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Tag: erin khar

  • Strung Out: An Interview with Erin Khar

    Strung Out: An Interview with Erin Khar

    When I was in a 12-step program, I had so much shame… Some people seemed pissed off when you relapsed. I get that it’s upsetting, but have a little compassion.

    Erin Khar is an award-winning writer known for her deeply personal essays on addiction, recovery, mental health, parenting and self-care. “Ask Erin,” her weekly Ravishly column, attracts more than 500K unique readers per month. Her work is published in SELF, Marie Claire, Redbook, and anthologies including Lilly Dancyger’s Burn It Down: Women Writing About Anger. Her first full-length memoir, Strung Out: One Last Hit and Other Lies That Nearly Killed Me (Park Row Books, February 25), will be released this month.

    Khar battled heroin for 15 years. Her intro to opioids came in pill form at age eight. It was the year her parents split up. In Strung Out she writes, “My Dad had moved out and my mother drifted from room to room in our old Spanish house with a weightlessness that I could tell threatened to take her away.”

    Khar suffered from overwhelming feelings that she didn’t understand. “A panic spread across my chest, filling my body with heat, trapping me. I ran to the bathroom and locked the door. As I reminded myself to breathe, some instinct led me to the medicine cabinet.”

    With anxiety pounding, the third grader fumbled past Band-Aids and Tylenol and found her grandmother’s bottle of Darvocet, which warned: “May Cause Drowsiness and Dizziness.” She wanted so badly to stop hurting she popped two big red pills into her mouth, then gulped from the faucet to wash them down. The burning heat of anxiety soon gave way to a “lightness of little bubbles.” Erin felt like she might float out of her body; this was the escape she’d yearned for.

    Strung Out depicts one person’s journey against the backdrop of America’s opioid crisis. The book is written in gorgeous, accessible prose. Candor and vulnerability come through in a natural, believable voice, conveying what many trauma survivors know intimately: pain, anxiety, rage, depression.

    Khar snorted heroin for the first time at age 13. At first, she’d said no to the boyfriend urging her to try it; her stolen pills felt like enough. But her guy persisted, describing it as a much better high. It was also the quickest route to forgetting. When Khar was four, a teen boy began molesting her. The abuse continued for years. Like many survivors, Khar told no one and desperately tried to block it from her mind. 

    “I needed to be somewhere else, someone else,” Khar told The Fix. 

    Strung Out is a page-turner that follows the progression of addiction: Narcotics seem like a magical solution until the relief morphs into a monster roaring for more. Opioids are now responsible for 47,000 deaths per year—that’s nearly two-thirds of all drug-related deaths in the U.S. 

    Reading Khar’s book felt like listening to a confidante, a kindred spirit who “got me.” We sat down in a New York City garden to talk about the hell of addiction and colossal relief of long-term recovery.

    What idea sparked this book?

    I wrote Strung Out because it was the book I wish I’d had when I was younger. I want to open up the conversation. Why do people take drugs? And why can’t they stop? The more we talk about it the more we can get rid of the stigma and shame surrounding it. Many people still don’t seem to understand addiction. I want to encourage empathy and compassion and give people hope.

    I love that your then 12-year-old son asked if you ever did drugs. Can you tell me about that?

    At first, I pretended I didn’t hear him. [Laughs] I tried not to cringe at my deflection.

    I stalled by saying, “That’s a complicated question.” I didn’t know what to say. I did use drugs. A lot of them. Heroin was on and off from 13 to 28. That’s when I got pregnant with him. But how much should I tell him? I’d smoked crack, done acid, taken Ecstasy.

    You describe childhood guilt and shame vividly. Looking back, do you think that was rage turned inward?

    Oh yeah. It definitely had to do with early trauma. All I knew then was a nagging feeling. It wasn’t until I was 19 that I came to terms with everything. Before that, I minimized what happened to me, trying to shove [memories] aside. It took a long time for me to see that my therapist was right: my anger had sublimated into guilt.

    Do you look back now and understand your feelings of shame?

    Yes. I took responsibility for things because it gave me the feeling that I was in control. Can anyone process that kind of childhood trauma all in one go? I don’t know. Maybe it takes a lifetime to process? Maybe I’m still processing it.

    Do you get triggered due to PTSD?

    Yes. Even though I’ve done a lot of work on myself, I still have hypervigilance. My body reacts strongly to some situations, like if I’m startled by something, and especially if I’m asleep.

    Can you describe things that helped? Especially for anyone who is trying but can’t stop using.

