The Recovering

by Leslie Jamison

  That first winter of my second sobriety, I got my first down jacket. For years I’d felt personally persecuted by winter—a martyr to its bitter chill, my numbness epic and inevitable, the air little more than an external companion to my interior weather. But as it turned out, wearing a good jacket made you less cold.

  For Valentine’s Day, Dave and I drove north to Dubuque, an old river-money town perched on bluffs over the Mississippi. We played roulette at the riverboat casino and marveled at an octopus at the aquarium—swirling its legs like scarves in the water, purple and pearl-white, its suckers making little moons wherever it squished them against the glass. Dave was someone who could get excited about an octopus, or a dilapidated boomtown, and the fact that he could bring out that sense of wonder in me made me want to give it back to him. That was part of why I’d planned the weekend in Dubuque, though it was bittersweet, everything delicate. We were careful with each other.

  Not long before the trip, while I was cleaning our apartment, I’d found a messy pile of notes stacked on Dave’s dresser—all the apologies I’d written, all the mornings after we’d fought—each one acknowledging how many had come before it. A few days later, I’d asked if he was interested in coming to a meeting, something I hadn’t done the first time around. I wanted to invite him into this new version of my life, rather than blaming him for not already being in it with me.

  When he came, he was eloquent and thoughtful—moved by the things other people said. Three elderly women came up to me afterward and said, “He’s so charming.” It was like the time we’d gone to see a couples therapist, a middle-aged woman who ran sessions from her house in the suburbs and leaned over when Dave went to the bathroom: “Well, he’s certainly charming.” My face must have looked shocked, because she quickly said: “But I can imagine he’s a real Jekyll and Hyde.”

  In Dubuque, we went to a Bavarian pub for dinner and ordered head cheese and goulash. There were approximately three hundred thousand beers on tap. I was desperately determined to enjoy the head cheese. Maybe I wasn’t drinking beer but I was trying something new. At a certain point the bar broke into song. Strangers belted out drinking anthems in German, though the message was clear enough across the language gap: Drinking is awesome and more drinking is more awesome and most drinking is most—The head cheese was disgusting.

  Dave and I went back to our bed-and-breakfast full of decorative plates and watched Dune on VHS—watched the fat man fly around with his little jets, deformed and degraded by the spice, his drug, totally slave to it. We curled up under our quilt and I thought, Maybe this can be saved.

  —

  X —

  HUMBLING

  Everyone shared at meetings, but “telling your story” meant speaking in a more structured way—what it was like, what happened, what it’s like now—usually at the beginning of the meeting, for anywhere from ten to thirty minutes. People had different philosophies about how to approach it. “I’m not going to give you my drunkalog, because all our drunkalogs are the same,” some people said, and launched straight into sobriety. But I loved drunkalogs. I couldn’t get enough of them. They were like getting dessert before dinner. Sure, they were all the same. But they were all different, too—insofar as every particular life manifested and disrupted the common themes in its own way. Drunkalogs were also useful because they reminded me of certain absences it was easy to take for granted after they’d been absent for a while: not waking up early with a hangover, or not thinking about booze every minute, every hour, every day; a type of progress that depended on not being aware of it.

  The first time I spoke—the time I got heckled by an old-timer, This is boring!—it was in the basement of a school, a gym with gleaming hardwood floors and bleachers pushed into the walls and a wooden stage where we laid out grocery-store cookies in their plastic trays next to a tarnished silver coffeemaker. For the Monday speaker meeting, the folding chairs were laid out in rows, probably forty of them, with an aisle down the center—like a literary reading, or a wedding. The night I had agreed to speak I wore a shiny black shirt that wouldn’t show the sweat under my armpits.

  Fifteen minutes before the meeting began, there were only a scattering of people—mostly people I knew, friendly faces: the therapist who was in the midst of a divorce, the man whose infant daughter had died six years earlier. But the crowd was sparse, and I began to worry it was because word had gotten out that I was speaking. This was typical thinking: imagining the world as a conspiracy of forces directing their attention toward me, when it was more likely people were just picking up their dry cleaning, or watching the Bachelor episode they’d been looking forward to all week.

