Recommendations close to my formerly drunk heart
These aren't meant to represent a broad range of perspectives or teach you anything (though they might); these are just a few things I happen to love.
I love a well-done depiction of addiction. I’m a librarian by training, so I also love recommending books. I can’t do a full question response or essay this week, so I thought I’d do a quick roundup of some of my favorite books and other media regarding addiction (mostly alcohol addiction, because that’s what I connect with the most).
My therapist suggested I take the week off and tell you fine readers that I’m modeling self-care, but if you knew how much coffee I’d consumed, how long it’s been since I washed my hair, and the state of the sweatpants I’m wearing, you’d understand why I don’t feel like that’s the most honest approach.
Please share your favorite addiction-related books, movies, podcasts, songs, etc., in the comments. This isn’t one of those things where I get money if you buy something through an affiliate link, though I hope the bookshop.org links inspire you to purchase from your local bookstore (or check them out from your local library!).
I’ll be back with a response to a reader’s question next week!
Edit: The short story that was the initial idea for this post and totally forgot to include!
You Were Perfectly Fine by Dorothy Parker
Short stories are how I fell in love with writing. I won’t say much about Parker’s story because it speaks for itself, but if you read it and have thoughts about it, please share them!
Books
Drinking: A Love Story by Caroline Knapp
I read this book before I got sober, which stuck with me long after. I can’t count how many times I’ve read it. Knapp writes so elegantly about her alcoholism that it can take your breath away.
“It was love at first sight. The beads of moisture on a chilled bottle. The way the glasses clinked and the conversation flowed. Then it became obsession. The way she hid her bottles behind her lover's refrigerator. The way she slipped from the dinner table to the bathroom, from work to the bar. And then, like so many love stories, it fell apart. Drinking is Caroline Kapp's harrowing chronicle of her twenty-year love affair with alcohol.
Caroline had her first drink at fourteen. She drank through her yeras at an Ivy League college, and through an award-winning career as an editor and columnist. Publicly she was a dutiful daughter, a sophisticated professional. Privately she was drinking herself into oblivion. This startlingly honest memoir lays bare the secrecy, family myths, and destructive relationships that go hand in hand with drinking. And it is, above all, a love story for our times—full of passion and heartbreak, betrayal and desire—a triumph over the pain and deception that mark an alcoholic life.”
I have a confession: The audio version of this book is my favorite audiobook of all time. The book itself is fantastic and one of the most accurate depictions of a blackout drinker (and the self-delusion that often accompanies alcohol addiction) I’ve ever encountered. Hildy is very particular, and whoever cast the narrator picked the right woman. Her narration doesn’t just bring the plot to life; it adds a new dimension to it.
“Hildy Good is a townie. A lifelong resident of a small community on the rocky coast of Boston's North Shore, she knows pretty much everything about everyone. And she's good at lots of things, too. A successful real-estate broker, mother, and grandmother, her days are full. But her nights have become lonely ever since her daughters, convinced their mother was drinking too much, sent her off to rehab. Now she's in recovery—more or less.
Alone and feeling unjustly persecuted, Hildy finds a friend in Rebecca McAllister, one of the town's wealthy newcomers. Rebecca is grateful for the friendship and Hildy feels like a person of the world again, as she and Rebecca escape their worries with some harmless gossip and a bottle of wine by the fire—just one of their secrets.
But Rebecca is herself the subject of town gossip. When Frank Getchell, an old friend who shares a complicated history with Hildy, tries to warn her away from Rebecca, Hildy attempts to protect her friend from a potential scandal. Soon, however, Hildy is busy trying to protect her own reputation. When a cluster of secrets becomes dangerously entwined, the reckless behavior of one person threatens to expose the other, and this darkly comic novel takes a chilling turn.”
Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty by Patrick Radden Keefe
This book isn’t specifically about addiction, and yet it’s entirely about addiction. Addiction to money, addiction to power, addiction to opioids.
“The history of the Sackler dynasty is rife with drama—baroque personal lives; bitter disputes over estates; fistfights in boardrooms; glittering art collections; Machiavellian courtroom maneuvers; and the calculated use of money to burnish reputations and crush the less powerful. The Sackler name has adorned the walls of many storied institutions—Harvard, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Oxford, the Louvre. They are one of the richest families in the world, but the source of the family fortune was vague—until it emerged that the Sacklers were responsible for making and marketing a blockbuster painkiller that was the catalyst for the opioid crisis.
