Answer Addiction

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  • Life After “Blackout”: An Interview with Sarah Hepola

    Life After “Blackout”: An Interview with Sarah Hepola

    I was far more scared to fail — to have written a lousy book that people ignored — than I was embarrassed about people knowing that, say, I had sex with some random guy in Paris.

    Sarah Hepola’s book, Blackout: Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget was released four years ago, in the summer of 2015. It quickly became one of the best-known and most well-received memoirs about addiction. 

    In Blackout, Hepola recounts her long-term love affair with drinking and the lifestyle that comes with it, and then describes how her relationship with booze transformed into something complicated and dark. Literally dark, as in frequent blackouts where she didn’t remember what she did the night before, or sometimes who the person in bed next to her was. This behavior had disastrous results: “I drank myself to a place where I didn’t care,” she writes, “but I woke up a person who cared enormously.”

    The Fix recently caught up with Sarah to discuss life, recovery, and what it’s like to share your most intimate moments with the world. 

    While I am sure that you were thrilled to have a book deal for Blackout, did you have any trepidation before the book was released about having all of your dark secrets out in the open? Was there ever a feeling of ”Oh my God, what have I done?”

    I crashed my car twice in the months before the book came out. Once I was pulling out of a tricky underground garage, and the second time I was in a middle lane I mistook for a turning lane, and I just smashed into an SUV. I really shouldn’t have been driving. 

    The anxiety is weird. On one hand, maybe no one will read the book. Great! But wait, then nobody reads your book. Your surest route to comfort is your surest route to failure. I was far more scared to fail — to have written a lousy book, that people ignored — than I was embarrassed about people knowing that, say, I had sex with some random guy in Paris. My dark secrets were an exposure I could control, in the sense that I got to say what was included in that book. But to expose your secrets and discover no one cares? That is sad, like someone yawning in the middle of your striptease. 

    I was also deeply worried the book would have a negative effect on family and friends. That my parents would be judged harshly, or one of my friends would feel mistreated. I volunteered for that kind of scrutiny, I cashed the check, but those people never asked for a spotlight. They only made the mistake of loving me. I think in nearly every case, those relationships were made stronger for the experience, but I worried myself sick over it, which probably tells you something about me, or my deficiencies as a writer, or my overdeveloped sense of responsibility for other people’s happiness. But the short answer to your question is that I didn’t sleep well for months.

    What was it like for you when your book first hit and became hugely successful and your whole scene was out there for all to see? 

    I think it was about 4 p.m. on a Wednesday when my editor called and told me the book was on the New York Times bestseller list. Some part of me had been waiting for that call since I was a little girl, and afterward I walked around in a daze, like: I’m going to be a New York Times bestseller for the rest of my life. No matter what crap I put out after this, no matter how I fail, they can’t take that away from me. The next day, I was like: But why is it in LAST place on the list? Can we nudge that up a bit? So I’d say I felt astonished, and still hungry.

    As for how it felt to have my “whole scene” out there, I don’t know. I’d been writing candid first-person essays for a while, so disclosure was a comfortable position for me, but the book took it to another level. On one hand, I was deeply gratified to hear people connect with the material. On the other hand, it can be a cold and drafty feeling when strangers behave as though they already know you, or you know them. It’s made dating weird. I use the dating apps, and I try not to let potential romantic interests know my last name before we meet, but it doesn’t always work out. To this day, I’m never sure what the person across the table knows about me when I sit down. Usually it’s nothing, though, because it turns out most people don’t read books, or care much about them. 

    Your book has been inspirational to a lot of folks. Do you have a lot of people who are in recovery or considering recovery contact you and talk about how you’ve inspired them?

    Yes, and it’s one of the coolest parts. The emails are often quite personal about their drinking problems, or blackouts, or the struggles they’re having, and you’d think I’d get tired of those emails, but I devour each one. I read them in line at airports and in grocery lines and sitting in my driveway at home, because I’m so riveted by the story I can’t be bothered to turn off the engine and walk inside. I just sit in my parked car with my seat belt fastened, scrolling and scrolling like wow, huh, you don’t say, that’s wild. 

    I’ve always loved people’s stories, especially their darkest ones, and I think the emails have been an antidote to the lonely disconnect I felt when someone knew about me, but I didn’t know them. Every once in a while someone asks if I can call, or help them get sober, and I decided before the book came out I wouldn’t do that. In fact, I knew I wouldn’t respond to most emails. I didn’t have time. But most people just want to just say their piece, and move along. I do occasionally get late-night emails that will say things like, “I’ve never told anyone this, and please don’t write me back.” A couple have said, “I need to tell someone this before I die.” It’s a very strange perch to sit on, to be the recipient of these little confessionals. Mostly secret drinking problems, some affairs, risky sex, that kind of thing. I do have to wonder how many people are drunk when they write me. But many — the majority, by far — are sober people who want to say, “hey this was cool” or “hey, this meant something to me.” I never get tired of it. I’ve heard from a fair number of people who stopped drinking after they read the book, and a few send me updates on their birthday. “I have one year.” “I have two years.” That’s incredibly special. 

    Where are you at with your recovery now? 

    I was five years sober when Blackout came out, and my recovery felt so strong. I mean, jeez, why wouldn’t it? I gave up drinking, and I got the life I always wanted — I’d written a book, the book did well, I was traveling the country, people were cheering, cash and prizes, what’s not to love? I wondered how my recovery would hold up after the excitement went away and life threw me challenges, and — well, recovery got harder. I’ve had some tough years.

    I don’t struggle with a craving for alcohol, because whatever was wired in me got disconnected. I’m better without booze, and I know it. But I struggle with a craving … for what, exactly? For more. For a love relationship that I have never managed to maintain, for a family I never put together in all the years of slipping off bar stools, for a connection I found in alcohol — temporarily and ultimately at a cost that was too steep — but that can be hard to make when you are a quiet writer who works from home and lives with a rotating cast of over-loved tabbies. Twelve-steppers would tell you I need a stronger connection to my higher power, and who knows? Twelve-steppers have often been right, in my experience.