  When more people started arriving, I realized I’d also been relieved at the low turnout, and immediately started to imagine how everyone who’d shown up might be disappointed by what I said. Before the meeting began, I poured a scalding cup of coffee and grabbed a brittle chocolate chip cookie, took one bite and then put it down in front of me—on the folding table I sat behind, facing the crowd, beside the meeting’s chairperson, a woman I trusted. She had short-cropped gray hair and a teenage daughter, and she spoke with matter-of-fact warmth. She was honest about her mistakes but not exhausting in her regret.

  My half-eaten cookie stared up at me as I told my story, which ended up focusing less on narrative drama and more on things I was surprised to find myself talking about: waking in the middle of the night worried about my meds, with a racing heart like a bird trapped in the cage of my ribs; and finding that stack of apologies on Dave’s dresser.

  It was right about then, just when I’d just started to feel pretty righteous about moving away from narrative interest and toward emotional candor, that the man in the wheelchair started shouting, “This is boring!” After he started shouting, I started unraveling—heat in my eyes, swell in my throat, voice starting to crack open—and struggled to finish the thought I was articulating about prayer. “It’s like picking up a heavy box,” I said. “I mean, prayer is like putting down the heavy box, but then I kept trying to pick it up again.” I started crying fully. Again, the man yelled: “This is boring!”

  He wasn’t a bad person. He was just losing his grip on whatever part of us keeps us from shouting at strangers. And maybe, also, he was bored. I wiped my eyes with the back of my hand. What was my other thing I had to say about prayer? I had another thing to say about prayer. Multiple women in the audience reached for tissues in their purses. After the meeting, one of them came up to me immediately. “It was so moving to see you cry,” she said, “when you started talking about prayer.”

  Then another woman, the chair of the meeting, put her hand on my arm and said: “You just told my story. Thank you.”

  Malcolm Lowry’s greatest nightmare was being accused of telling someone else’s story. That’s why he was so outraged by the success of Jackson’s Lost Weekend, and by its publication in the first place—by the idea that someone else had told his story before he’d been able to tell it. Years later, in his unfinished final novel, Dark As the Grave Wherein My Friend Is Laid, Lowry offered a thinly fictionalized account of his own anger: a scene in which a novelist named Sigbjørn Wilderness discovers that his alcoholic magnum opus has been scooped by a terrible book called Drunkard’s Rigadoon. “It’s purely a clinical study,” Sigbjørn’s wife assures him, “it’s only a small part of yours.” But Sigbjørn is crushed. If his alcoholism hasn’t helped him produce an original masterpiece, what good has it been? He was sure he’d been “achieving something that was unique,” but instead is told—by his agent and several publishers—that his book is “merely a copy.”

  When a dismissive 1947 review in Harper’s magazine accused Under the Volcano of being “a long regurgitation [that] can only be recommended as an anthology held together by earnestness,” little more than a patchwork “imitating the tricks” of better authors, Lowry defended himself in a passionate letter to the editor. Though critic Jacques Barzun had given the novel only a paragraph i
n his review, saying its characters were “desperately dull even when sober” (This is boring!), Lowry’s rebuttal was twenty-two (indignant) paragraphs long. It closed with a postscript suggesting which line Lowry truly couldn’t forgive: “PS: Anthology held together by earnestness—brrrrrr!” It’s as if the charge of redundancy was so grave that it had banished Lowry to the cold, a merciless literary exile.

  But an anthology held together by earnestness? It’s one of the most apt descriptions of a recovery meeting—its particular beauty—that I’ve ever heard.

  More than thirty years after he wrote The Shining, and twenty years after he got sober, Stephen King started to wonder whether a more fulfilling sobriety might have been possible for Jack Torrance, the dry-drunk writer who blew up the Overlook Hotel. “What would have happened to Danny’s troubled father,” King asked himself, “if he had found Alcoholics Anonymous?”

