The Recovering

by Leslie Jamison

  When my first novel came out that winter, the girls at the bakery made a cake decorated with a version of the cover—which showed a faceless woman in a mauve negligee, not my first choice—fashioned from pink and purple chocolate. The book didn’t sell well. The high point was the day it reached ninety-something on the Alcoholism sublist on Amazon, far below the Big Book—translated into twenty different languages. My mom was excited to see it ranked on a sublist. She emailed me about it. Thanks for letting me know! I wrote back, as if I hadn’t been checking for myself. I read my online reader reviews obsessively, all ten of them. The most passionate one said that my descriptions of alcohol were so detailed I must be an alcoholic, and gave the book three stars out of five.

  I was still trying to work myself as hard as I could—to prove to myself that sobriety was worth it—but mostly my writing felt like riding a stubborn horse, kicking it with spurs until it bled.

  In The Shining, Jack Nicholson plays a dry drunk desperately punching away at his typewriter in an empty off-season resort—an embodiment of grudging sobriety, its maze of carpeted corridors haunted by the sinister ghosts of prior revelry. Jack hurls himself at his manuscript but ends up typing just one phrase for hundreds of pages, All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy, varied only by margins and typos: All work and no play makes Jack a dull bog. All work and no play makes Jack a dull bot. It’s sobriety through a glass darkly. All work and no play—no booze—makes everything hopelessly dull. Life, prose, everything.

  Jack starts drinking again in the movie, or at least he wants to drink so badly he hallucinates his own relapse. He gets a tumbler of bourbon from poker-faced Lloyd, a ghost bartender at the empty lobby bar. “Here’s to five miserable months on the wagon,” Jack tells Lloyd, “and all the irreparable harm that it’s caused me.”

  Stephen King’s novel The Shining, on which the Kubrick film is based, is the story of a failed recovery set in a twisted vision of rehab: An unhappily sober man relapses in an empty hotel perched high in the Colorado Rockies. Instead of the community of rehab, we get life in an isolation tank. When Jack Torrance takes a job at the Overlook Hotel, he no longer drinks, but he’s still consumed by the resentment and anger that fueled his drinking. “Would he ever have an hour,” he wonders, “not a week or even a day, mind you, but just one waking hour [without] this craving for a drink?”

  After the winter’s first major snowfall, the phone lines go down and the road that connects the Overlook to the rest of the world is closed. Jack and his family are utterly alone, left to the devices of their own unraveling. The hotel’s walls are banked with fallen snow, its rooms full of rotting ghosts, its wallpaper stained with blood. The topiary animals come alive. The elevators fill with confetti and deflated balloons, the menacing afterlife of revelry. The Shining isn’t just a relapse story; it’s a story about the frustrations of a dry drunk—recovery-speak for someone who no longer drinks but isn’t in any recovery program—a man literally white-knuckling his way through life. Jack’s hands and fingers appear constantly throughout the novel’s six hundred pages, “clenched tightly in his lap, working against each other, sweating,” his nails “digging into his palms like tiny brands,” or shaking, or balled into tight fists, contorted by “the wanting, the needing to get drunk.”

  Though Jack has been dry for longer in the novel than the movie—fourteen months, to be precise, not that he’s counting every second of it—he’s angry that he hasn’t gotten enough credit for his own self-improvement. “If a man reforms,” he asks himself, “doesn’t he deserve to have his reformation credited sooner or later?”

  Everything conspires to make Jack drink again. He pictures guests drinking in the gardens during summer: sloe gin fizzes and Pink Ladies. He wipes his handkerchief across his lips in longing. He starts chewing Excedrin just like he used to for his hangovers. He eventually finds himself facing Lloyd at the bar, asking for twenty martinis: “One for every month I’ve been on the wagon and one to grow on.” Jack sits on his bar stool telling Lloyd about the trials of staying high-and-dry, the five months he’s added to his sobriety during the long winter: “The floor of the Wagon is nothing but straight pine boards, so fresh they’re still bleeding sap, and if you took your shoes off you’d be sure to get a splinter.” Sobriety is Spartan and uncomfortable, sticky and joyless. It pricks you at every turn. The ballroom behind his bar stool fills with ghosts—ghoulish creatures with sagging skin wearing fox masks and rhinestone brassieres and sequined dresses—and they’re all egging on his relapse, “looking at him expectantly, silently,” as the bartender tells him: “Now drink your drink,” a command that all the spirits repeat, in chorus.