    The first thing was accepting that I wasn’t going to be fixed overnight. Then it was forgiving myself for relapsing constantly. For me, whatever I’m dealing with, if I break it down into small, digestible increments, it’s a lot easier to handle. Focusing on the big picture is not helpful. That’s why they say a day at a time.

    How did you stop relapsing?

    By being honest about relapses. When I was in a 12-step program, I had so much shame. It was detrimental to worry about being judged at meetings. [Some] people in AA seemed pissed off when you relapsed. I get that it’s upsetting but have a little fucking compassion. [So] I hid relapses, which made it a lot easier to do it again. Finally, I was honest about [chronically] relapsing and that helped me stop. You do not have to relapse. It’s not a requirement of recovery but I don’t think that we unlearn things in 30 days or 60 days or 90 days or a year. I don’t think it happens that quickly. For anyone who struggles with addiction, we want immediate relief. 

    Like pushing a button?

    Yes. I wanted to be numb. Stop thinking. In recovery, my biggest life lessons were learning to have patience, be honest, and work on accepting things I have no control over.

    Did you find things easier when you began opening up?

    First, I had to get through my fear that people were always judging me. It took work. I wouldn’t say it was easy but yes, I did get better. 

    How do you feel about your upbringing now?

    I definitely don’t blame my parents for any of the choices I made. Even the choices when I was really young. I hid the sexual abuse and my depression from them. I hid my suicidal feelings. If my parents had stayed together and everything had been perfect, I may still have hid things. It may be a function of my personality.

    Today I have a really good relationship with both of my parents and they have a really good friendship with each other. I will forever be grateful that no matter what happened, through everything I did, they never turned their backs on me. I have a very different idea about tough love than I used to. When I was first trying to get sober, the general idea of interventions and dealing with somebody who was addicted was this hard line of tough love. 

    I used to deal with people that way. But now, I really don’t think it works. That doesn’t mean that you should enable people. But, for me, I was lucky. Despite everything I had done to my parents—years of lying and stealing—our family connection remained. That door was still open when I finally asked for help.

    Erin Khar talks hope, shame, and recovery:

     

    Order Strung Out: One Last Hit and Other Lies That Nearly Killed Me

     

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • Redefining Recovery: The Evolution of the Addiction Memoir

    Redefining Recovery: The Evolution of the Addiction Memoir

    From “Drugstore Cowboy” to “My Fair Junkie,” the focus of addiction literature has shifted to recovery.

    In July, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced that last year, overdose deaths dropped slightly—from 70,000 to 68,000—the first dip since 1990.

    “Lives are being saved, and we’re beginning to win the fight against this crisis,” tweeted Alex Azar, the U.S. secretary of health and human services.

    But who’s “we,” exactly?

    Though I doubt Azar had contemporary literature in mind in the fight against addiction, it was the first thing I thought of when I read the statistic. For years, drugs and alcohol were so romanticized in literary culture, the words “writer” and “addict” seemed inseparable. Here it’s worth noting that, while you and perhaps many of the authors listed here might disagree, for this article—and, truthfully, because I do in general—I’m merging alcoholism and drug addiction into one thing, even if the individual recovery looks different.

    Back in 1990—when overdose deaths began to climb—novels like Drugstore Cowboy (1990), Leaving Las Vegas (1990), and Jesus’ Son (1992) presented a glamorized view of addiction. While these depictions weren’t sanitized, and it could be argued that they were less celebratory of boozy culture than the party chic depicted by F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, or even the work of beat generation authors like Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs, or later Hunter S. Thompson, these portrayals left their mark.

    Sarah Hepola, author of 2014’s best-selling memoir, Blackout (a redemptive portrait of addiction), agrees that she, too, “link[ed] writing with drinking and a kind of artful indulgence and libertinism… something close to a job description.” 

    But the culture has changed dramatically, and books today—like Hepola’s—offer more views of recovery than debauchery.

    The groundwork was perhaps first laid with Caroline Knapp’s Drinking, A Love Story (1996). Knapp took on not only addiction, but cutting, anorexia, and compulsive spending. Harrowing as her account was, the narrative throughout was informed by the lens of inevitable sobriety.

    Hepola remembers reading that book, “Chardonnay in hand.” But even if her “stomach sank” when Knapp sobered up, Hepola sensed that the author “was also thriving.” For Hepola, reading that book was part of an awakening that sobriety “might not be the death [she] feared.”

