The woman in the pantsuit was a local librarian, and the bikers were just passing through. The single mother was ten days sober and totally falling apart. Her son had seen her crying two days in a row. Their llama was going through puberty and acting like a little shit. When it was my turn to speak, I told everyone about rewatching the BBC miniseries just to keep myself from drinking, and one of the bikers—a huge man with a snake tattooed around his neck—nodded so vigorously I was sure he’d say he’d seen that miniseries too. He hadn’t. But he knew what it was like when craving tugged you like a puppet. He told us about his first drink, and when he paused to describe the smell of that bourbon, he spoke straight to my gut, straight to those terrifying bottles in the farmhouse pantry. It wasn’t his words so much as his pause, how it held him for a moment, the memory of that bourbon smell—how it stopped him in his speech.
A few days later, I met the single mother for coffee. She brought me bratwurst made from her goats, and I told her I didn’t know what it was like to be a single mother, or any kind of mother—but I did know about crying every day, and I also knew that the ninetieth day of my sobriety had been pretty different from the tenth one.
The second time I got sober, I started praying with a sense of purpose. It was impossible to picture the clear outline of any god, but praying regularly was a way to separate my second sobriety from my first one. Back then I’d only prayed haphazardly—when I wanted something, basically. This time around, I understood arranging my body into a certain position twice a day as a way to articulate commitment rather than a bodily lie, a false pretense. I prayed in the bathroom—by the toilet, under the dirty skylight over our shower—where Dave wouldn’t see me. He wasn’t judgmental; I was just embarrassed. It was easier to be alone with my fumbling faith, and it felt good to kneel on the bathroom floor for different reasons than I’d knelt on them before: not throwing up or getting ready to throw up, but closing my eyes and asking to be useful. I’d been told to pray for people I resented, so I prayed for Dave and for every girl he’d ever flirted with, for every man I’d ever hated for not wanting me. I even liked the physical residue of these morning prayers, the tangled red pattern on my knees from the bath mat we didn’t clean enough.
When I was younger, I’d gone—reluctantly—to a regal Episcopal church in Inglewood. My mother had started going to church after she and my father divorced, and she’d asked me to come with her. The church was stunning, with massive copper lanterns hanging from the wooden beams, and jeweled light stilled by the stained glass windows on Sunday mornings: angels with red-tipped fiery wings. The golden altar held a pale statue of Jesus with a sculpted triangular beard and ruthlessly serene eyes, his finger raised as if he were just about to say something. But what? Going to church meant feeling something just out of reach—a sense of connection to this pale man, or the sermon, or the songs—the ecstatic faith that seemed to swell inside everyone else. I wasn’t sure I believed in God, so wouldn’t it be lying if I prayed to him? The premise of the miracle at the heart of everything, that impossible resurrection, made me feel miserly with disbelief, like my heart was a locked storefront shuttered against sublimity. I was shy and uncomfortable in my own body, kneecaps bruised by wooden kneelers, afraid of the vulnerabilities of belief—afraid to find anything too beautiful, or fall for it.
Because I wasn’t baptized, I couldn’t take Communion, so I either sat alone in my pew while everyone else walked up to the altar, or else I went forward and knelt on the velvet cushion, arms crossed over my chest, while the priest placed his palm on my head and said: “I bless you in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.” But I didn’t believe in any of them, and it seemed dishonest to take a blessing in their name. The more you had to make yourself believe, I was sure, the more false your belief was.
Years later, recovery turned this notion upside down—it made me start to believe that I could do things until I believed in them, that intentionality was just as authentic as unwilled desire. Action could coax belief rather than testifying to it. “I used to think you had to believe to pray,” David Foster Wallace once heard at a meeting. “Now I know I had it ass-backwards.” For a long time, I’d believed that sincerity was all about actions lining up with belief: knowing myself and acting accordingly. But when it came to drinking, I’d parsed my motivations in a thousand sincere conversations—with friends, with therapists, with my mother, with my boyfriends—and all my self- understanding hadn’t granted me any release from compulsion.
