The Recovering

by Leslie Jamison

  That evening, we decided to make food for the Occupy protesters camped downtown. This would be the thing we did instead of breaking up, a sign of hope and possibility. We baked sugar cookies that filled our loft with their sweet heat. I imagined how they’d be received—with surprise and gratitude.

  It was dark by the time we arrived at the green. After someone directed us to the food tent, we set our plate of cookies on a table crowded with brownies, lemon squares dusted with sugar, a blueberry pie with a plastic cover, and a ring Danish from the grocery store. As we left, I heard someone say, “Why does everyone bring cookies? We’ve got so much fucking dessert here.”

  Contract logic justifies all kinds of labor, and makes all kinds of promises—If I do x, I’ll get y—but anyone who lives by contract logic for long enough is eventually betrayed by it. The people in the Occupy tent don’t always say what you want them to say. The sober writer doesn’t always write a sober epic. The sober writer doesn’t always even stay sober. Charles Jackson eventually decided AA had “flatten[ed] him out,” and that it worked best “for the mindless”—that it had doomed him to “years of a kind of grey, bleak, empty well-being” that made true creative work impossible, consigning him to “apathy, spiritlessness, blank sobriety, and a vegetable health.” Jackson decided he believed in the Faustian bargain after all, believed in the choice between sobriety and genius. “Should I say the hell with it and return to my former indulgence,” he wondered, “and thus be freed from my healthy prison, free once more from fear, able to function as a writer again?” After years of Möbius-strip sobriety—in and out, on and off—Jackson finally committed suicide by overdosing on Seconal in 1968.

  If my obsession with authors who had gotten sober was another version of contract logic, played out with whatever god I was tentatively praying to (If I get sober, you’ll show me writers whose sobriety inspired them), it was an obsession that delivered a humbling and partial hope. Which isn’t to say I didn’t find writers who wrote beautifully from recovery—Wallace, Johnson, Carver—but that the universe responded to my demands the way it often does: unpredictably, on its own schedule, without the grand drama of either boundless manna or unequivocal refusal. I wanted every recovery story to wear its sobriety like a shimmering, supernatural gown. But sometimes a story is just a thing someone needed to say, or a way someone needed to fail.

  Contract logic involved its own tyrannical authorial impulse—I will write the script, and God will make it come true—but sobriety didn’t dutifully deliver on its end of the contracts I’d written. It did the opposite: offered relief from my own plotline.

  The sobriety stories I heard from Seneca House often hinged on overturned scripts and thwarted expectations. Marcus thought he was destined for a reckless expat life abroad, but ended up petting a beagle on a soggy creek-side porch. Gwen had been Citizen of the Year before she spent time as the Hobby Lady. Shirley thought she had one life mapped out for herself—a career in journalism and marriage to another journalist—but sobriety delivered something else entirely: a divorce, a cross-country move, years as a single parent. Sobriety wasn’t instantaneous wish fulfillment; it was more like tearing off a bandage and reckoning directly with everything she’d been drinking to survive.

  Shirley almost committed suicide the first time she ever did a Fourth Step. Her inventory was ninety-six single-spaced typed pages long, full of all her resentments at her husband and all her ambivalence about being a mother. She was planning to kill herself with carbon monoxide in the Pinto in her garage, and she’d gotten as far as turning the ignition when she thought about her kids coming home from school and finding her body there. So she killed the engine and went inside to call her shrink instead. She ended up in a locked ward for thirty days, on suicide watch. That was the real end of her marriage, she told me: her stay at a psychiatric hospital. Lou’s pride couldn’t stomach it.

  After they divorced, Shirley moved back to Portland—with two kids, no husband, and no job. Her first AA meeting was in a smoky room full of strict old-timers: “We don’t hold hands,” they said, “and we don’t say hi.” She attempted suicide once more, after the move to Portland—slit her wrists—but survived.

