The Recovering

by Leslie Jamison

  Googling the phrase “just another addiction memoir” yields several pages of results, mostly blurbs insisting that a certain book isn’t “just another addiction memoir,” an author insisting his book isn’t “just another addiction memoir,” or an editor insisting she didn’t acquire “just another addiction memoir.” This insistent chorus reflects a broader disdain for the already-told story, and a cynical take on interchangeability: the idea that if we’ve heard this story before, we won’t want to hear it again. But the accusation of sameness, just another addiction memoir, gets turned on its head by recovery—where a story’s sameness is precisely why it should be told. Your story is only useful because others have lived it and will live it again.

  By the time James Frey published his infamous addiction memoir, A Million Little Pieces, in 2003, addiction narratives had become so familiar, so trite, that more melodrama was required to purchase certain levels of attention. People had already heard the one about the crackhead; now they wanted to hear the one about the crackhead who had run over a cop, spent three months in jail, and gone through a root canal without anesthesia. Frey’s editor, Nan Talese, said she’d almost passed on his manuscript because—as one account put it—it seemed like (yes) “just another addiction memoir,” but she reconsidered after reading the first few pages because “the grim subject matter fascinated her.”

  When the memoir’s distortions first came to light—Frey spent only one night in jail, he never hit a cop with his car, he probably did get anesthesia for that root canal—the call for reparations spread like wildfire. Oprah, who had chosen the memoir for her book club, brought Frey onto her show to stage an almost ritualistic public shaming. Twelve indignant readers filed a lawsuit on behalf of indignant readers everywhere. The book had given them hope, they said, and what did that hope mean now that they knew it wasn’t based on truth? A social worker who’d recommended the book to her clients filed a lawsuit seeking ten million dollars on their behalf. Frey’s distortions became a stand-in for the “truthiness” of his times, his book linked to the political deceptions and overblown narratives that had justified the war in Iraq.

  “My mistake,” Frey wrote in a public apology, was “writing about the person I created in my mind to help me cope, and not the person who went through the experience.” He acknowledged that the changed facts were lies, but insisted they were products of a story he’d told himself to get better. Frey’s fabrications weren’t simply a product of his imagination, however, they were a product of the marketplace—in this case, a marketplace of sentiment and trauma already swollen by inflation, an economy that demanded increasingly elaborate forms of abjection to keep readers interested.

  I’ve often wanted to defend Frey, not because I find his alterations defensible but because I find them comprehensible. Perhaps this is only because I project a certain desire onto them: Frey sought the objective correlatives of high drama—prison time, violence, even dental work without Novocain—because he was clutching at things that could communicate the huge stakes of how it felt to need drugs like he did. Perhaps I projected this desire onto him because I’ve often had it myself: this hunger for a story larger than my own, with taller buildings and sharper knives.

  At meetings, my stories were hardly the best ones in the room. It was like a picnic where I’d brought the plastic forks instead of the fancy Brie or a key lime pie. But I also knew my presence was one small part of what allowed the meeting to happen at all—my body in a room along with everyone’s. “Exceptional case, my ass! I was just another junkie, period,” Janet tells herself in The Fantastic Lodge, describing her time at the Narco Farm. “This disappointed me horribly, naturally.”

  People weren’t dazzled by anything I had to say, or how I said it. They just listened. “Yeah, I’ve gotten punched in the face while I was drunk, too,” one guy said. I wasn’t supposed to tell my story because it was better than anyone else’s, or worse than anyone else’s, or even that different from anyone else’s, but because it was the story I had—the same way you might use a nail not because you thought it was the best nail ever made, but simply because it was the one lying in your drawer.

  When I got sober for the second time, the messy story I’d had so much trouble telling before—about getting sober and then starting to drink again—was something I could offer other people: Yep! I also had trouble convincing myself I couldn’t drink. My return was not unique; it just meant I was present again, and I could tell the story of what it was like to be gone. In one of his haikus, the Japanese poet Kobayashi Issa writes: “The man pulling radishes / pointed my way / with a radish.” I pointed the way with whatever radishes I’d lived: whiskey tucked behind a futon, wine bottles in a purse, apologies piled on a dresser. At three days sober, you can tell someone on her first day what the second day was like for you.