    The book I’m working on now, which has taken a long, long time, is an attempt to make sense of the frustration I’ve felt over the last few years as I edged into my forties as a single woman. Those can be confusing years for a woman who hasn’t had kids yet, if she wanted them—which I always did—because the window is closing on your fertility, and it’s like: Should I give up, or never give up? I also think that’s a challenging stretch in your sobriety. I’ve heard years six to ten referred to as “the desert years.” I just got nine years last May, so maybe I’m almost out of my little Sahara. 

    I’ve never regretted my decision to quit drinking. What I regret is not quitting sooner. But you know what they say: It takes what it takes. For me it took until the age of thirty-five. 

    Since you started your recovery in 2010, what changes have you noticed in the drinking scene, and in the social scene in general?

    Well, I’m pretty checked out on “the drinking scene,” though everyone seemed jazzed about the Aperol spritz for a while. What took me by surprise was the growth of the non-drinking scene. Sober bars and sober parties and the “sober curious.” I’m curious to see where the recovery movement goes in the 21st century, because it’s becoming less tied to the spiritual solution of 12-step programs and more tied with health and wellness and lifestyle brands. Is that good? Bad? I have my suspicions, but we’ll see. 

    I’m certainly glad to see sobriety losing its stigma. I’m thrilled to be living in the golden age of seltzers. My refrigerator is filled with La Croix and Bubbly and Waterloo and my current favorite, Spindrift. I like that bartenders who used to be dicks about making a virgin cocktail treat it more like a challenge now. Do you like ginger? Do you like pineapple? That’s nice. Not long ago I went to this amazing restaurant in Oklahoma City called Nonesuch that had non-alcoholic pairings with their dinner that were arguably more interesting than the alcoholic ones. Incredible. I commend the creativity that went into that, but I’m also glad business owners are realizing the money they’ve been leaving on the table. Suckers like me will pay a LOT for pretty drinks with no booze in them. 

    A big change is that young people are drinking less. Fashions change. I suspect we’ll reach a place where the kind of drinking that defined my era — drink-till-you-puke binge drinking — will seem old-fashioned. We’re in an era of pot and pills and whatever behavioral addiction we are all currently acquiring through our phones. I did an event with Chelsea Handler not long ago, the famously vodka-swilling Chelsea Handler, and she’s a pot evangelist. She’s starting her own line, and she’s working on a strain that doesn’t give you the munchies. I’m not into marijuana, but whoa. That sounds like a growth industry. I’m watching mom friends put away the Chardonnay and pick up the one-hitters. 

    What projects are you working on now?

    The new book is another memoir. It pivots around questions I started asking as I edged into my forties, which also happens to be the years since Blackout came out: Why did I never get married? Why did I never have kids? Is singlehood something that happened to me, or did I choose it? Is my solitude a curse, or a gift? Something I should change, or accept? In a way it’s me working through what was underneath my drinking all along, which was loneliness.

    The book dips back into my past choices, and examines deep relationships — with men, with my family, with my writing, with my own body — to try to understand how my story has unfolded, at the same time it’s tracking a larger cultural story about women’s rising place in the world, along with shifting attitudes toward marriage, love and sex, parenthood, etc. I sold the book last summer to Whitney Frick at the Dial Press, which is part of Random House, and she’s been so insightful and patient with me because it’s shifted a bit as I’ve been working on it, as books often do. My hope is that we can push it into world in 2020, but that depends on me making my fast-approaching deadline (yikes), and whatever the fates have in store for the news cycle and the general mood with regard to the presidential election. Let me say this: I was stuck for a long time. But I’m writing as fast as I can.

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • The Eternal Holiday of the Alcoholic

    The Eternal Holiday of the Alcoholic

    When you drink constantly, you become numb, slipping down into a sub-life, a waking coma. You become a chaotic ghost that exists almost at one step removed from everything else.

    The following is an excerpt from Jolly Lad – The Expanded North American Edition, published this month by MIT Press and available here.

    After I stopped drinking in August 2008 I went to Alcoholics Anonymous a lot at first – most days in fact for about half a year. I don’t go that often anymore and I haven’t done any of the twelve steps but I’d still say the programme was a crucial aid to me quitting.

    I guess even before I joined the fellowship I already had an inkling of what AA would be like. I’d seen enough soap operas, so I was prepared. Generally speaking, it was as I’d imagined it – a neon strip-lit, magnolia painted room with trestle tables and stackable chairs – usually in churches, village halls or community centres. Careworn people in comfortable clothes, chatting, sipping tea, rolling cigarettes. The 12 commandments and the 12 traditions would be unrolled and hung on the back wall. The yellow card (“Who you see here / What you hear here / When you leave here / LET IT STAY HERE!”) would be placed prominently at the front, resting against a small tub for the collection of voluntary subs at the end of the meeting. There would be a literature table full of pamphlets, information sheets and books and a box containing chips, or commemorative engraved metal tokens, for those who had hit a notable anniversary in sobriety – including the most important one: 24 hours. There would always be one or more copies of The Big Book there – the text written in 1939 by Bill W, to help alcoholics.

    Chapter Three of The Big Book says: “Most of us have been unwilling to admit we were real alcoholics. No person likes to think he is mentally different from his fellows. Therefore it is not surprising that our drinking careers have been characterised by countless vain attempts to prove we could drink like other people. The idea that somehow, someday he will control and enjoy his drinking is the great obsession of every abnormal drinker. The persistence of this illusion is astonishing. Many pursue it into the gates of insanity or death.”

    I had been prepared to pursue the chimera of controlled drinking right through the gates of death myself. When I gave up I was close to dying and had nearly checked out accidentally once earlier the same year. But I’d made my peace with death. I had come to believe that alcohol was the only thing that made life bearable. And in a lot of ways it was.