    Yet it wasn’t until Mary Karr’s Lit came out in 2009 that readers really got the chance to see addiction from the vantage point of long-term sobriety. This isn’t to say Karr made recovery look easy. As Karr wrote, “I haven’t so much gone insane as awakened to the depth and breadth of my preexisting insanity, a bone-deep sadness or a sense of having been a mistake.” That she would recover, however, was a foregone conclusion. That she would flourish—more so as a sober person than a drunk one—was obvious from her career.

    Since then, books more focused on recovery than addiction began to trickle in. There was Bill Cleggs’ 90 Days (2012), Hepola’s Blackout (2014), Lisa F. Smith’s Girl Walks Out of a Bar (2016), Amy Dresner’s My Fair Junkie (2017), and Catherine Gray’s The Unexpected Joys of Being Sober (2017).

    Then last year brought an avalanche. Leslie Jamison’s The Recovering, Kristi Coulter’s Nothing Good Can Come from This, Janelle Hanchett’s I’m Just Happy to Be Here, Porochista Khakpour’s Sick, Stephanie Wittels Wachs’ Everything is Horrible and Wonderful, and Tom Macher’s Halfway all came out in 2018.

    And it was this plethora of titles that made me wonder, could this uptick in rehabilitative tales have contributed to the decrease in overdose deaths? 

    It may not be possible to establish a cause-effect relationship, but there are clear correlations between art and life. The Netflix show 13 Reasons Why (based on a novel of the same name), has faced tremendous backlash over alleged copycat suicides, and research has shown these concerns to be valid. And despite the number of holes that could be poked in this idea—starting with how incomplete this list of titles is and including the fact that this study was provoked by the broadcast and not the book—it’s undeniable that recovery from addiction has a new kind of cachet thanks to these books. 

    And this trend doesn’t show signs of slowing, with more recovery titles on the way, including Dan Peres’ As Needed for Pain (February 2020), Eileen Zimmerman’s Smacked: A Story of White Collar Ambition, Addiction, and Tragedy (February 2020), Erin Khar’s Strung Out: One Last Hit and Other Lies That Nearly Killed Me (February 2020), and Rose Andersen’s The Heart and Other Monsters: a Memoir (July 2020).

    What may be even more interesting—and, dare I say, hopeful—about these titles, is that each offers its own individual path in recovery. There’s no one right way to do it, which not only reflects reality, but might make the prospect more palatable to more people.

    Khar, for instance, recalls looking for relatable stories. “There were very few books about drug addiction written by women, and I didn’t find any of them.” So she set out to write one.

    “I want my book to give people hope and to reduce the stigma around speaking about drug addiction,” says Khar. “I wrote Strung Out because it was the book I needed when I was younger.” 

    Andersen, whose forthcoming book addresses both her and her deceased sister’s addiction, puts it bluntly—”For so long, [the] addiction [narrative] has been centered on the white, male experience,” she says. “Even basic AA literature was written by and for men, so to expand the voices that can be read and heard in this genre is vital.”

    Another important facet of this trend is that getting sober isn’t the end of the story. Hepola puts it this way: “Addiction and alcoholism has been a helpful lens through which to understand my relationship with alcohol (and food and men), but it’s not the only lens.”

    These books reassure us that there is life beyond addiction, more to recovery than the sad dirge of replaying past exploits.

    “Sobriety is really about cracking open possibilities,” says Hepola. “A life that is so much bigger than the bar stool.”

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • Harpies, Bitches, Witches and Whores: Women Write About Anger in New Anthology

    Harpies, Bitches, Witches and Whores: Women Write About Anger in New Anthology

    “People can see an angry man [who is] fighting for a cause and see him as strong. It’s not the same for women—especially not for women of color and trans women.”

    Burn It Down: Women Writing About Anger is a fiery collection of 22 essays. Editor Lilly Dancyger (Catapult, Narratively, Barrel House Books), an accomplished essayist (Longreads, The Rumpus) and journalist (Rolling Stone, Washington Post), brought together a diverse group of writers. Currently Dancyger is working on a memoir about her artist father and his heroin addiction.

    With empathy in short supply these days, Burn It Down is an invigorating read. The collection is filled with compelling creative nonfiction in the form of first-person narratives from women of different races, ethnic groups, and religions. No matter how you identify—cis female, cis male, trans, or nonbinary—there is a lot to learn here. Dark humor and gorgeous prose take you through the lessons learned in other people’s lives.

    The first sentence in Dancyger’s introduction demanded my attention: “Throughout history, angry women have been called harpies, bitches, witches and whores.” With a shorter-than-ever attention span, I was surprised to devour this book in one sitting. Dancyger guided the writers to go deep and spill raw feelings. 