  Jack’s relapse exists in a strange purgatory between hallucination and actual intoxication: “Jack brought the drink to his mouth and downed it in three long gulps, the gin highballing down his throat like a moving van in a tunnel, exploding in his stomach.” Does he actually drink, or just imagine drinking? It gets him drunk either way.

  After this fantasy has ended and its imagined bottles have disappeared from the shelves, Jack finds himself at the bar with his crying wife and their traumatized child, wondering: “What was he doing in a bar with a drink in his hand? He had TAKEN THE PLEDGE. He had GONE ON THE WAGON. He had SWORN OFF.” It sounds like a temperance play—like my old all-caps superlatives, or Lowry’s melodrama—and it sounds like one to Jack, too: “It was just before the curtain of Act II in some old-time temperance play,” he thinks, “one so poorly mounted that the prop man had forgotten to stock the shelves of the Den of Iniquity.” Jack is aware of his own self-dramatizing tendencies, but he’s also aware—with keen disappointment, like a real alcoholic—that all the bottles are gone. His son, Danny, telepathically curses the hotel: “You had to make him drink the Bad Stuff. That’s the only way you could get him.”

  The novel and film versions of The Shining both present bleak visions of the relationship between sobriety and creativity. In the movie we get a sober man without a story—his mind fallow and fumbling, typing the same words over and over again—but the book imagines a writer seduced by the wrong story. Jack becomes obsessed with the story of the Overlook Hotel itself, its history of depravity: murders and suicides and mafia scandals. One day while Jack is checking on the boiler in the basement—the novel’s Chekhovian gun, spotted in the first act and fired by the last—he discovers a scrapbook full of articles about the hotel’s violent past. His fascination quickly starts to sound like relapse, as he examines the scrapbook “almost guiltily, as if he had been drinking secretly,” all the while worried that his wife “would smell the fumes on him.” When Jack thinks about writing the story of the Overlook, he gets the same sensation “he usually felt… when he had a three-drink buzz on.”

  Whether he’s working on a story that doesn’t exist (in the film), or committed to telling a story of dissolution (in the novel), Jack’s monomaniacal focus on creation is what obliterates his decency. In the novel, he relapses because he finds himself drawn to the wrong tale, not a recovery narrative but something nearly opposite: the hotel’s own sordid drunkalog. The sinister revelry beckons, all the ghosts beckon: Drink your drink. It’s a relapse writ large. The stakes are supernatural. When the boiler explodes and the hotel goes up in flames, there’s no triumphant recovery, only finality: “The party was over.”

  When Stephen King wrote The Shining, in the mid-seventies, he wrote it “without even realizing… that I was writing about myself.” At the height of his use, King was filling his trash cans with beer bottles and doing so much cocaine he had to stuff tissues into his nostrils so he wouldn’t bleed on his typewriter. The Shining was a nightmare written by an addict terrified of sobriety. “I was afraid,” King wrote decades later, “that I wouldn’t be able to work anymore if I quit drinking and drugging.”

  When I wanted to force myself to write, I spent my evenings at the Java House, a cavernous coffee shop stocked with fist-sized cookies—often stale—that I purchased with dogged deter
mination, trying to tell myself that pleasure was still possible. I opened my laptop by the front windows and watched people walk into bars while I pecked at my keyboard, working on a short story called “The Relapse” that was supposed to be an inoculation against actually relapsing.

  The story begins with a woman named Claudia binge-drinking while pregnant, just like I had. When I wrote about the clear sweet booze surrounding her fetus, I wanted to drink it. I wanted gills so I could swim through it. After Claudia decides to quit drinking, she meets a man named Jack at an AA meeting. This plotline was a way for me to dramatize one of my relapse fantasies: that I would meet a man in the program and throw everything away with him—my relationship, my sobriety, all of it. Claudia and Jack trade drinking histories the way other people might flirt by talking about their sexual pasts. Claudia isn’t sure if she is using the possibility of alcohol to flirt with Jack, or the possibility of Jack to flirt with alcohol. Claudia tells Jack she wants to relapse so she can know—without a doubt—that she has absolutely lost control. Then she’ll be able to get better.