This ruptured syllogism—If I understand myself, I’ll get better—made me question the way I’d come to worship self-awareness itself, a brand of secular humanism: Know thyself, and act accordingly. What if you reversed this? Act, and know thyself differently. Showing up for a meeting, for a ritual, for a conversation—this was an act that could be true no matter what you felt as you were doing it. Doing something without knowing if you believed it—that was proof of sincerity, rather than its absence.
I didn’t know what I believed, and prayed anyway. I called my sponsor even when I didn’t want to, showed up to meetings even when I didn’t want to. I sat in the circle and held hands with everyone, opened myself to clichés I felt ashamed to be described by, got down on my knees to pray even though I wasn’t sure what I was praying to, only what I was praying for: don’t drink, don’t drink, don’t drink. The desire to believe that there was something out there, something that wasn’t me, that could make not-drinking seem like anything other than punishment—this desire was strong enough to dissolve the rigid border I’d drawn between faith and its absence. When I looked back on my early days in church, I started to realize how silly it had been to think that I’d had a monopoly on doubt, or that wanting faith was so categorically different from having it.
When people in the program talked about a Higher Power, they sometimes simply said “H.P.,” which seemed expansive and open, a pair of letters you could fill with whatever you needed: the sky, other people in meetings, an old woman who wore loose flowing skirts like my grandmother had worn. Whatever it was, I needed to believe in something stronger than my willpower. This willpower was a fine-tuned machine, fierce and humming, and it had done plenty of things—gotten me straight A’s, gotten my papers written, gotten me through cross-country training runs—but when I’d applied it to drinking, the only thing I felt was that I was turning my life into a small, joyless clenched fist. The Higher Power that turned sobriety into more than deprivation was simply not me. That was all I knew. It was a force animating the world in all of its particular glories: jellyfish, the clean turn of line breaks, pineapple upside-down cake, my friend Rachel’s laughter. Perhaps I’d been looking for it—for whatever it was—for years, bent over the toilet on all those other nights, retching and heaving.
When Charles Jackson reread The Lost Weekend, years into his inconstant sobriety, he “was most of all impressed by the sense that, in spite of the hero’s utter self-absorption, it is a picture of a man groping for God, or at least trying to find out who he is.” He understood the old patterns as driven by the same hungers: the hunger for booze as the hunger for God, all this groping as part of the same journey.
At times, it seemed my relationship wasn’t to a Higher Power but to the act of prayer itself—a ritualized cry of longing and insufficiency—as if my faith were a catalog of places I’d gotten on my knees, a hundred bathrooms where I’d knelt on cold tiles with thin ribbons of grout under my shins; or crouched on a foot-worn bath mat, facing the eye-level skyline of my mother’s bubble bath, jars of pearly peach and vanilla. In those bathrooms, God wasn’t faceless omnipotence but proximate particulars, grout and soap—the things that had always been there, right in front of me.
During the spring of my first sobriety, I had embarked on a different type of writing project than I’d ever pursued before: I drove to the Tennessee wilderness to write about an ultramarathon my brother was running, a 125-mile race through briar-cloaked hills and hollers around the outskirts o
f a deserted federal penitentiary. The runners spent days in the woods, circling back to a central campsite after every loop to fill their fanny packs with candy bars and pop their blisters with sewing needles. I’d never done anything like this, conducting interviews and gleaning observations to write about the lives of strangers, and the sheer plenitude thrilled me—how much was all around me, just waiting to be gathered.