  Could be anyone. Could have been anyone’s story. These were phrases I often heard in meetings, but they struck me as erasures. Giving up on singularity was like giving up on the edges of my own body. What would I be, if I wasn’t singular? What was identity if it wasn’t fundamentally a question of difference? What defined a voice if not distinction? I was still a little girl at the dinner table, trying to prove myself by coming up with something better than a few clichés balled up in my throat. Recovery started to rearrange these urges. Whenever someone else said something simple and true, I felt it bodily. “I got sad and ate a cookie,” one woman said, and an electric current surged between her body and mine.

  In early drafts of the AA Big Book, “you” was often changed to “we,” which effectively turned assumptions into collective confessions. “Half measures will avail you nothing. You stand at the turning point” became, in waxy red pencil script, “Half measures availed us nothing. We stood at the turning point.” In moving from you have to stop drinking to we had to stop drinking, the grammar implies a certain humility: We can’t know your story; we can only speak our own.

  The paradox of recovery stories, I was learning, was that you were supposed to relinquish your ego by authoring a story in which you also starred. It was a paradox made possible by the acknowledgment of commonality: I happen to be at the center of this story, but anyone could be. When Gilles Deleuze wrote that “life is not personal,” he was getting at this, too, that an individual story is both more and less than self-expression. A 1976 AA pamphlet called “Do You Think You’re Different?”—its cover full of black circles, one thinner than the others—opens with an admission of delusion: “Many of us thought we were special.” The plural subject already holds the argument: Even the belief in singularity is common.

  In a book called My Story to Yours: A Guided Memoir for Writing Your Recovery Journey, Karen Casey offers a paint-by-numbers approach to writing your addiction story. The premise itself insists that our stories are the same, and that this isn’t a bad thing. Casey structures her personal story around prompts designed to nudge readers back into their own: “What’s the first memory you have of drinking? Did it include friends you could trust or strangers you realize now were not very savory?”

  Casey’s book is the epitome of everything programmatic about recovery narratives. It makes the blueprint explicit. But I loved its stark confession that our stories have common hinges, whether we want to admit to them or not.

  “You might have some fond memories of the drinking days too, and that’s normal. Share some of them if you like.”

  A balcony with Dave: the crisp tang and sugared nectar of Sciacchetrà, a local white, the wine Pliny called “lunar,” with the big moon over us and the waves breaking below, the faith we’d get married, the church music from another hill.

  “Do you believe in destiny?”

  Yes, I do! I wanted to tell her. I wanted to shout it.

  “If so, what do you see as yours currently? Are you content with it? If you had hoped for something different, why not write a letter to God, here and now?”

  I wanted to write God a letter asking why Dave and I were still f
ighting. I wanted to hurl myself at Casey’s trite questions like I’d surrendered myself to the tight columns of my Fourth Step. I imagined flinging myself off a cliff, onto their necessary humbling.

  “We’re all drama queens,” my sponsor told me once. “Even in our sobriety.”

  That first spring of my second sobriety, I was reading applications for the Writers’ Workshop to make some extra money—specifically, to help keep up with the coupon book of student-loan payments from my own days as a workshop student. I was supposed to rate these applications on a four-point scale. The fiction program got more than a thousand applicants a year and accepted around thirty. That meant someone had to rule a lot of people out. But meetings were teaching me to listen to everyone. I started to lose my bearings. I would read something trite and second-guess myself. Was it trite? Who was I to say? Maybe it was just a radish I couldn’t recognize.

  When you’re hungry for wisdom, it’s everywhere. Every fortune cookie had my number. “Why is the truth usually not just un- but anti-interesting?” David Foster Wallace once wondered. “Because every one of the seminal little mini-epiphanies you have in early AA is always polyesterishly banal.”

