When I first got into AA, I had been told to choose a sponsor who “had what I wanted.” I sensed this didn’t mean a Pulitzer Prize. I eventually chose Stacy not because she reminded me of myself, but because she didn’t. She moved through the world with assurance—helpful without seeming righteous, humble without excess apology. It felt viscerally good to be around her ease, like silk against the skin. She was not ashamed to confess the size of her love for her Pomeranian. We shared a sense of humor, both laughed at the part of Bill’s story in the Big Book where he said he’d never been unfaithful while he was drinking, out of “loyalty to my wife, helped at times by extreme drunkenness.” We liked that he confessed the less-than-noble reason, too.
Stacy and I had worked together before my relapse, and when I decided to get sober again, she and her fiancé had taken me to my first meeting back. “Thank you for giving me another chance,” I’d gushed, thinking it was all about our connection.
“Of course,” she’d said. “That’s how the program works.”
When it came to my Fourth Step, I was anxious about the format of the list—a spreadsheet with extremely narrow columns—because I wasn’t sure how I’d tell the full story of each item I was listing. “Some of my situations are pretty complicated,” I explained.
“So are everyone’s,” my sponsor said. “I’m sure you’ll manage.”
The Fourth Step was supposed to include all my “harms and resentments,” but I asked Stacy if I was supposed to list people I resented, even if I hadn’t caused them any harm. She smiled. I was clearly not the first alcoholic who had asked this question. “Anyone who gives you a knot in your gut,” she said. The chart had a column asking me to link each of my resentments to a motivating fear—fear of conflict, fear of abandonment—and I filled it out dutifully, always a model student. (Fear of inadequacy.) I hadn’t done an inventory during my first sobriety, and it was part of my attempt to do things differently this time around. The inventory wasn’t about asking for absolution for my sins; it was about bringing discomfort into the light, all the toxic grudges that might make me want to drink again. Listing them was like emptying a cluttered drawer.
When I looked back at what my drinking had been, I saw someone hurling herself at the world—asking it to give her back to herself with some edges. I saw myself standing in a man’s doorway, my body thrilling with coke and already smarting with disappointment, practically begging him to kiss me. My sister-in-law had once asked me, “Would you rather have no bones or no skin?” and at first it made me picture a creature without bones, a shapeless dough-blob of flesh; and then a creature without skin, a taut sculpture of glistening nerves and muscles. How would you describe the creature without either? Just totally fucked? Sometimes I suspected I had no structure; at other times, no boundaries. I looked back at the girl in the doorway, waiting to be kissed, and wanted to clap a hand over her mouth—to shake the coke from her nose and drain the vodka from her stomach, to say: Don’t say that, don’t drink that, don’t need that. Except I couldn’t, because she did—say that, drink that, need that.
She wasn’t the only one with needs. This was part of my inventory, too, accepting that I wasn’t the only victim of my insecurities. In the chart called “Sexual History Inventory,” the most telling column was this one: “Whom did I hurt?” It wasn’t just telling because it was full of names, but because most of them were followed by question marks. I’d rarely paid enough attention to know whether I’d hurt them or not. My insecurity had convinced me I didn’t have the power to hurt anyone.
By the time I was ready to go over my chart with Stacy—this was the Fifth Step, talking about the Fourth Step inventory with someone else—I was in the recent aftermath of another surgery, a procedure to fix residual damage in my nose from the time I’d been punched. I’d shared about the surgery in a meeting, hoping for sympathy, but the main thing I got was: “Be careful with your painkillers.” It turned out to be good advice. I was surprised by how much I looked forward to the drugs that would knock me out, and the ones I’d get afterward; by how obsessively I’d imagined the possibility of laughing gas or Valium. It was like a surge through my belly, this anticipation—unbidden and unexpected. In meetings, people sometimes said: Your disease is always waiting for you outside. It’s out there doing push-ups. I pictured alcoholism as a small man with a mustache and a wifebeater.