    Image via Krent Able

    There was dirt, horror and disfigurement everywhere I looked. But after one stiff drink I could leave the house; after two drinks the fear started lifting and after the third drink I’d feel like an artist. Or to be more precise, I would see the world through the eyes of an artist. And after five drinks, well, I could take my pick of them. On a good day I felt like Picasso. But there were all kinds of days. Imagine being Gustav Klimt in Hull, the golden light of the low winter sun at 3pm in the afternoon radiating along The Avenues. Imagine being Walter Sickert in Manchester, the violent brown and black smudges radiating from your feet and along canal towpaths. Imagine being Vincent van Gogh in St Helens, the sky ablaze with stars. That is something close to victory, something close to beating death.

    They laughed at me and called me a piss artist. And how right they were. I was an aesthete with a broken nose in a stained shirt and inside-out boxer shorts, drinking the world beautiful.

    When you drink constantly, you become numb, slipping down into a sub-life, a waking coma. You become a chaotic ghost that exists almost at one step removed from everything else. You float through the film of your own life. You see the sublime in the augury of fried chicken bones and tomato sauce cast upon the upper deck floor of a bus. You can divine a narrative among the finger-drawn doodles on the misted windows. You can feel your destiny in hundreds of individual condensation droplets on the glass turning red, then amber, then green.

    Everything that you’d worried about a few hours previously… Where will I get the money from? What if he beats me up? Am I seriously ill? Am I dying? Have I got cancer? What will she say when I finally get home a week late? Will she cry when we eventually go to bed together? Will she pack her things and leave the next day? How near is death? What will it be like? Will I scream and cry? What is it like to die? And now, after some drinks, there is just the sweet sensation of your life passing you by with no struggle and no fuss. The rope slides through your fingers with no friction, just warmth as a balloon rises higher and higher out of sight. I have bottles and bottles and bottles and my phone is out of credit. A Mark Rothko night. A Jackson Pollock night…

    This is the eternal holiday of the alcoholic. Once you create as much distance from your everyday life as you naturally have from orange tinted Polaroids of childhood caravan trips or stays in seaside hotels and Super 8 film reels of school sports days, then you start to experience your quotidian life like it’s the sun-bleached memory of a happy event. You feel nostalgia and warmth for boring events that are unfolding right in front of you. You feel wistful about experiences that most people would find barbaric or gauche or unremarkable. You experience the epic, the heart- warming and the hilarious in post office and supermarket queues. You develop permanently rose-tinted glasses.

    But there’s no getting away from it, after a while the strategy starts failing. You start seeing everything through the eyes of Francis Bacon, through the eyes of Edvard Munch, through the eyes of HR Giger…Your vision becomes stained and cracked.

    It is pretty tough stopping drinking but it’s not like I want a pat on the back for it.

    Image via Krent Able

    I see alcoholism as a self-inflicted leisure injury to some extent, disease or not. But going on the wagon is nothing compared to coming to terms with what you are like sober. The trouble with stopping drinking is that the only thing it solves in your life is you being drunk or hungover and ill all the time. When you stop drinking, everything you drank to avoid dealing with is still there, as bad as ever. Mental illness, debt, depression, the impulse to self-harm, the impulse to commit suicide, anxiety, social dysfunction, eating disorders, body dysmorphia, stress, anger, violent rage… I started drinking when I was 13 and was drinking every day by the time I was 15. I stayed pretty much constantly drunk until I was 37. When I stopped I had no real idea what I would be like.

    Alcoholism is debt consolidation for your life. Submit to alcoholism and your life becomes incredibly simple. Drink becomes the only thing you care about – and you will end up just fine with letting all the other stuff slide to the extent that it doesn’t even matter if you die or not. The only real problem with this arrangement is what happens if you decide to stop.

    Picture a reservoir surrounded by mountains. You have been tasked with draining the massive body of water away to repopulate the area. But once the water has gone you are faced with the former town that was initially flooded and the now wrecked buildings which need to be pulled down. Call several construction firms. People have been fly tipping here for years. There is tons of rubbish here. You will need help to clean the area up. There are corpses wrapped in carpet and chains. It was the ideal place to dump bodies. You’ll need to call the police and the coroner’s office. The press are on their way. There are rotten and half eaten animal carcasses that need to be cleared up and disposed of. Environmental health need to be involved. You have never seen so many mangled shopping trollies, broken children’s bikes and unwanted cars. The clearance job will be massive. There are burst canisters of toxic waste that have long since leached into the ground. It will be years before you can do anything with this land. The water was merely the stuff that was making this area look picturesque. What you have left in its place is an area of outstanding natural horror. It probably feels like you should have left well enough alone.

    Before claiming a seat by putting my coat on the back of it, and even before queuing up for a coffee, I went into the gents to try and freshen up. I scrubbed my hands hard and splashed freezing cold water onto my face – prodding the dark purple streaks of flesh under each eye with a fingertip. I stood for some time looking into the mirror as the water dripped off my face.

    What did I look like? A middle-aged man with long hair in a heavy metal T-shirt. The beard of someone who slept behind a hedge on an A-road roundabout. Face permanently blotched red down one side with hundreds of burst capillaries after spending three days awake doing amphetamines in 1996. A Monday night which culminated in nurses shouting: “Shave his chest, shave his chest!” A nose broken 17 times and eventually surgically rebuilt. Forehead like the cover of Unknown Pleasures. Right eyelid drooping down over a partially sighted eye, scarred and damaged beyond repair.

    George Orwell said we all get the kind of face we deserve by the time we turn 40. I had mine hammered irreversibly into place by my 25th birthday. Ostensibly I looked like the same person, but somehow as if reflected in the back of a rusty soup spoon instead of a mirror.