  I kept a notebook where I recorded at least one thing I loved from each application—because I wanted to honor each applicant, even if she would never get admitted. This slowed down my reading process quite a bit, and whenever I glanced back at my notes, they never looked as wise as they’d seemed when I copied them down: “Father realizes he must accept son for who he actually is.” “All the cats are named after different vegetables.” Someone could have written: I wrote this application because I want to be accepted, and I would have wanted to accept her. Something about desire itself, its naked and unartful articulation, had started to seem beautiful.

  I’d grown suspicious of my own narrative tendencies: my desire for drama; my tenacious, futile pursuit of originality; my resistance to clichés. Perhaps this resistance to cliché was just one symptom of my refusal to accept the commonality of my own interior life. But I couldn’t deny the way that certain platitudes struck me like a bronze bell and left me feeling rung—spoken, stolen, shaken.

  I was never persuaded that clichés held the Full Truth of My Experience, or anyone else’s. I’m not sure anyone else was, either. But submitting myself to the clichés of recovery was another way of submitting to its rituals—gathering in basements, holding hands in circles. Saying This applies to me too started to seem necessary and tonic. There was something illuminating, something even like prayer, in accepting truths that seemed too simple to contain me. They weren’t revelations but reminders, safeguards against the alibis of exceptionality that masqueraded as self-knowledge. The word itself—“cliché”—derives from the sound that printing plates made when they were cast from movable type. Some phrases were used often enough that it made sense to cast the whole phrase in metal, rather than having to create an arrangement of individual letters. It was about utility. You didn’t have to remake the entire plate each time.

  I knew a man in meetings who spoke almost entirely in clichés, like a patchwork quilt of phrases sewn together in jagged veers of thought. We had to quit playing God… every recovery began with one sober hour… every day is a gift, that’s why we call it the present… sobriety delivers everything alcohol promised… the elevator is broken, use the steps… God will never give you more than you can handle. These phrases had helped him survive his own life. Now he was presenting them in hopes that they might be useful to the rest of us—less like a sermon, more like a song.

  —

  XI —

  CHORUS

  Several years after recovery started changing my mind about clichés, I wrote a newspaper column in their defense. I called them “subterranean passageways connecting one life to another” and basically pulled a Charles Jackson, smuggling recovery into my prose and praising its wisdom without naming it directly. A few days later, I got an email from a man named Sawyer, who said he’d come to appreciate clichés quite a bit himself—in recovery, he said, not just in AA but in this “rag tag” rehab he’d helped run in the early seventies: “We started with all-volunteer help in a little ramshackle hostel. Actually a sort of hot pillow place in a secluded spot on the banks of the Potomac.” That’s how Sawyer first told me about Seneca House, a converted fishing motel in Maryland, insisting that he thought there was a “great story to be told about Seneca House, with both bathos and pathos.”

  For two decades, before closing in the early nineties, Seneca had been a rehab full of ambassadors and bikers, Navy guys and diplomats’ wives, long-distance truckers and oil executives, housewives with Valium habits; a Navy commander, a dentist, a Rhode Island gigolo, and an elderly hypochondriac who wore his shirt unbuttoned to the waist; all swapping stories of grit and regret. One housewife described her ready-made tall tale for wine-shop clerks: She was making beef Bordelaise in a vat, and she needed nine bottles of red. One guy said he used to strain his shoe polish for the alcohol. One woman said her Valium stash had fallen out of her cleavage and into her Thanksgiving turkey, at the table in front of everyone; another confessed she’d shot heroin straight into her vagina.

  From the first moment I heard about Seneca, I wanted to tell the story Sawyer believed in. These were Berryman’s passioning countrymen in full splendor. I loved the image of an old firetrap by a river, its glowing old neon MOTEL sign hanging above the battered aluminum smokers’ table, its reflection glimmering in the water. I wanted to tell the story of a ragged little universe in an old wooden house, how living alongside other people facing their damage could make it easier to face your own. It would be like Charles Jackson had written: The story happens, is happening—taking place, like daily living—on every page.