It turns out I didn’t even get the pre-op stuff I’d been hoping for, nitrous oxide or Valium. All my anesthesia did for me was make me vomit after the surgery into a bucket Dave held beside me. He’d been there for me—over and over again—and in sobriety it was getting easier to see that; easier to tell him I was grateful for that tenderness.
The night before I was supposed to do my Fifth Step, my face was still bandaged. I hadn’t taken any Vicodin, too scared of how much I wanted to take them all—or at least enough to make the whole world swim. I was on a zero-salt diet to bring down my swelling, subsisting largely on a mixture of Cheerios, walnuts, and dried cherries, like a vain little squirrel. I texted Stacy suggesting that maybe we should postpone our session for a few weeks.
“Are you physically able to speak?” she asked.
I told her I was.
“Then let’s do it,” she said.
So the next day we sat across from each other at my kitchen table. I put out a little bowl of Cheerios and cranberries. I poured us glasses of water. My chart lay on the table between us, its boxes reductive and true. It felt useful to look at my regrets in terms of fear rather than selfishness. Perhaps it was just a question of seeing how often selfishness, mine and everyone’s, was motivated by fear.
I started explaining the first situation on my inventory, in all of its nuance and complexity, its layers of guilt and shame and—
“Just the short version,” she said. “Keep it simple.”
Through the course of his attempts to stay sober, Berryman took many personal inventories:
What has bothered me most about myself all my life?
Whether I would be a great poet or not.
What bothers me most about myself at the present time?
Poverty of love for others.
What bothers me most about myself in relation to the future?
Whether I can overcome this.
No surprise, perhaps, that Berryman’s final book of poetry was called Love & Fame. During the last four years of his life, he went to rehab four times, detoxed at hospitals, went to countless meetings, and even chaired one at a local prison, inviting the prisoners to have dinner at his house when they got out. (One took him up on it.) He read piles of AA literature. He filled out charts and checklists. Every one of his monthly inventories from Hazelden was full of check marks and x’s. He put little crosses next to “Self-Importance,” “Dishonesty,” and “False Pride.” Next to “Resentment,” he wrote: Hurts oneself. Always for the unchangeable. He underlined the “Immoral” in “Immoral Thinking.” He was immersed in the so-called Minnesota Model (what we now call rehab) in the heart of Minnesota, residential treatment in the land of ten thousand treatment centers.
The AA First Step that Berryman completed the first time he first arrived at St. Mary’s Hospital in Minneapolis gives a sense of the wasteland his drinking had become:
Wife left me after 11 yrs of marriage bec. of drinking. Despair, heavy drinking alone, jobless, penniless.… Seduced students drunk.… My chairman told me I had called up a student drunk at midnight & threatened to kill her.… Drunk in Calcutta, wandered streets lost all night, unable to remember my address.… Many alibis for drinking… Severe memory-loss, memory distortions. DT’s once in Abbott, lasted hours. Quart of whisky a day for months in Dublin working hard on a long poem.… Wife hiding bottles, myself hiding bottles. Wet bed drunk in London hotel, manager furious, had to pay for new mattress. Lectured too weak to stand, had to sit. Lectured badly prepared.… Defecated uncontrollably in a University corridor, got home unnoticed.… My wife said St. Mary’s or else. Came here
.
There’s a palpable heartbreak not only in the devastation of Berryman’s drinking, but in his surprising regrets—not just shitting in a hallway but also lecturing badly prepared. He was preparing better for recovery. Hence the piles of reading, the dutiful charts. In one Fourth Step, he made a list of his “Responsibilities”:
(a) to God: Daily practice, submission of will, gratitude (I agree it’s one of my few life-long virtues), well-wishing others
(b) To Myself: determine what I want (life, art); seek help.… never deceive myself. Look for the wonder + beauty.