    Image via Krent Able

    I was comfortable with going to AA now that I’d been going for nearly two years but still, the back of the room suited me just fine – it’s not a Kate Bush concert, you’re not missing anything if you don’t sit in the front row.

    Comfort was not on the agenda the first time I went to AA however. My first visit to the rooms might as well have been my first day at senior school, or my first day in prison, for all the stress it caused me. I went while visiting friends up north and it was terrifying. A bare concrete room with old school chairs, bare lightbulbs and spiders in the corners. A retirement age man with a nose like a red, purple and blue blood sac mumbled brutal things as other broken people looked at their feet. When I stepped outside into the freezing cold night after the 60 minutes were up I had to sit on a garden wall for ten minutes, staring at the ground under an orange sodium light. I was unable to stand properly because of anxiety and I was still dizzy with fear walking away afterwards. It struck me quite clearly that there might not even be any point to giving up drinking, that it could even make things worse in some ways.

    It’s bad form to talk about the meetings or AA at all. Tradition 11 says: “Our public relations policy is based on attraction rather than promotion; we need always maintain personal anonymity at the level of press, radio and films.” I’d like to apologise for speaking about AA here, even if it is just in very general terms. I would never repeat what anyone else said there; I never talk there myself, I just sit and listen. I wait for the reassurance of identification and nothing else.

    “I was like that once. I was that bad. I never want to go back to that again.”

    Buy Jolly Lad here.

     

    This excerpt has been lightly edited for context. All identifying details of AA meetings have been changed.

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • "I Wish Daddy Didn't Drink So Much": Judith Vigna’s Misguided Bibliotherapy

    "I Wish Daddy Didn't Drink So Much": Judith Vigna’s Misguided Bibliotherapy

    Vigna seems convinced that a few watercolor washes can make the world a better place, but her idealism is misguided; stories of the horrible undercurrent of the real world are more likely to scare children.

    Although the following review is not positive, I empathize with what Judith Vigna tried to accomplish. In the late 1980’s, she took on a topic that few writers of children’s books would choose to address: how to explain family difficulties brought on by alcoholism and addiction. Beyond the intimate connection of a parent or trusted family member talking directly to a child, raising this issue on a public platform is like walking through a minefield. It’s so easy to make a single misstep that blows the project straight to heck. Not to hell, mind you, we’re talking about children’s books.

    I Wish Daddy Didn’t Drink So Much (1988) and My Big Sister Takes Drugs (1990) were published by Albert Whitman & Company as fictional self-help stories to educate kids about alcoholism and substance use disorder. With these books, Vigna invents a kind of misguided bibliotherapy designed for children in preschool to grade 3. The books do a belly flop, and it’s hard to imagine that either would successfully educate or console a young child, although that is their goal. Moreover, both books are culturally biased since they focus on white characters in either suburban America or a strange rural environment where isolated houses exist in the middle of nowhere for no good reason.

    Is such grim reality needed in children’s picture books? In the context of both of these efforts, there is a sense that something precious has been hijacked to accomplish a worthy educational goal. Children’s storybooks and picture books are a beloved part of childhood, combining the visual imagination with language. The innocence of the genre is a key element to the lasting success of so many outstanding children’s books from Maurice Sendak’s Where The Wild Things Are and Dr. Seuss’s The Cat In The Hat to Shel Silverstein’s The Giving Tree and Margaret Wise’s Goodnight Moon.

    Although each of these stories teaches a life lesson about good behavior and decency, they don’t cross the line by subverting the fantasy to morality. Indeed, the fantasy bolsters the moral message, taking it to the next level by presenting the ideas in an artistic context that provides access for a child. When I recall first reading books as a little boy, I remember the fun I experienced and the thrill of turning the pages. In Judith Vigna’s stories, the fun is replaced by a dull melancholy ruptured here and there by a disturbing undercurrent of anxiety and fear. Even when hope is presented in the end and partial solutions proffered, the ugliness remains, like the father’s undeterred alcoholism in I Wish Daddy Didn’t Drink So Much.

    The best example of this replacement happens in I Wish Daddy Didn’t Drink So Much, aimed at kids in pre-school to grade 2. The night before Christmas is disturbed when young Lisa’s drunken father stumbles into her bedroom dressed as Santa Claus. On the very first page of text in the book, Lisa explains that the costume did not fool her for a second. She says, “I knew it was only Daddy in a Santa Claus suit because he bumped into my bed twice and spilled beer on the rug. I didn’t like that. When Daddy drinks a lot of beer, he acts funny.”

    In other words, even a child knows that Santa Claus doesn’t show up drunk. Still, Lisa is excited because her father is going to take her sledding the next day. Santa even leaves a note taped to her new sled that says her daddy promised him that they would go sledding and try out the present after breakfast. Unfortunately, Daddy is too hungover to go sledding. Lisa asks later in the day if they can go, but Dad is drinking beer while watching television, focused solely on the hair of the dog that bit him the night before.

    Lisa’s father ignores her request, and she gets mad, telling him that he promised. The face of the little girl is drawn with such sadness and disappointment. Reacting to her feelings, her father lashes out and yells at Lisa. She ends up playing with her sled in the house, imagining that she’s in the clouds but feeling sad and scared.

    Although there is no direct physical violence in the book, beyond loud fights between the mother and father, the threat looms. The bad times continue and culminate with an intoxicated failed attempt to go sledding. Later, Lisa mopes outside as her mother and father have a big screaming match inside the house with sounds of breaking glass.

    The story ends when Lisa and her mother escape her father’s drunken anger by going over to Mrs. Field’s house. They have a nice Christmas dinner with this old lady, and Lisa opens up about how her father’s drinking destroyed Christmas. Mrs. Field tells Lisa that she used to drink too much before she got help. One day, her father might be ready to get help as well. Until then, she advises this little girl, “you can learn to be happier. You can try to do one of your favorite things every day.”