I slept in my car and filled a notebook with details: one runner’s tale of seeing a wild boar on the trail, the dead-tired glass of his eyes and the mud on his legs; rain pattering on the roof of my Toyota all night, sliced by the lonely cry of bugle taps played whenever a runner dropped out of the race. I ate chicken slathered in barbecue sauce, roasted over a campfire in the smoke and chill of early spring, and asked these runners why they pushed themselves past the limits of what they thought they could endure. What community was made possible by a shared confrontation with pain? Even this attempt at reportage was turning into autobiography. But it was still something new—inspiring and awkward. Before interviews, I got nervous. My armpits dampened with sweat. My pulse spiked up. I was a terrible interviewer, at first, too eager to prove myself, and so busy saying, Yeah, I know exactly what you mean, that I never gave people enough room to speak. Often I stuttered when I asked my questions, and cringed whenever someone shrugged or squinted in reply. But it surprised me, my own ability to make eye contact. Meetings had trained me. Whenever someone shared, you had to look at her—so that if she ever locked eyes with you, you could give what she was saying a place to land.
By the time Berryman started working on his novel Recovery, he had come to see the notion that he needed to drink in order to write as a delusion. “So long as I considered myself as merely the medium (arena for) my powers, sobriety was out of the question,” he wrote in 1971, in a handwritten note he later adapted for use in the novel. “The even deeper delusion that my art depended on my drinking, or at least was connected with it, could not be attakt directly. Too far down. The cover had to be exploded off.”
Several years earlier, in a 1965 review in the New York Times, Charles Jackson had questioned the mythic figure of the “tormented” artist: “Are we really all that tormented? Or is it something we hang onto, foster, even cherish, till it becomes an end in itself, full of self-defeating interest?” In this review of Lowry’s Selected Letters—a review that would have infuriated Lowry, if he’d been alive to read it—Jackson wondered what Lowry might have been able to write “if by some supreme effort, some mystical or psychological shifting- of-gears, the tormented man had been able to get on another level and get outside of himself.” Jackson was probably thinking more specifically about recovery, something he wasn’t willing to name explicitly, perhaps thinking about what he’d told an AA meeting six years earlier—“I couldn’t get outside myself”—or his own unfinished novel, his attempt to get “for the first time, out of myself.”
Marguerite Duras certainly wrote drunk, but she didn’t harbor any delusions about what the drinking did for her work. “Instead of drinking coffee when I woke up,” she wrote, “I started straight away on whisky or wine. I was often sick after the wine—the pituitary vomiting typical of alcoholics. I’d vomit the wine I’d just drunk, and start drinking some more right away. Usually the vomiting stopped after the second try, and I’d be glad.” Her pragmatic approach to this particular oblivion—the “typical” and totally un-singular vomiting, the relief when her body stopped resisting the booze—dismissed myths and opted for something more matter-of-fact: “Drunkenness doesn’t create anything.… The illusion’s perfect: you’re sure what you’re saying has never been said before. But alcohol can’t produce anything that lasts. It’s just wind.”
Duras’s critique of the “illusion” of drunken creativity is also a critique of the illusion of singularity: the idea that what you’re saying has never been said before, one of the precise notions that recovery pushes against. In my own sobriety, I’d given up on that impossible ideal of saying what had never been said, but I also believed every unoriginal idea could be reborn in the particularity of any given life. As my sobriety continued, my writing turned toward interviews and journeys: asking a long-distance runner in a West Virginia prison what it felt like to be trapped in one place, asking a woman at a Harlem community center about the way her obsession with a mysterious whale helped her recover from a seven-week coma.
Duras herself was never involved in any organized recovery, though she did undergo three brutal “disintoxication” treatments at the American Hospital of Paris. Their physical toll nearly killed her, and brought on terrible delusions: a woman’s head shattering like it was made of glass, or “exactly ten thousand tortoises” arranging themselves into formations on a nearby roof. Duras even dreamed a vision of the communal salve she never actually experienced: “The sound of singing, solo and in chorus, would rise up from the inner courtyard under my windows. And when I looked out I would see crowds of people who I was sure had come to save me from death.”
After one of his admissions into detox, Berryman wrote a poem addressed to his fellow patients Tyson and Jo:
take up, outside your blocked selves, some small thing
that is moving
& wants to keep on moving
& needs, therefore, Tyson, Jo, your loving.