(c) To my family: cherish them. They look to me for love, guidance
(d) To my work: “above all seek balance”
“Personal acclaim is the alcoholic’s poison”
(e) to AA: “to God and AA I owe my deliverance”
At the bottom of the list, he wrote instructions to himself: “Be careful how you live. You may be the only copy of the Big Book other people ever read.” When Berryman started to consider writing a novel about recovery, he imagined a book that would function not as great literature but as a Twelfth Step—We tried to carry this message to alcoholics—bringing recovery to those who hadn’t found it yet. He scribbled ideas for what this book might become: “make a book of these notes—useful 12th step work—probably hardly worked up at all, only expanded and glossed, with some background… on Hazelden and St Mary’s last spring.”
This wasn’t another lyric dream song. It was something else, hardly worked up at all, not meant to be beautiful but useful. In considering his book “useful 12th step work,” Berryman was following the desire he’d articulated on his inventories: to replace the ambition to be “a great poet” with a creative life committed to “love for others.” He thought of calling the novel Korsakov’s Syndrome on the Grave but found he preferred I Am an Alcoholic. (“Like better,” he wrote next to this simpler title.) Eventually he just called the book Recovery. He wanted to donate the profits: “Give half my royalties to—who? Not AA—they won’t take it, perhaps just lend it privately to AA’s in despair.”
Berryman kept his notes in a beige notebook labeled RECOVERY NOTEBOOK, stained with coffee. His life no longer ran on whiskey and ink but on caffeine and graphite, less godly fuels. He wanted Recovery to constitute an act of gratitude. In an early draft he imagined his dedication:
This summary & deluded account of the beginning of my recovery is devoted to the men & women responsible for it (the founders of Alcoholics Anonymous, physicians, psychiatrists, counselors, clergymen, psychologists, transactional analysts, [group leaders, inserted], nurses, orderlies, in-patients, out-patients, members of AA) and to its primary divine Author.
In the spring of 1971, less than a year before his death, Berryman taught a course at the University of Minnesota called The Post-Novel: Fiction as Wisdom-Work. This was what he was attempting in Recovery, as well: something like wisdom-work.
Though Jean Rhys was never in recovery, she once wrote an imagined courtroom scene—called “The Trial of Jean Rhys,” scribbled in spidery script in a plain brown notebook—that looks remarkably like the “fearless moral inventory” of an AA Fourth Step. After the Prosecution lists the major themes of her work (“Good, evil, love, hate, life, death, beauty, ugliness”) and asks Rhys if they apply to everyone, she replies: “I do not know everyone. I only know myself.”
When the Prosecution persists, “And others?” she confesses: “I do not know others. I see them as trees walking.”
That’s when the Prosecution pounces: “There you are! Didn’t take long, did it?”
Part of Rhys’s torment was that her self-absorption wasn’t complete enough to make her unaware of its effect on others. But in the trial, confessing her solipsism doesn’t count as repentance; it just confirms her guilt. The Prosecution continues its line of questioning:
Did you in your youth have a great love and pity for others? Especially for the poor and unfortunate?
Yes.
Were you able to show this?
I think I could not always. I was very clumsy. No one told me.
Excuse of course! (Prosecution shouts.)
It is untrue that you are cold and withdrawn?
It is not true.
Did you make great efforts to, shall we say, establish contacts with other people? I mean friendships, love affairs, so on?
Yes. Not friendships very much.
Did you succeed?
Sometimes. For a time.
It didn’t last?
No.
Whose fault was that?
Mine I suppose.
You suppose?
Silence.
Better answer.
I am tired. I learnt everything too late.
Rhys’s trial echoes Berryman’s inventories: What bothers me most about myself at the present time? Poverty of love for others. Even when Rhys articulates some faith in human possibility (“I believe that sometimes human beings can be more than themselves”) the Prosecution still objects: “Come come, this is very bad. Can’t you do better than that?”
After that exchange, the trial transcript just reads: “Silence.” Objection sustained. But Rhys did believe there was a way she could surrender herself to something larger than her claustrophobic sadness: “If I stop writing,” she told the court, “my life will have been an abject failure… I will not have earned death.”