  In the first draft I wrote, Claudia and Jack got drunk together. Then I decided the ending was too predictable. I gave it away in the title! That version of the story seemed like a pathetic version of wish fulfillment, without any larger purpose in sight. So I revised: She didn’t relapse. She stayed straight. But all this flip-flopping, draft to draft, was just another version of what I was doing every day in my own head.

  “The fantasy of every alcoholic,” says one textbook, “is that there is a nearby, possible world in which he discovers a decorous dosing regimen, and drinks like a perfect gentleman or lady.” From the safe perch of sobriety, I started to summon a catalog of my finest drinking moments. Recovery wisdom said, You can’t turn a pickle back into a cucumber. But I was busy re-cucumbering, marinating in nostalgia. I could still remember drinking on a balcony with Dave while the dark sea frothed and surged below us; or stumbling back to my college boyfriend’s concrete high-rise dorm, exhaling puffs of frosted gin breath into the cold, falling into his twin bed on the nineteenth floor as the high tower creaked and moaned in the wind. I could still remember getting drunk during a work trip to Xi’an, on a clear liquor that a Chinese writer told me was white wine. But it wasn’t white wine. It was fire. I could still remember picking up a fried scorpion from the pile of fried scorpions, under the watchful gaze of two birds carved from turnips, and making a joke with my chopsticks, acting like a total fucking idiot but not caring. That was the point: not caring. As if I’d been released from a contract. Drinking was plush and forgiving. It sparkled like backyard fireflies. It smelled like good meat and smoke. It was already happening in the nearby possible world. It said, Come on over.

  In that world, I would drink like I’d always wanted to drink, except it would work out; it would be okay. I definitely wouldn’t get drunk and stuff my face with old crusty leftover pasta from the fridge and tell Dave it made me sick to watch his compulsive attachment to affirmation, something I obviously knew nothing about. I definitely wouldn’t start crying and wiping the snot from my nose with my hand and asking him why he couldn’t even comfort me, why he was so repulsed by my sadness.

  At a meeting, when I shared about how hard it was to be at parties, one woman suggested that in that case I might not want to throw so many parties at our house. But I was going to meetings less frequently, and we were throwing parties more often. Twenty-two-year-olds in heavy eyeliner were taking shots in my kitchen. At one I went to the fridge and found that my Diet Wild Cherry Pepsi, the one I’d tucked behind the soy milk to keep it safe, was gone. Dave had given it to a visiting poet, who was sober and thirsty.

  “But I’m sober,” I told him. “I was thirsty.”

  These things were both true. It was also true that I could have said, Hey, let’s not have sixty people get drunk at our house. But I was wary of imposing another limit—already worried he resented the ones I’d tried to impose—and I liked imagining that I wasn’t entirely banished from the realms of revelry.

  After that party was done, thirty minutes after everyone was gone, a tiny poet climbed out of our hallway closet. We were picking up red plastic cups, still sticky with wine. “Where is everyone?” she’d asked. “Is it over?”

  And I envied her, because she was drunk.

  When Sasha finally decides to drink herself to death in Rhys’s Good Morning, Midnight, she reflects on how easy it can be to disappear entirely: “You are walking along a road peacefully. You trip. You fall into blackness. That’s the past—or perhaps the future. And you know that there is no past, no future, there is only this blackness, changing faintly, slowly, but always the same.”

  After publishing Good Morning, Midnight, in 1939, Rhys tripped and fell off the road herself—as if the novel had been prophecy. Rhys disappeared for a decade, publishing nothing, and no one knew where she’d gone. Rumors spread that she’d died at a sanitarium; that she’d died in Paris; that she’d died during the war. Occasional articles about her work referred to her as “the late Jean Rhys.”