  King’s 2013 novel, Doctor Sleep, was an attempt to answer this question. The plot follows Jack’s son, Danny—now grown up into a drunk like his dad, but finally clean and sober—as he fights an anonymous collective called the True Knot, a band of RV-dwelling supernatural monsters who chant in circles before they “drink pain” harvested from their unfortunate victims. The True Knot looks like a sinister version of AA, a fellowship of suffering where pain has become—quite literally—a form of sustenance. The novel’s climax, however, is not Danny’s triumph over the True Knot but a scene directly afterward, when Danny finally confesses his true “bottom” to an AA group at his fifteenth sobriety anniversary. He describes the morning he woke up in bed with a coked-up single mom and stole money from her wallet while her diapered son reached for a pile of leftover coke on the coffee table, thinking it was candy. (Leftover coke? The addict in me was dismayed. But the shame was familiar.)

  After Danny confesses his terrible truth, the moment of honesty that the whole book has been building toward, he gets… very little in response: “The women in the doorway had gone back to the kitchen. Some of the people were looking at their watches. A stomach grumbled. Looking at the assembled nine dozen alkies, Dan realized an astounding thing: what he’d done didn’t revolt them. It didn’t even surprise them. They had heard worse.” The narrative doesn’t just insist on the moment as anticlimactic; it insists that this anticlimax has still been meaningful.

  As it turned out, my own sobriety held the same double moral as a second-act Stephen King novel: You’ve spoken your truth, and now everyone is making a beeline for your sober-birthday cake. Your story is probably pretty ordinary. This doesn’t mean it can’t be useful.

  When I finally read the manuscript of Charles Jackson’s unfinished novel What Happened—the pages he had written under the influence of recovery, unpublished in his archives—I brought so much desire with me. It was like the desire poet Eavan Boland confesses when she asks for poems with women in them who aren’t beautiful or young: “I want a poem I can grow old in. I want a poem I can die in.” I wanted a story I could get sober in.

  This made it disappointing to confront the manuscript of What Happened, which offered a tedious, convoluted narrative I found difficult to keep reading. “I can only write the human, meanderingly,” Jackson had written to a friend, confessing his fears about his long-awaited epic, and I started to understand what he’d meant. I’d been glued to The Lost Weekend, unable to put it down, and I wanted What Happened to be like that—only better! about functionality!—but it wasn’t. Mostly, it was hopelessly abstract:

  What life means, it came to him (or he seemed to overhear it), it means all the time, not just at isolated dramatic moments that never happened. If life means anything at all, it means whatever it means every hour, every minute, through any episode big or small, if only one has the awareness to sense it… each step, the dramatic and the humdrum alike—every fleeting second of the way.

  The thing was, I actually agreed with what Jackson was saying. I’d come to believe that life happened every hour, every minute; that it wasn’t made of dramatic climaxes so much as quiet effort and continuous presence. But I could also see how Jackson’s desperate desire to deploy his recovery wisdom had crippled his story. His own words about the book now played back to me like an omen: “with scarcely any ‘plot’ but much character… I’m proud to be so objective and detached, finally.”

  The manuscript bore out some of my worst fears about sobriety: that it was destined to force you into a state of plotless abstraction, a string of empty evenings, a life lit by the sallow fluorescence of church-basement bromides rather than the glow of dive-bar neon signs. The reckless readability of The Lost Weekend—the momentum of Don’s escapades, and the roaring engine of his thirst—had been replaced by stasis.

  If Jackson was afraid he would only ever be known for The Lost Weekend, then Lowry carried a similar fear that he would never write anything as good as Under the Volcano. (Even his fears were unoriginal.) But after several rounds of brutal “aversion therapy” to treat his alcoholism in the mid-1950s, Lowry embarked on a major round of edits on the book he hoped might someday surpass his alcoholic magnum opus. October Ferry to Gabriola was a novel about the happiest years of his marriage, spent in a squatter’s shack north of Vancouver. In critic D. T. Max’s account, Lowry wrote furiously in the aftermath of his aversion therapy—new pages that examined “what he called the ‘alcoholocaust’ of his life, and the way that drinking had affected his art.” Lowry took apology letters he’d written to his wife, Margerie, over the years and pasted them directly into the draft. He was trying to fill the book with the texture of his regret, to make it not just a transcript of harm but also the process of reckoning. This kind of salvage made me imagine crafting a book from my own apology notes.