    And that’s about it. There’s a closing bit where Lisa returns home and her father promises to take her sledding on Sunday. But nothing changes, and Lisa remains in a crappy situation with little learned and less relieved. Telling a child to do one of her favorite things every day as a response to alcoholism in the family is like telling a cancer patient to go to Disneyland every weekend. It profoundly fails to address the primary problem.

    Vigna seems convinced that a few watercolor washes can make the world a better place, but her idealism is misguided; stories of the horrible undercurrent of the real world are more likely to scare children. Story time is not when the dark issues of humanity should be raised with children. Going out and doing a favorite thing is not an effective approach to dealing with an alcoholic parent.

    In complex.com’s list of The 25 Most Ridiculous Holiday Children’s Books, Vigna’s book comes in at number one. It’s an impressive accomplishment because the competition is stiff, ranging from How Santa Lost His Pants and How Santa Lost His Job to Santa Cow Island and The Flying Canoe: A Christmas Story.

    My Big Sister Takes Drugs is Judith Vigna’s second attempt at the bibliotherapy children’s picture book genre. Designed for Grades 2 through 3, a slightly older crowd from seven to nine years old, the book tells the story of little Paul who is dealing with the fact that his teenage sister, Tina, is using drugs. The drugs profoundly change Tina in a negative way. Rather than play games with Paul, she offers him prescription pills. Later, after being busted by the cops for smoking crack in the park with her delinquent friends, Tina is shipped off to rehab. Tina’s drug use causes Paul to lose friends because other parents don’t want their kids around his older sister. Also, once Tina goes to rehab, there is no money left to send him to soccer camp.

    As part of a Vigna’s desperate drug education and awareness program, this dank children’s picture book only succeeds in stigmatizing substance use disorder. Okay, Tina has become a mean big sister and hangs out with mean kids. Paul feels threatened in his own home. However, these scare tactics of losing friends and opportunities because of drug usage are counterproductive to any real understanding of addiction as a disease in general and a family disease in particular.

    The story is poorly told and not believable. For example, there is a weird section where Tina tries to get her brother high on New Year’s Eve, offering him prescription medication while she reclines on her bed. Paul declines and Tina calls him a chicken. When Paul inevitably tells his parents about the incident, Tina is grounded for a week.

    Such a sequence makes little or no sense. Why would a teenage sister want to give her little brother drugs? Why would she be home on New Year’s Eve with her little brother and not out with her friends? Does Vigna understand drug culture and teens at all? Tina is way too open about what she is doing with both her parents and Paul. The generally secretive nature of adolescent drug use is replaced with typical adolescent rebellion, a replacement which does not do justice to the truly insidious nature of drug abuse and addiction. I wondered why Judith Vigna did not do more first-hand research before writing a book designed to educate children on such a crucial issue.

    At the same time, at this very moment, I feel a bit guilty about being so hard on Judith Vigna. Although her idealism might be misdirected, it comes from a loving instinct to do good in the world and help other people. At the end of I Wish Daddy Didn’t Drink So Much, she includes A Note to Grown-ups. In this note, Vigna writes about the challenge of alcoholism as a family disease: “The children tend to blame themselves, and without adequate support, may feel ashamed, confused, and alone… Parents and other caring adults can help by reassuring children that they are not responsible for the drinking.”

    But despite such good intentions, Vigna’s attempt to offer such reassurance and educate children about substance use disorder, a worthy and necessary goal, falls flat. 

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • So You Want to Write About Addicts

    So You Want to Write About Addicts

    At its best, addict lit satiates our quintessential human yearning for stories that may lead to salvation. We want warm fuzzies. We want sweet, sweet, redemption.

    We started each morning of residential treatment with burned muffins, a house meeting, and introductions.

    “My name is Tom and I’m a junkie here on vacation. My goal today is to lay in the sun and sample the delicious food in this all-inclusive resort.”

    Tom’s sarcasm made orange juice squirt out of my nose. Humor was an elixir for the boredom of early sobriety and monotony of the rehab center’s strict daily schedule.

    Our addiction counselor corrected Tom: “You need to take this more seriously. I need you to redo that and tell us your real goal for today.”

    The story that society tells about addiction is one of tragedy. When we talk about addicts, we talk about pain, drama, and heartbreak. Of course, addiction is all of these things, but it’s also a rich, multi-faceted story with humor and joy. When we let addiction define the entirety of a human being’s existence, we flatten people to one-dimensional caricatures.

    The story that society tells about my favorite tragic hero Kurt Cobain is a prime example; his sense of humor gets buried beneath his pain. The media glosses over parts of his personality, like how he wore pajamas on his wedding day and a puffy-sleeved, yellow dress to a heavy metal show on MTV. “The show is called Head Banger’s Ball, so I thought I’d wear a gown,” Cobain deadpanned. “But nobody got me a corsage.”

    Two weeks after Nirvana released Nevermind, they pranked the famous British show Top of the Pops. Wearing sunglasses and a smirk, Cobain infuriated producers and the audience when he dramatically sang “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” in a mopey style that evoked Morrissey from The Smiths.

    If you want to write about addiction, remember that two seemingly contradictory things can be true at the same time. Addicts can be both funny and tragic. Another example: Cobain’s original name for In Utero was I Hate Myself and Want To Die, but the record company opposed the title, fearing that fans wouldn’t understand the dark humor.

    While I love satire, I also understand why we don’t want to minimize the seriousness of addiction. Addicts suffer. Addicts bleed. Addicts, like Cobain, die too young.

    *

    I know a thing or two about almost dying.

    I recently discovered an old home movie of my ex Sam* and me. In the video, we were strung out like Christmas lights. Watching it made me feel like a voyeur in my own life.

    Thick tongued, I slur, “Let’s jaaammmm,” to my musician boyfriend. He pushes a tuft of blonde hair out of my face. My unruly David Bowie mullet always gets in the way.

    Sam’s strumming his acoustic guitar and singing “Needle and The Hay” by Elliot Smith, a classic junkie song.

