I think the book is also way more interesting in the places that I fail, rather than where I succeeded. Look, this is a premature memoir—I haven’t had a crazy career to do a retrospective on—so I rather try to be like, I am a work in progress, so my career is a work in progress.
Lukas, did you actually write this for attention? Not to go all Barbara Walters, but I am curious.
No, let’s do it. Look, I’m inviting criticism by, A), writing this book in the first place, and B), having that title. That was, for me, a little bit of the theme: that I cared so deeply about what people thought and I wanted to be liked so much. And I still do. I’m still always that people-pleasing attention whore. But I think, if I’m being completely honest, when I first sold it and wrote it, it was during the strike, and I was feeling a lack of attention, and I just thought that title was so funny. By the end it became something that I truly did care deeply about. I’ve never worked harder in my life on any project. And I do want attention, I just want it in different ways now. I don’t want only to be a provocateur. If anything, the best thing that can happen is someone can read this book and feel seen. But, yes, I do want attention.
We all do. Was there anything that you felt the need to make clear or felt was important the public knew about your public persona?
I think what was really important was some of the extreme and crazy shit that happened to me as a child. And it’s not that unique. A lot of people had crazier childhoods, but I think they’ll universally connect with that. A thing that was heavy on my mind was mental health and drug addiction, and feeling how the system has failed so many people and how I really wanted to humanize my brother. That was a hard thing to talk about that I wanted to be open about, because, I think, being fully transparent, there was a lot of anger for my brother and my mom and my father. And the best thing besides feeling understood by my family and friends [because of] this book was getting to talk to them and getting to understand them more. The most important thing was showing those cracks in my family and the love that is there, and making sure that I show that we all fucked up, but that I don’t blame anyone and am not resentful. We can only love to the extent that we’ve been taught to love. I am not a philanthropist or a social justice warrior or anything like that, but two things that I give a fuck about are really being open about mental health and addiction. If I can help anyone with that, that would be the one thing that I would love to happen from this book.
I can imagine writing a memoir prompts maybe a little too much self-reflection. Was there anything you learned about yourself looking at your life so closely?
I think just having compassion for myself. I used to be such a fuck-up, and I made so many mistakes. I can’t believe the worst thing didn’t happen. I just was hard on myself. And I think [earlier on] I was like, oh, no, I was just surviving. But no, I was acting out. I was being volatile, I was being reckless. I really wanted someone to just grab me and hold me and tell me that it was okay, and to have the right kind of attention. And so I think the biggest thing I got out of it was just loving that fucking crazy 13-year-old Lukas, and not being so hard on him. And talking about addictions, I really had to take a look at myself. I was addicted to finding bad things about myself. I really was fucking reading every single comment and trying to fill up this attention well, and not with good stuff. I was looking for all that bad shit to solidify all these things I thought about myself, about my face, my body, my personality. I was addicted to fueling this dark part of my brain. I’m still guilty of it, but that was a huge thing: realizing how dark I would get in these moments and lose sight of what was happening in my real, non-screen life.
When I start reading a book, I always read the first line and the last line first.
Oh, wow, so “I killed a kid” and “I put the phone down.”
Yes. Did you think about those opening and closing statements, or were they not as big of a consideration? They feel like they were.
No, I honestly didn’t until you said that. And it’s interesting, because I think they really go hand in hand. I see that connection completely, but I never thought of it like that. I did have that “I Killed a Kid” chapter in a different spot, and I kept going back to it. There was something that would call me in the middle of the night that was, like, you got to put it in the front of the book. And maybe part of it was like, it’s a good opening line to get people hooked in. But I do think that, thematically, there is a through line with killing parts of myself and shutting parts of myself down in an effort to be seen and to be loved and to be validated. And to then finally putting the phone down [is] finally not looking for that attention or that validation from this fucking thing. That’s interesting.
Let’s go back to the liar thing. You establish early on that you are, were, a liar, that you augmented parts of yourself and your life as a kid. Did you lie at any point in the book?
No, I actually didn’t. I mean, look, I say in the very beginning of the book, some things are embellished to tell a story, and some things are… I just don’t fucking remember what I said when I was six years old, so it’s my storytelling and my version of them. But the events that take place in the book are a hundred percent real. And I definitely, definitely had the impulse to lie, mostly about things I didn’t feel comfortable talking about. But the antidote to that was sensationalizing this one part that people are going to pick up for clickbait, and leading with humor. So, not a lie, but an easy way out, and that’s okay for some of these moments. I would say the only lies are maybe dialogue, just things that I thought were funnier than what really happened. I probably juiced it up a little bit, but everything that happened in this is a hundred percent true.
You mentioned that you’ve been working on screenwriting. Would you turn this into a movie or a show? Was that a thought as you were writing it?
I don’t know how much it would translate as a whole into a TV show. I’m definitely open to it. I would absolutely love to, but there’s also different slices of it that I think could be taken out. I think some of the bootcamp stuff, connecting with Paris [Hilton] about her experiences with those kinds of facilities, that could be an interesting story to tell that could also shed light on a system that fails the most vulnerable people. That interests me in a story.
Would you write another memoir?
Yeah. I just think next time I’m going to hide it for a while so I can get a lot more time with it. I write poetry too, so maybe there’ll be, like, a slutty poetry book. For people with short attention spans.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