The fantasy that brilliant writing might redeem a flawed life—If I can do this book, it won’t matter so much will it?—didn’t belong solely to Rhys. When Carver was brought to court in 1976—accused of collecting unemployment while he was employed—his first wife, Maryann, showed the court his first collection of stories as a defense on his behalf, presenting the brilliance of his work as an excuse for the disappointments and deceptions of his life.
Perhaps it’s not enough. For the critic A. Alvarez, Rhys’s “monstrous” life made a “powerful argument against biography itself.” The effect of Rhys’s first published biography was “to make the reader doubt if any book, however original, however perfect, could be worth the price Rhys and those close to her paid.”
Neither of Rhys’s biographies made me want to spend a long weekend with her, but I’m not interested in the question of whether her work is “worth the price,” to us or to anyone, because it was never our choice to make. Her life was. The work is. We can’t trade either back. There’s no objective metric for how much brilliance might be required to redeem a lifetime of damage—and no ratio that justifies the conversion. Whatever beauty comes from pain can’t usually be traded back for happiness. Rhys kept hoping anyway, not for relief but for the possibility of an assuaging beauty—that by voicing her thirst well enough, she could redeem the damage it had caused.
When Berryman scrawled down a daily plan for writing Recovery, he was also outlining the healthier life he imagined the novel ushering him into:
Write 8 or 9–1 pm in study (aim at 2 pp a day, with next sentences drafted)
Walk! Drive!
Libr[ary]: Immunology, Alcoholism—journals!
Exercise + yoga
24 hr. book [AA lit]
1 or 2 short biog’s—esp famous alcoholics: Poe!! H. Crane.
His notes betray a tone of self-exhortation—Walk! Drive!—and willed excitement: Journals! He wanted to do his homework. He wanted to do yoga. He wanted to ground himself in a tradition of other drunk writers: Poe!! His exclamation points hold a certain heartbreak: Walk! Drive! He wanted to believe in rituals and intention. He wanted to believe in showing up for a life you’d chosen.
In his novel Kentucky Ham, Billy Burroughs Jr. wrote about working on a fishing trawler after his time at the Narco Farm. “We worked like I never did at Lexington,” he wrote. And he liked it. For him, work was the opposite of addiction: “You know what work does? It provides a constant. It structures time… I realize that a fix has to get done also and no two ways about it, but a fix goes in. To FIX. To adjust, to focus. But what I’m talking abou
t goes out and in a choosy way rearranges reality.”
For me, too, the drinking was always about taking something in, drinking something down—solace from the outside that could, for a time, be misunderstood as strength. And if the drinking had gone in, the work went out, just as Burroughs had said. As I got drunk and got sober, I liked that my bakery shifts stayed constant. It was always the same drill: Show up at seven. Work my production list. It was always: Pick up the pace on those squirrels. The routines of the bakery worked like another ritual, like the comforting structure of meetings—another shape I didn’t have to invent, a way of being useful. We marked the seasons with hundreds of cookies each week: frogs with tiny love letters for Valentine’s Day; ice cream cones for summer and glittery swirled leaves for autumn; snowmen in December with tiny orange triangles for noses. It was ridiculous, maybe, but they gave me a way to say, I did that—brought some small, undeniable pleasure to another person.
The camaraderie of the kitchen was surprising and often humbling. One of our bakers made a light saber from frozen cinnamon buns, and ate green bell peppers for lunch—cradling each one in his palm, whole and crunchy like an apple. Another one liked to tease me about my general ineptness, so on his days off, just to irritate him, I texted him photos of the doughnuts I’d made in our miniature deep-fry, which looked like giant mutant shrimps, captioned “Quality Control.” For a Planned Parenthood fund-raiser, I made a cake with thirty circular cookies stuck around the top like birth control pills. I was trying to adjust, to focus.
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