    I’m taking the cure/ So I can be quiet whenever I want.

    He hands me a bass guitar, but I can’t hold it. My limbs go limp. Thunk. The maple-neck, cherry wood bass crashes to the floor.

    So leave me alone/ You ought to be proud that I’m getting good marks.

    The bass doesn’t break, but I do. I try to pick it up, but my body slumps into a question mark. I look like a bobble head doll, with glassy blue-green eyes. Doll eyes blinking open and shut. Opiate eyes. Open and shut. Haunting thing.

    Sam stops singing. “Are you okay? Tessa, did you take Klonopin this morning?”

    Shut. When my eyes roll in the back of my head, he grabs my shoulders and commands, “Wake up! Wake up!”

    “I’m fiiiinnnneeee,” I mumble as my pale skin turns blue.

    I wouldn’t be fine for years.

    *

    When I heard there was going to be an opioid overdose memorial, I was skeptical. When I saw that Showtime was releasing a new docuseries about the epidemic called The Trade, I was skeptical. When Andrew Sullivan christened a non-addict “Poet Laurette of the opioid epidemic,” in a New York Magazine essay, I was skeptical. But not surprised. Never surprised.

    I’m skeptical because I’ve been devouring books, essays, documentaries, and movies about the opioid epidemic for years, charting their predictable rhetoric, cliché story arcs, and stigmatizing portrayal of addicts: addicts as cautionary tales, signal fires, propellers for drama. We’re afraid to color outside these lines, to show the ways in which addicts contain multitudes.

    I wear skepticism like a shell. It feels safer than being vulnerable. My skepticism asks questions like: who has the right to tell the addict’s story? How can a writer dip their plume into the well of an addict’s pain without having been there herself? How can we do justice to addicts and the addiction story?

    If you want to write about addicts, you first need to familiarize yourself with the formula and conventions of the “addict lit” genre. The territory has been well-charted in recent books like Leslie Jamison’s The Recovering.

    Human beings are intrigued by conflict and drama. We are all complicit. I am, too. Even though I’ve been clean for multiple years and know that I shouldn’t be gawking, I do. Even though I feel like they exploit people’s pain for entertainment, I still watch shows like Intervention and Celebrity Rehab with Doctor Drew. These shows jolt us out of the doldrums of our own lives or, if we are addicts ourselves, they reassure us that we are not alone.

    We watch from a safe distance, with the luxury of returning to the comfort of our own cocoons. At its best, addict lit satiates our quintessential human yearning for stories that may lead to salvation. We want warm fuzzies. We want sweet, sweet, redemption.

    *

    If you want to write a story about the opioid epidemic, you must imagine how addicts hunger for stories that represent us, encourage empathy, and feel believable. We long for stories to be our anchors and buoys to keep us afloat. Unfortunately, some stories sink. We must study those too, as a lesson of what not to do.

    The Prescribed to Death Memorial is a dehumanizing failure. It features a wall of 22,000 faces carved on pills to pay tribute to those who overdosed in 2017. If I died of an overdose, I wouldn’t want my face carved on a pill.

    I’ve spent my whole life being carved out. Instead, I’d like to know what it feels like to be whole.

    When I heard about the docuseries The Trade, I quickly signed up for a free trial of Showtime and checked its Metacritic score: 84.

    Steve Greene of Indie Wire praises the series. The Trade “doesn’t purport to be a corrective or some magic key to unlocking the problem. But as a means for empathy and a way to understanding the human cost at each step of an international heroin trade, it does far more than hollow words and shallow promises.”

    Each episode shifts between three main story arcs: a Mexican drug cartel, law enforcement, and addicts and their families. It is technically well-made, with sharp cinematography and juxtapositions like masked members of the cartel guarding poppy fields in Mexico as children play in the street; a grieving mother and father at a memorial rally in Ohio flying signs that say, “Hope Not Dope.”

    But the series was predictable and flat. The addict’s story arc of The Trade is a simple five-part dramatic structure. In the exposition, we see white middle-class young adults are prescribed painkillers for a sports injury or surgery. As their physical dependence grows, they need more and more to manage their pain. At the climax, they switch to heroin because it’s cheaper and sometimes easier to find than painkillers. They fall deep into the well of addiction.

    Then they go to rehab or they don’t. Cut. End scene.

    Paste film critic Amy Glynn says it was “dangerous from a watchability perspective…Junkies don’t make good television because they are really, really damned boring. They are painfully uninteresting, because heroin turns most people into zombie reptiles who are deeply depressed and deeply depressing.”

    At first, I was taken aback by this quote. But Glynn has a point. If you want to write about the opioid epidemic, you might want to do more than rely on pain porn. The poetry of a needle plunging into the crook of a junkie’s arm, crimson swirling into the plunger. Junkies drifting through public streets like zombies.

    Glynn redeems herself: “Someone needs to start telling the rest of the story. Like now.”

    *

    If you want to write a story about addicts, you need to realize that it’s still a stigmatized condition. My friend had to leave a grief group because other parents said her son’s overdose death was his fault and not as sad as a child who died of cancer. It’s as though grief was some sort of competition of suffering and pain. But an entire super bowl stadium could be filled with dead bodies like her son. There were 64,000 overdose deaths in the US in 2016.

    If you want to write a story about addicts, you need to know that life-saving medication-assisted-treatments like Suboxone and methadone are still expensive and difficult to access. Unfortunately, many treatment centers are “abstinence-only,” meaning they don’t allow their patients to take Suboxone or methadone. For a more in-depth plunge into the world of harm reduction, read Tracey Helton, Tessie Castillo, or Maia Szalavitz.

    *

    In addition to these dire facts, we have to deal with our stories being appropriated and exploited. Enter the poet William Brewer, who has never used opioids or struggled with addiction himself. Brewer inhabits the voice of addicts in his poetry book, I Know Your Kind. The title derives from a Cormac McCarthy quote, but it’s very clear to me that Brewer doesn’t “know my kind.”