  In 1949, an actress named Selma Vaz Dias put out a personal ad in the New Statesman, a weekly newspaper, to see if Rhys was still alive: “Will anyone knowing her whereabouts kindly communicate.” She was interested in turning one of Rhys’s novels into a radio play. By this point, Rhys was married (for the third time), to a disbarred lawyer named Max Hamer, a devoted but unstable husband who was convicted of fraud charges shortly after their marriage, in 1947. When Rhys saw Vaz Dias’s ad, she was living alone near Maidstone Prison, in Kent, England, where Hamer was incarcerated. Rhys had been in jail for drunk and disorderly behavior several times herself. A local paper had recently run a headline about one of these run-ins with the law: MRS. HAMER AGITATED, ONLY HAD ALGERIAN WINE. When Vaz Dias wrote an article about “finding” Rhys, she framed the fifteen years Rhys had been lost to the world as an open mystery: “But who was JEAN RHYS and WHERE WAS SHE?”

  Where was she? Mainly, she’d been somewhere drinking. Her days played the same tracks on repeat. Even her biographer got tired of it. “Jean’s life,” wrote Carole Angier, “really did seem to be the same few scenes re-enacted over and over.” The drinking made Rhys plump, or else it made her scribble phrases on the wall: “Magna est veritas et praevalet,” she scrawled in lipstick. “Truth is great and it prevails.”

  After Hamer was released from prison, he and Rhys moved into a Cornwall summer cottage in the middle of winter, where she made a sign telling people to go away: “NO teas—NO water—NO lavatory. No matches. No cigarettes. No teas. No sandwiches. No water. Don’t know where anybody lives. Don’t know anything. Now Bugger Off.” They eventually moved to a dilapidated cottage in a little village called Cheriton Fitzpaine, where the roof leaked and the walls were full of mice and the villagers thought Rhys was a witch because she once threw broken bottles at a fence in the middle of the night.

  During the years of her “disappearance,” Rhys also began working on the book that would eventually make her famous. It was a novel about the madwoman in the attic from Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre—an attempt to reclaim this woman from her villainy and her insanity, to write her backstory as a woman exiled from her Caribbean homeland and wronged by a man. Nothing like Rhys at all.

  “I’m struggling with a new thing,” she wrote a friend. “What a tiresome creature I was, or still am. But if I can do this book, it won’t matter so much will it?”

  The first spring of my sobriety, I got a month off work at the bakery so I could go to a place called Yaddo—a swanky writing residency in upstate New York. Half of me imagined this month as a creative whirlwind that could justify the dreary trudge of my sobriety, but the other half of me imagined it would be the perfect place to start drinking again: among strangers, far from anyone I’d ever told I was an alcoholic. I’d heard Yaddo described as a messy swirl of debauchery—infidelities and drunken rambles through the woods—and imagined slurred recitations of “The Raven” in a g
lossy wood-paneled library that would feel like the inside of a walnut shell, with tasseled brocade curtains and gleaming booze trolleys. “I am drunk every morning, almost, at Yaddo,” Patricia Highsmith had written. “I am the God-intoxicated, the material-intoxicated, the art-intoxicated, yes.”

  Sobriety had disappointed me in almost every way I could imagine: It hadn’t repaired my relationship with Dave. It made me feel drained and shy. It made my writing lifeless and effortful. I thought of it this way—as if I were a victim of my own life, as if sobriety were a snake oil salesman who’d made promises he hadn’t kept. He had taken away the main thing I looked forward to when I woke up in the morning. He had launched me into a series of tiring days cloaked by a gray scrim that only my antidepressant seemed partially able to lift. Now that the grayness had given way enough to see around its edges, I was telling myself the drinking didn’t have to be so dark.

  There hadn’t ever been a moment when I decided to stop going to meetings. It was more like I’d peeled away, a bit guiltily, surrendered to not-feeling-like-it for many days in a row, until I hadn’t gone for several months. And without meetings, sobriety had turned into a weight I was carrying around for no reason at all.

  Much of my train ride to Yaddo was spent deciding whether or not I should start drinking there. Eventually, I decided it would look too sneaky. If I was going to convince everyone in my life that it was okay for me to drink again, it wouldn’t look good if I started on the sly. But I didn’t want to tell anyone at Yaddo I was sober, either, because I was pretty sure I was going to drink again, sometime soon, and the fewer people to whom I’d introduced myself as alcoholic, the better. So I told people I was celebrating Lent late this year, after Easter, and I was giving up booze. I wasn’t like sober or anything. People looked at me in confusion. “Okay, that’s great.” A few people asked, “Why didn’t you do it during Lent?”