  So much unfolded after Shirley didn’t die: two more cross-country moves, two children coming of age, one child’s gender transition, six AA love affairs, two bouts of cancer. She got a job teaching journalism in Louisiana, spent decades in activism—protesting the Keystone Pipeline, marching with Black Lives Matter—and growing a robust flock of Portland pigeons, other sober women she sponsored. At meetings, she was always the one arguing that you never threw out a newcomer, no matter how drunk he was. You had to find a way to let him stay in the room.

  Forty years after she got sober, Shirley showed me her Portland: not backyard beehives and artisanal gelato shops, but the hospital where she’d gotten her mastectomy, the bend in the Willamette River that reminded her of a suicide attempt. She showed me the partially deflated balloons from her most recent sobriety milestones—thirty-five years, then forty—dangling from her apartment ceiling like hanging plants; and a poster on her office wall, a blow-up of a feature called “Cheap-n-Chic” from her daughter Laura’s college newspaper, that showed Laura wearing clothes she’d gotten from secondhand stores, sassy pedal pushers and a plush green velvet hat. That “Cheap-n-Chic” spread meant something to Shirley, in part because it was a validation of her sober mothering, when she’d encouraged her children to learn how to shop for themselves.

  During my Seneca visits—with Sawyer, Gwen, Marcus, and Shirley—the ghosts of old dramas set up shop in the banality of the present, in living rooms and coffee shops: memories of hair stringy with vomit, nights in jail, crack in White Plains, white lightning in Monrovia, children driven over bridges during blackouts. After Gwen told me about her suicide attempt, we held out our plates of Tuscan flounder for scoops of rice pilaf. Recovery works like this: You bring old traumas into the buffet line. You dump the old coffee grounds and listen to the story of a suicide attempt. It’s no diminishment of what was painful, and no romanticizing of it either, only an awareness of everything giving way to something else: this chicken and dumplings, this salad bar.

  Certain stories might carry the easy lilt of practiced narrative grooves: Madeline’s blackened branch and Gwen’s moccasin making. Marcus throwing a chair across the room in anger. Sawyer touring drunk wards in Lithuania. Shirley dancing tango in an empty bakery. But just because a story has been crafted for survival—sculpted by memory, polished by repetition, whittled into artifact—doesn’t mean it doesn’t also hold truth.

  Years after her second suicide attempt, Shirley met a man in the Portland recovery scene, a guy who rowed supplies out to the oil rigs, who had slit his wrists too. Whenever he and Shirley ran into each other at meetings, they bumped their wrists together and touched suicide scars.

  In recovery, certain kinds of difficulty are harder to confess than others. The hardest stories for Shirley to tell—early on—were about her marriage. It wasn’t hard to talk about how much she resented her husband, his rages and his self-absorption, but it was hard to talk about how much she’d relished being his “sacrificing helpmeet.” Shirley had a certain narrative about their life together, about how she’d hated her role in it, and it was harder to admit this other part: the thrill of martyrdom and sacrifice. It took her an even longer time to share what she’d whispered to Laura, her infant daughter, the day of her adoption: I don’t want you, I don’t want you, I don’t want you.

  Sometimes the hardest things to confess are the difficulties of sobriety. The story of Shirley’s parenting wasn’t a simple conversion narrative: that she had been a terrible parent drunk and a better one sober. Her sobriety was hard on her kids, too. They missed her when she was away at rehab. When Shirley asked her daughter to speak at her fourteenth sobriety anniversary, Laura talked about how she felt Shirley had abandoned her for sobriety. As a girl, Laura had once asked Shirley’s sponsor, Madeline: “Wh
y doesn’t my mother love me?” And Madeline told her: “Your mother can’t love anyone right now.”