  When I pitched the story to a magazine editor I respected, he wrote back: “Hmmm… it would be a tougher sell here on account of the why-write-about-these-guys-and-not-some-other-guys question. If you have a good answer for that, I’d be game to run it up the masthead.”

  I had no good answer for that. I thought Seneca House was compelling not because it was different but because it wasn’t—because these-guys had gotten drunk just like some-other-guys had gotten drunk, because these-guys had gotten better just like some-other-guys had gotten better. They’d shown up at a junky wooden shack and said, This is done.

  How had Jackson put it? It is really wonderful, simple, plain, human, life itself.

  His name is Sawyer, and he’s an alcoholic.

  He grew up in Vandergrift, a Pennsylvania steel town. His father died when he was two months old. His mother, who’d come from Lithuania at sixteen, cleaned the homes of steel-baron millionaires. She saved every nickel and dime so that Sawyer could go to prep school, which is where he really started drinking. He got kicked out for booze. Then his test scores got him a scholarship to Virginia Polytechnic, and he got kicked out for booze again. He went to Korea with the Army, where he worked as a land surveyor and drank triples of whiskey. His battalion was based in an old walled silk factory in Yeongdeungpo, a district in southwest Seoul that looked like medieval times, with mules pulling honey wagons full of shit to the rice paddies. When a mule died en route they set up a meat sale on the road, right then and there.

  Eventually Sawyer managed to build himself a life that looked good from the outside—wife, kids, career as a lawyer in D.C.—but he drank away his paychecks at the Jefferson Hotel after work and often left his family’s electric bill unpaid. At home, his six kids ate peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for dinner by candlelight while Sawyer sang along to Louis Armstrong at the hotel bar. On a good night, the guys at the Jefferson put him in a cab, but on a bad night he’d end up drinking rotgut at some illegal place in Chinatown, maybe get picked up by the police, maybe get bailed out of jail by his law partner. Looking back, he saw that the drinking had been a way to evade responsibilities—the flock of kids with their jam-sticky hands, tugging on his pant legs, asking him to fix their wagons.

&nb
sp; Sawyer finally got sober when his wife, pregnant with their seventh, told him she would leave him if he didn’t. He’d just come home from drinking all night. His first AA meeting surprised him. He thought he’d see the same guys he saw in drunk court. Instead it was a luncheon full of businessmen who seemed to be doing better than he was. He got a sponsor, an Irish-American veteran named Buck who’d flown with the Flying Tigers in China, Chennault’s Fourteenth Air Division, a guy who liked to say, “Being Irish isn’t a prerequisite for being a drunk, but it’s not an obstacle either.” He had no patience for guys who couldn’t give their all to AA. One time Sawyer missed a Friday-night meeting to attend his son’s Boy Scout meeting, and when he told Buck why he hadn’t been there, Buck got red in the face and said that in that case, Sawyer should give the Boy Scouts a call the next time he got drunk and wanted help.

  Sawyer was thriving in sobriety—making good money as a personal-injury lawyer, known as “Sawyer the Lawyer” on the D.C. AA scene—when he got a call from a hospital, where a man named Luther had listed him as next of kin. Luther was a client Sawyer had represented several months before, for a crosswalk hit-and-run: a sober alcoholic who was in the middle of a serious schizophrenic episode. Luther had listed Sawyer because he didn’t have anyone else. “Poor son of a bitch,” Sawyer told his partner, then went down to the hospital.

  During the months that followed, Luther kept coming around to visit Sawyer at his office, saying he wanted to help other drunks get sober. My barnacle is how Sawyer started to think of him. It seemed like the only way to help Luther, the only way to get rid of Luther, might be to help him help someone else. Luther had money he could use—some from the hit-and-run settlement, some inherited from family. So when a couple of guys, both sober counselors, came to Sawyer and told him they were trying to convert a run-down old fishing hostel into a rehab, he immediately thought of Luther.