    I don’t want to be harsh on Brewer. Being from the polite Midwest where we’re supposed to avoid confrontation, I almost deleted this part. But Brewer’s words feel like a chisel mining people’s pain. I also feel it’s my responsibility as a recovering addict and writer to call it like I see it.

    Brewer writes lines like: “Tom’s hand on the table looked like warm bread. I crushed it with a hammer, then walked him to the E.R. to score pills” and “Who can stand another night stealing fistfuls of pills from our cancer-sick neighbors?”

    In a world where artists and writers are constantly being called out for cultural appropriation, I was surprised that nobody called Brewer out for appropriating the addict’s story for his own artistic gain. Brewer’s sole connection to the epidemic is that he was born and raised in Virginia, the state with the highest overdose death rate in the nation. In an interview with Virginia Public Radio, Brewer said when he visited over the holidays, he inquired about whereabouts of former classmates. “People replied, ‘They’re on the pills. We don’t really see them anymore.’”

    If you want to write about an addict, you should avoid infantilizing and dehumanizing addicts, along with the trope that addicts are all “lost and forsaken.” Some of the strongest, most courageous people I know are addicts. Active drug users like The People’s Harm Reduction Alliance in Seattle established needle exchanges, distributed the overdose reversal drug, naloxone, and are fighting to open supervised safe injection sites.

    *

    If you want to write a story about addiction, realize that most addicts struggle with whether or not they should publicly share this part of their identity. For a long time, I didn’t think I’d ever write about my addictions to alcohol, opiates, and benzos. I didn’t have the courage. Here in the Midwest, we keep the laundry to ourselves. We don’t air it out. When I wrote about my first struggle with alcoholism in 2011, my family warned me that it could impact my future job opportunities and dating. I knew they were just looking out for my “best interests.” But I insisted: my privacy, my mistakes, my choice. I hoped that sharing my addiction and vulnerability might be therapeutic for me and maybe even help others.

    If you ‘re going to write a story about addiction, realize how it’s affected by different identities. For example, I’m extremely lucky, because I have supportive friends and family. When I was broke and had nothing, they offered me food, shelter, and support. Also related to my privilege as a white, middle-class woman is that I don’t have a criminal record. Yes, my hospital records bother me, but they are protected by confidentiality laws.

    In a way, writing about my addiction felt like making these private records a public matter. I was hesitant. Brewer was also reluctant to write about the opioid epidemic, for different reasons. He said, “West Virginia is very rarely looked at in a positive light. And so here again is a situation where something really quite terrible is going on, but it became so clear that this thing wasn’t going to go away and was starting to seep into my daily life.”

    *

    Heroin doesn’t seep into most people’s daily lives. Heroin is a tsunami. Heroin drowns.

    *

    There may be value in writing beyond our own experience, as Brewer did. Representation is important and if we all followed the advice to only “write what we know,” things could get bland and boring. Artistic expression would suffer. But it’s a tightrope. It’s a practice in tremendous empathy, wanting to diversify representation, while also being respectful and staying in your lane.

    *

    If you want to write about addicts, you’d benefit from also depicting the humor of early recovery, a story that often falls outside the margins. When I was digging through my own videos and journals, I was of course humiliated by some of my own narcissism and self pity. But I was also surprised and heartened by the unexpected joys like my friendship with Tom at my first rehab.

    On my first day, I noticed him in the smoking tent, wearing bright red Converse, a beret, and long sleeves to hide his track marks. I noticed the way his brown eyes brimmed with both kindness and sadness as he deadpanned in meetings.

    “You guys are like The Wonder Twins of rehab,” staff said. Despite our 20-year age difference, we were inseparable.

    Tom bummed me Parliament menthols and lent me one of his ear buds, so we could listen to The Replacements, The Pixies or The Velvet Underground together. On weekends, we went to record stores, ate pizza, and he read my shitty poetry. We made beaded lizards and built crooked birdhouses bedazzled with feathers and glitter.

    One day in group, we had to watch a 1987 film called, The Cat Who Drank and Used Too Much.

    “Was I just daydreaming, or did you just say we are watching a movie starring a cat?” Tom asked.

    “Yes, it’s made for kids. Lost and Found Ministries recommended it as a good way for parents to explain addiction to their kids.”

    “Drunken cats, who knew?” I said.

    I later learned that the film was praised as an “audience favorite about a beer drinking, drug addicted cat,” when it was screened at the Oddball Film Festival in San Francisco.

    Our story begins in any town USA, a sleepy suburban neighborhood lined with rosebushes and plush green lawns. Cue sappy flute and piano elevator music with too much treble.

    The film opens as Pat the Cat is getting into a red car for his morning commute. We see Pat drinking alcohol from a pitcher and beginning to experiment with other things. A cigarette here, some prescription pills, a bit of coke there (powdered sugar).

    “He’d try anything, it was never enough. Then it was too much.” Pat crashes his car and almost loses everything, but then decides to go to rehab!

    “I’m not trying to be catty, but Pat seems to be pretty well-off to me,” Tom said.

    At the end of the movie, Pat has a cupcake to celebrate his sobriety. Ah, it seemed like only a few weeks!

    “If only it were that easy!” I said.

    “Sure, his life isn’t purr-fect, but it’s pretty close!”

    *

    What I’m trying to say is: If you want to write a story about an addict, we might not be perfect, but we can do better. Starting now.

    If you want to read stories about heroin or the opioid epidemic, I recommend starting with nonfiction. There is power in reading about people’s lived experiences.

    Of course there are also excellent and illuminating fictional books about the opioid/ heroin addiction. Check out this list by Kevin Pickard.

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • Neil Strauss' Evolution: From Pick-Up Artist to Relationship Expert

    Neil Strauss' Evolution: From Pick-Up Artist to Relationship Expert

    “Your relationship success has nothing to do with your partner, it’s really all about you and working on yourself…Until you do that you’ll always fall in love with the same kind of person.”