The poet teaches what he most needs to learn, and Berryman was constantly finding ways to recommit himself to the lives of others. In the margins of a Grapevine, an AA magazine, next to one prompt—“Have I a personal responsibility in helping an AA group fulfill its primary purpose? What is my part?”—Berryman wrote: To listen. Next to “What is the real importance of me among 500,000 AAs?” he wrote: 1 / 500,000th. There were 500,000 AAs for Berryman to love, every one of them moving. Recovery was about understanding himself as one tiny numerator, a blocked self, above the larger denominator of a community. Many communities. As part of his step work, Berryman listed all the groups he was part of:
My groups
K and Twiss
AA
Friends and poets (Cal etc.)
Common Cause!
HUM, all of M
Shakespearians
Students
The church
“America”
the human race
K and Twiss were his wife, Kate, and their daughter, Martha; Cal was Robert Lowell; HUM was his division (Humanities) at the University of Minnesota; Common Cause meant protesting the war in Vietnam. He wanted to love his colleagues and his school; he wanted to love strangers halfway around the world, strangers his country was bombing in the name of its democratic vision. Hence “America” in scare quotes. Hence the human race. AA was the group that asked him to face his responsibilities to all the other groups on the list. Writing his novel was not only an opportunity to offer something to these communities (“useful 12th step work”) but also a way to dramatize the difficulty of becoming part of one: the struggle to humble himself, to submerge his own voice by making himself 1/500,000th of the chorus rather than its soloist.
The protagonist of Recovery is a renowned former professor of immunology named Alan Severance—almost amusingly revered, as if celebrity immunologists are nothing out of the ordinary—who struggles, as Berryman did, to reconcile his acclaimed professional life with his identity as a debilitated alcoholic. From his room at rehab, Severance sees the spires of the college campus where he teaches: “Towers above the trees across the river reminded him he was University Professor Severance not the craven drunk Alan S who had been told by an orderly that his room smelled like a farmyard.”
At rehab, Severance is constantly reaching for the part of himself capable of something besides self-concern: “His own hope was to forget about himself and think about the others.” These are the same instructions that Berryman gives Tyson and Jo: take up, outside your blocked selves, some small thing. Who can Severance take up? There’s a man named George, who is still seeking the approval of his dead father, or a woman named
Sherry, who isn’t interested in anything—until, to Severance’s great delight, she gets interested in the history of North Dakota. There’s another woman, named Mirabella, who tells the group that she hasn’t wanted to do anything but scream for years. “You don’t remember a time when you didn’t have it?” her counselor asks, and she replies, “Drinking sends it away.” The core question of Recovery is whether something else might send it away instead. Perhaps other people might. “In hospitals he found his society,” Berryman’s friend Saul Bellow wrote about his stints in rehab. “About these passioning countrymen he did not need to be ironical.”
When George finally accepts that his dead father had good reason to be proud of him, Severance is so moved he finds himself “fighting sobs.” And when George climbs onto a chair to announce his joy—“I DID IT. I DID IT.”—Severance catches his exuberance as contagion: “Cheers from everybody, general exultation, universal relief and joy. Severance felt triumphant.”
But Recovery is also canny about the ways that resonance can become self-involvement, an absorption in the strength of your own emotional response. When George is having his breakthrough, it’s actually difficult for Severance to hear him because his own empathy gets so loud: “There was more, but Severance was fighting sobs and didn’t hear it.” When the group recites the Serenity Prayer, Severance hates that “his rich, practiced, lecturer’s voice had dominated the chorus, giving him no pleasure.” Even when he forces himself to say the same words as everyone else, he still yearns to be loudest. One woman who had been at rehab with Berryman remembered that “he couldn’t ever be wholehearted about belonging with the rest of us.” He was “constantly retreating into his uniqueness,” she said. “He really thought it was all he had that made him worth anything.”
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