  At a 1970 AA convention in Miami, one speaker lamented that an AA member might believe “that he must tell an unqualified success story or not speak,” that he might think he should “not speak about his fear of people, his inability to work or understand all aspects of the program, or the fact that he may frequently behave badly, or that he is unhappy and depressed, even when all these things may be true.” But in meetings, I found these weren’t the experiences you were expected to excise from sobriety; they were sobriety—the bad behavior and grumpiness, as much as the wonder. Sawyer had a piece of framed calligraphy hanging on the wall of his basement: Alcoholics Anonymous is not a history of our personal success stories. It is, rather, a history of our colossal human failures.

  At one point, Sawyer told me that Gwen had gone through a burnout when she was director of Seneca House. “Let her tell you this, not me,” he said, “but we had to send her away to a rehab that they have for burned-out treatment people. They had an intervention on her.”

  When I finally worked up the nerve to ask Gwen about it, we were sitting in the Blue Note, the bar at her retirement home—in the middle of the afternoon, when it was utterly empty—and she said the intervention had happened during an incredibly stressful time. She’d been organizing her son’s wedding and pulling together the paperwork for Seneca House to get the accreditation it needed for third-party reimbursement from insurance companies. She’d broken down crying. Once, she said. Then she’d shown up at Seneca to find a circle intervention waiting for her. “Which of course,” she told me, “I used to teach people how to do.”

  At her staff’s request, Gwen ended up at a specialized treatment center in Palm Springs, California. It was recovery for people who had wrung themselves dry trying to recover others. Gwen knew all their exercises. They hung purses and pillows from her outstretched arms. “They burdened you until you could hardly stand up,” she said. “And then said, ‘How do you feel?’ I thought, ‘Eh. I know what you want me to say.’”

  It was clear there were certain kinds of vulnerability that Gwen had readily admitted into her narrative—her fallibility as a mother, her early lapses in sobriety, the necessary humbling of becoming the Hobby Lady, staying on Antabuse until she’d been sober a year—and other kinds of vulnerability her story hadn’t fully metabolized: the day when she was the focus of the circle rather than its leader, the day she stood accused of being overwhelmed.

  But the most useful sobriety stories are the ones that acknowledge how sobriety can bottom out, because they also acknowledge its surprise and depth, that sobriety is fundamentally full of unpredictability: miraculous, harrowing. For me, it wasn’t just moving but useful to know that Gwen had hit a wall one day and started crying.

  Recovery means giving what you need yourself, not what you already possess. Your own fragility isn’t a liability but a gift. You bump suicide scars with a stranger. You don’t kick the drunk out of a meeting. You find a way to let him stay in the room.

  For much of that first autumn back in New Haven, I clung to what my sponsor told me—No big changes in the first year—and stayed in my relationship with Dave. But by clinging to that prohibition, I’d also flipped it into possibility: Once a year had passed, I would have permission. And when I hit a year of continuous sobriety in early December, I told Dave I couldn’t do it anymore.

  Everything between us felt exhausted, brittle, depleted. The hot magma of conflict—with all its heat and surge—had cooled into hardened ridges of resentment, a quieter lunar landscape. The realizations I’d had about what had broken between us had come too late to resuscitate what had already bled out. It was hard to explain the almost in our love—to myself or anyone—how consuming it was, that sense of being almost able to make it work. His mind was the mind I most wanted to ask every question. He’d spread a picnic across the marble of a train station at midnight. He’d told me I should take vitamins so my bones didn’t break when he fucked me. He’d read Berryman to me in a humid August kitchen. He was fully alive without drinking. When we were up, we were so fully together in that state of upness, but when I came low, I always believed that I’d betrayed the person he wanted me to be. I loathed this version of myself so much I couldn’t believe he didn’t loathe her as well.

  When I told him that I thought we were done, Dave looked so pained. He asked me to take some time to think about it. It seemed cruel—to both of us, somehow—that the thing that made him reach for me was the idea I might finally pull away.