Empire of Pain is the saga of three generations of a single family and the mark they would leave on the world, a tale that moves from the bustling streets of early twentieth-century Brooklyn to the seaside palaces of Greenwich, Connecticut, and Cap d’Antibes to the corridors of power in Washington, D.C. It follows the family’s early success with Valium to the much more potent OxyContin, marketed with a ruthless technique of co-opting doctors, influencing the FDA, downplaying the drug’s addictiveness. Empire of Pain chronicles the multiple investigations of the Sacklers and their company, and the scorched-earth legal tactics that the family has used to evade accountability.
A masterpiece of narrative reporting, Empire of Pain is a ferociously compelling portrait of America’s second Gilded Age, a study of impunity among the super-elite and a relentless investigation of the naked greed that built one of the world’s great fortunes.”
Lit is about getting drunk and getting sober; becoming a mother by letting go of a mother; learning to write by learning to live. Written with Karr's relentless honesty, unflinching self-scrutiny, and irreverent, lacerating humor, it is a truly electrifying story of how to grow up—as only Mary Karr can tell it.
The Boston Globe calls Lit a book that “reminds us not only how compelling personal stories can be, but how, in the hands of a master, they can transmute into the highest art." The New York Times Book Review calls it “a master class on the art of the memoir” and Susan Cheever states, simply, that Lit is “the best book about being a woman in America I have read in years."
Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward
“A hurricane is building over the Gulf of Mexico, threatening the coastal town of Bois Sauvage, Mississippi, and Esch's father is growing concerned. A hard drinker, largely absent, he doesn't show concern for much else. Esch and her three brothers are stocking food, but there isn't much to save. Lately, Esch can't keep down what food she gets; she's fourteen and pregnant. Her brother Skeetah is sneaking scraps for his prized pitbull's new litter, dying one by one in the dirt. Meanwhile, brothers Randall and Junior try to stake their claim in a family long on child's play and short on parenting.
As the twelve days that make up the novel's framework yield to their dramatic conclusion, this unforgettable family--motherless children sacrificing for one another as they can, protecting and nurturing where love is scarce--pulls itself up to face another day. A big-hearted novel about familial love and community against all odds, and a wrenching look at the lonesome, brutal, and restrictive realities of rural poverty, Salvage the Bones is muscled with poetry, revelatory, and real.”
Like Mr. Burroughs, I adamantly maintained that I didn’t have a problem with alcohol right up until I found myself in a locked hospital ward and tried to figure out how I got there. Dry is saturated with humor and insight.
“You may not know it, but you've met Augusten Burroughs. You've seen him on the street, in bars, on the subway, at restaurants: a twentysomething guy, nice suit, works in advertising. Regular. Ordinary. But when the ordinary person had two drinks, Augusten was circling the drain by having twelve; when the ordinary person went home at midnight, Augusten never went home at all. Loud, distracting ties, automated wake-up calls and cologne on the tongue could only hide so much for so long. At the request (well, it wasn't really a request) of his employers, Augusten lands in rehab, where his dreams of group therapy with Robert Downey Jr. are immediately dashed by grim reality of fluorescent lighting and paper hospital slippers. But when Augusten is forced to examine himself, something actually starts to click and that's when he finds himself in the worst trouble of all. Because when his thirty days are up, he has to return to his same drunken Manhattan life—and live it sober. What follows is a memoir that's as moving as it is funny, as heartbreaking as it is true. Dry is the story of love, loss, and Starbucks as a Higher Power.”
TV and Movies
In some ways, I feel like this show was created specifically for me (it definitely wasn’t). She’s young, she’s a writer, she’s a terrific and horrific drunk in equal measure. Oh. And she doesn’t need anyone’s help.
I wish this show had a million seasons, but alas, only two.
28 Days (2000)
Other than national treasure Steve Buscemi being in it, what I appreciate most about 28 Days is how well it depicts the deeply weird interpersonal relationships one develops in rehab. You find yourself relying on, and eventually befriending, some of the nuttiest human beings on the planet, but by the time 28 days are up, you kind of feel like they understand you better than anyone else ever has.
When a Man Loves a Woman (1994)
Elder millennials and older, get ready for the kind of trailer you haven’t seen in a while. Also, RIP Phillip Seymour Hoffman.
Please share your recommendations in the comments!
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I’m not a doctor or mental health professional, so my advice shouldn’t be construed as medical or therapeutic. You are free to take or leave it.
I have found Raymond Carver's stories and poems to be particularly meaningful for me as an alcoholic. I remember trying to read a short story while I was still active in which alcohol played a big part and I couldn't finish. But shortly after I got sober, the New Yorker published his poem "Gravy," and I carried that around in my wallet until it dissolved.
They all sound great! Have a nice time of self-care. Do it with abandoned!