  The response from others was a bit less enthusiastic. Lowry’s editor at Random House canceled his contract for the book because the manuscript sent to him was “just about as tedious as anything I’d ever read.” After Lowry’s death, Margerie added her own comments to the manuscript. “Rambling notes,” she wrote. “Seems like a dissertation on alcohol. Nothing useful here.”

  When I read the manuscript of Jackson’s What Happened, I grasped at its meager glimmers of plot: “He had the impulse to pull the car over to the side of the road and give himself up to introspection, a kind of self-inventory.… Leaving nothing out.” Okay, he’s in a car, I thought. But where was he going? Would something finally happen there? I perked up at the mention of an inventory, like the AA Fourth Step, because maybe that meant I would get to read about how Don had fucked up. But then I felt guilty for wanting the train wreck. I was supposed to be rooting for the underdog story—the story of sobriety—but instead my own lapsed attention was just proof that this story would never be as interesting as the story of getting drunk. It was like sitting at a meeting and hoping the drunkalog would never stop, thinking yeah yeah yeah at the part about a newfound connection to a Higher Power. I didn’t want to think yeah yeah yeah about sobriety, didn’t want my eyes glazing over at its even-keeled horizon line. I was afraid that loving the drunk story best meant some part of me still wanted to keep living it. And of course, some part of me did.

  During those first few months after I quit drinking the second time, sobriety often felt like gripping onto monkey bars with sweaty metallic palms, just praying I didn’t fall. When an arts cooperative in a small Iowa farm town offered me a week in their workshop—a converted tofu factory in the middle of soybean fields, offered as barter payment for judging a student contest—I spent my days trying not to think about the kitchen counter in the nearby farmhouse where I was staying, and the bottles of red wine someone had left there. I asked Dave if he wanted to drive over from Iowa City and stay with me, share the tofu factory, but he said he was behind on a deadline (he was often behind on a deadline) and needed to stay at home.

  Once he said he wasn’t coming, it became even harder to stop fantasizing about drinking. It would be so easy to get drunk out in these ghostly soybean fields, all alone—to sink in
to that blooming warmth and not tell anyone. So I tried to distract myself. Because I was afraid to go back to my farmhouse at night, to those three bottles I could picture so clearly, I stayed up till three in the morning trying to work in the converted tofu factory. It was barely converted to anything—still full of broken machinery, tackle boxes, and rusty metal lockers, with loose screws rolling down the concrete loading dock. The worst night, I sat at my big slab of a desk until five in the morning and watched a BBC miniseries about just-industrialized nineteenth-century Manchester, snow falling on mill strikes, and then started rewatching it, and then watched the “Making Of” special about it—all so I wouldn’t have to go back to the farmhouse and reckon with those bottles of wine.

  The next morning, I looked online for a list of meetings in town. At noon I showed up at the address I’d found: a brick church with a stained glass window that looked dull in the sunlight. The front door was locked. But when I circled around to the back, where two bikers in full leather were standing with a white-haired woman in a mint-green pantsuit, I knew I’d come to the right place. It was just the four of us, until a woman in sweatpants showed up, a single mother who lived on a farm nearby with her son. It was only her second meeting, she said.

  One of the bikers, smiling, said, “The journey begins.”

  “I hope so,” she said. “I can’t even imagine tomorrow.”

  It turned out the back door was locked and the person with the key hadn’t come, so I thought maybe we’d all go our separate ways, but no—we all went to a gazebo in the park instead, and sat in the dappled sunshine on splintered wooden benches.