  I went to stay for a few days with a friend in Brooklyn, in her tiny studio on Ninth Street, where we binge-watched Rihanna videos: She was falling in love! She was sad in a bathtub! She was smoking eight cigarettes at once! I cried over greasy hamburgers at the dive joint on her block. While I was there, I got a note from Dave saying he’d found my Big Book lying on our bed. When he confessed he’d started looking through it, reading notes I’d scribbled in the margins, I felt the sad gratification of symmetry: his desire to know those parts of me that didn’t involve him. “You’ve been examining yourself so fearlessly,” he wrote, “in this quiet way I haven’t ever really asked about.” He quoted a passage in the Big Book that I’d underlined—Fear is an evil and corroding thread—and wrote: “I think I feel now something like what you must have felt so often in Iowa.” It wasn’t just that he was afraid I’d leave him, it was that he had begun to understand the ways fear could rearrange you, could fill you with disarming and overwhelming kinds of longing—to know another person, to gather all their pieces, to read their secret thoughts.

  When I came back to our apartment, I saw three empty nips of liquor in our recycling bin, the kind you’d find in a hotel minibar. He’d been drinking, he said. This was what it looked like when he drank: three little bottles. I knew that I wanted him to be happy but worried that I resented him too much to make him happy. I looked at those three empty nips and told him, “I can’t.”

  When we had sex that afternoon, it was familiar and domestic—pulling socks off each other’s feet, peeling away long underwear. All the leaves had fallen from the trees and couldn’t block the sun any longer. He bent my leg so that my knee jutted in front of the window, winter light gleaming behind. It felt possible to reach for him without reservation now that I knew I was losing him. I watched our limbs tangled, thinking, I can’t believe this is ending. I’d told myself I was learning to live without drinking so I could become a stronger version of myself, someone who could build a life with him without rotting it with fear. I’d told myself that I was giving up drinking to make our love possible. Now I was sending myself into another life without either one.

  —

  XIII —

  RECKONING

  At the back of the composition book filled with notes for Recovery, his unfinished novel, Berryman left behind a fairy tale called “The Hunter in the Forest.” He wrote it with his daughter Martha, and most of it was transcribed in her effortful child’s print. In the story, a hunter gets lost in a forest where two bears live, both named Hungry “because they were always hungry, every single second.” They steal the hunter’s food, put his gun in a squirrel hole, and take off his pants. (“That was a very angry hunter!”) Then they put him in a cage and lock the door. Though the story never frames it this way, these are the dilemmas of addiction: The bears are hungry every single second. The hunter is lost. The hunter is in a cage. Berryman and his daughter wrote four different endings, three of them in Berryman’s cursive:

  He fixed the lock, got out of the cage, and conquered all the animals.

  And they said “There! That’s what you do to us. You’re lucky we didn’t kill you!” Moral: Be kind to animals and they will be kind to you.

  He awakened and they fed him nothing but hay.

  One ending offered victory: The hunter triumphs over the animals. Another one offered a moral: If you are good to the world, it will be good to you. A third
offered disappointment: nothing but hay. Martha wrote the fourth ending in her serious childish scrawl. She labeled it “Real Ending”: “The hunter awakened and said, ‘Well?’”

  This final ending, the real ending, offered the true anticlimax of salvation: The hunter doesn’t know what to make of the world he has woken into. Well? After waking up, there is always the question of what comes next—what life might lie beyond the life you’ve left behind.

  After Dave and I moved out of our apartment, I rented a brick studio near the gray flank of I-91. It was one long sunlit room directly above a middle-aged couple who filled their hallway with bulk boxes of mason jars. They were jammers. She had a long braid down her back and he had staples on his scalp from an unmentioned procedure. Just after moving in, I gave them a plate of gingerbread cookies I’d made with a new set of cookie cutters shaped like forest animals—moose, squirrel, fox—purchased to signify the beginning of a new era of unwilled generosity and outward focus, in which I would always be doing little things for others. Oh, that? I’d say. That was nothing. I imagined the casual voice I’d use, the self-effacing tone of someone who wasn’t doing anything for karmic credit. No biggie, just baked you some foxes. I lived in that apartment for eighteen months, and used my cookie cutters once.