    Neil Strauss has an enviable list of accomplishments. A nine time best-selling author, he got his start as a music critic writing for The New York Times and Rolling Stone; he has toured with and written about heavy metal bands, and penned books with some of the greatest rock stars. He’s written about how to survive in a post-apocalyptic world from a survivalist’s point of few, harboring skills such as flying a plane, delivering a baby, and fashioning a knife out of a credit card.

    Strauss’ The Game: Penetrating The Secret Society of Pick Up Artists, is one of the top two most shoplifted pieces of literature from Barnes and Noble. The other one? The Bible. Both are similar in appearance and in length: hardcover leather with gold embossed titles on the cover.

    Even though it’s been over a decade since its debut, The Game, which many view as the holy grail on how to seduce and lure women into the bedroom, was recently released in its 11th hardcover edition. To Game fans, Strauss is somewhat of a Messiah. He delves into the elusive PUA (Pick Up Artist) scene and morphs from geek to the ultimate ladies’ man. He goes undercover, adopting the name “Style,” and by making adjustments and using certain puzzling techniques that verge on reverse psychology, he discovers that suddenly he can have any woman he wants. He explains lingo including terms such as peacocking: to wear something flashy and unusual in a crowded venue to get a romantic prospect’s attention; sarging: to go out to look for willing participants to try PUA moves on; kino: touching your object of desire sporadically during a conversation to establish a connection and build trust; and closing: sealing the deal and ending things with a kiss and/or a trip to the bedroom.

    Eventually Strauss left the PUA community, but not empty-handed. He began teaching others how to wine and dine women by starting “StyleLife Academy,” which made him an unexpected celebrity and hero to many men. His admirers also included an unlikely group: the FBI. The Game was required reading for agents. Few details are known other than Strauss was personally invited to train them in an undisclosed location. He applied the same techniques he honed for picking up women to teach FBI agents how to open a conversation and gain the trust of suspects, with the ultimate goal of closing: luring confessions out of the bad guys.

    One cannot play the game forever, so where does the hero go next? When it came time for the sequel, Strauss went in a radically different direction.

    The Truth: An Uncomfortable Book About Relationships is the exact opposite of a dating guide; it’s about Strauss’ journey from to player to monogamous man. His painfully honest candor is refreshing and as the title states, it’s an uncomfortable book. Some of the most brilliant work comes from pushing the limits of our comfort zones, and Strauss shares all, revealing details of his adventures into the world of polyamory, orgies and open relationships. On the occasion of The Truth’s re-release in paperback several weeks ago—with a new subtitle: An Eye-Opening Odyssey Through Love Addiction, Sex Addiction, and Extraordinary Relationships—we had the opportunity to talk to Strauss about emotional health, healthy relationships, and who he hopes his book will appeal to.

    “You write a book and you never know who the audience is, men who are struggling with intimacy and relationship issues in general, and women too.” Strauss tells The Fix.

    The Truth details how life has changed for the author post Game. After years of playing the field, he’s met the right girl at the wrong time. When she discovers that he’s had a fling with one of her friends, he checks into treatment for sex addiction in hopes to better understand himself and to save their relationship. He quickly comes to realize that what he experienced during his childhood has a lot more to do with the way he’s wired than he had thought. He accepts that he will have to make peace with his past, a realization that resonates with many individuals, whether they’re in recovery or not.

    “Whatever issue someone is experiencing, whether it’s sex addiction or something else, you have to get to the core of it. We all have core wounds that take place in our first 17 years. Those imperfections get passed on and whatever label you want to put on it doesn’t matter, you just have to fix it.”

    Few authors are recognized beyond their words on a page, but whether or not he intended on it, Strauss has become a guru in the topics of life, seduction and love. It’s no longer about how to get the girl; with the massive success he’s had, there are now men and women enrolled in Stylelife Academy. He’s gone beyond instructing others how to be the ultimate PUA. It’s about guiding others to live their lives to the fullest.

    “I think I’m fortunate. I love learning about people and new things. I found something that changes my life and solves my problems [and] I want to share that,” he says of the journey that has led him to where he is today: a settled down family man with a beautiful wife and son.

    So what comes after The Truth? Stauss has no plans to stop sharing what he’s learned with others. He’s preparing to lead a workshop called The H.A.V.E.: The Human Anti-Virus Experience, a three day intensive workshop where he’ll meet and teach those who want to do some serious work on themselves.

    “If everyone took a course between high school and college, the world would be a much more comfortable place. Emotional health needs to be taken as seriously as physical health. There needs to be something for people to take to de-program everything they were taught growing up and all of their false beliefs. I couldn’t find one out there that didn’t seem dark or culty so I created one.” He’ll share what’s he learned over the years, and bring in the very instructors who guided him on his path to self-realization.

    It’s easy to get distracted when speaking with an author who has such an array of experiences, and has the kind of life that so many only dream of. After a conversation with Strauss, it’s clear why he was awarded “The greatest pick up artist who ever lived.” The charisma is there and he’s filled with sincerity. Of course there are so many questions I want to ask him, but before my time with him is up, he leads me back to The Truth, and leaves me with valuable advice:

    “There are a lot of bad single-sided myths about relationships in our culture. Your relationship success has nothing to do with your partner, it’s really all about you and working on yourself. You can’t accept your partner as they are unless you work on yourself. Until you do that you’ll always fall in love with the same kind of person.”

    When asked what the future holds, Strauss told us he’s far from finished: “I have so many books I want to write. I want to keep telling amazing and better stories.”

    The Truth: An Uncomfortable Book About Relationships is now available in paperback. For more information on what Neil Strauss is up to, how you can attend The H.A.V.E. and learn other survival skills, go to www.neilstrauss.com.

    View the original article at thefix.com