    Dancyger told The Fix about her troubled teen years. She said, “I had good reason to be angry.” Not only was she raised by two people with drug addictions, but her father died at age 43 when she was a preteen. Her beloved cousin Sabina was only 20 when she was randomly murdered.

    “Anger overwhelmed me,” Dancyger said. “It came out in excessive drinking and doing a lot of drugs.” Her life was thrown out of whack, which sent her on a rocky journey where she learned that you need to “make space for anger in your life or it pushes you into self-destruction.”

    “Those were wild, reckless years. Then I dropped out of ninth grade,” she said. She made it to college, still drinking heavily. “There’s a big difference between drinking with your friends and being determined to get drunk every day. Finally, I ran out of steam and decided I was just done.”

    Writing has been healing, Dancyger told me.

    Burn It Down is meant for readers to give themselves permission to access their own anger. “To feel it, recognize it and accept it. There are so many things to be angry about,” Dancyger said. “It can be fortifying to enforce boundaries, pursue passions, and let anger out.” The book acknowledges that men are angry too, but this is a book about women. “People can see an angry man [who is] fighting for a cause and see him as strong. It’s not the same for women—especially not for women of color and trans women.”

    The first piece, “Lungs Full of Burning,” is by Leslie Jamison, who never thought of herself as ill-tempered. She spent years telling people, “I don’t get angry. I get sad.” Jamison writes about her long-held belief that sadness was more refined than rage. Out of a fear of burdening others, she squelched her feelings in order to spare people the “blunt force trauma” of her wrath. She writes, “I started to suspect I was a lot angrier than I thought.” Her essay talks about women in literature and film, pointing to the Jean Rhys novel, Good Morning, Midnight, in which the heroine resolves to drink herself to death, and describing Miss Havisham as “Dickens’s ranting spinster—spurned and embittered in her crumbling wedding dress.”

    I Started to Suspect I Was Angrier Than I Thought

    Jamison writes, “I’d missed the rage that fueled Plath’s poetry like a ferocious gasoline.” She talks about I, Tonya and how it handled what became known as the “whack heard around the world,” where one woman’s anger leaves another woman traumatized. Harding was portrayed as a “raging bitch,” said Jamison. Kerrigan was a pitiable victim. Yet, things are usually not as black and white in real life. Jamison points out how little coverage there was of Harding’s abusive mother and husband.

    “Women’s anger is a necessary conversation to be having,” said Dancyger. On Hillary Clinton, she explained, “Here was a woman who bent over backwards to avoid coming off as shrill. Look at the words used to describe angry women—hysterical, crazy, hormonal, irrational. And women of color experience an extra dimension of misogyny.”

    Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is “under tremendous pressure. We hear the racism in words like ‘fiery Latina.’ Kamala Harris is an ‘angry black woman.’”

    Erin Khar, editor-essayist-columnist and author of the much-anticipated memoir, Strung Out: One Last Hit and Other Lies That Nearly Killed Me (Park Row Books, Feb. 25, 2020) writes in her essay “Guilty” about panic attacks and anxiety she felt as a child, who then began keeping secrets. She grew into a troubled 13-year-old who turned to heroin. Later she was a chronic relapser: “As a junkie I was a walking apology.” Finally, thanks to a wise therapist, she learned that it wasn’t the guilt that was killing her; it was unexpressed anger. It’s a powerful story that illustrates the madness of addiction.

    There are tough scenes of self-loathing in Khar’s piece: digging fingernails into her arms till she bled, using a box cutter to carve into her leg. Recovering memories of being raped at age four. But the ending is satisfying, with a description of what her life is like today and the steps she took and tools she used to get there.

    Khar was generous with her time and very open in our interview. We covered a wide range of topics and segued into how many women experienced PTSD from watching the Brett Kavanaugh hearings. 

    “Lilly [Dancyger] was editing the essays during the Kavanaugh hearings and I was writing my essay for the book at that same time,” Khar said. We talked about Kavanaugh’s weeping, and blubbering about beer during his job interview for SCOTUS. We teared up as we shared our similar experience of shaking while listening to Christine Blasey Ford. 

    An Angry Black Woman, No Matter the Reason, Is Thought to Have an Attitude

    Burn It Down isn’t about what makes you angry, it’s about anger itself. In the essay, “The One Emotion Black Women Are Free to Explore,” Monet Patrice Thomas writes, “[A]nger spread through me like red wine across a marble floor, but I did not show it.” She describes her conditioning: “An angry Black woman, no matter the reason, is thought to have an attitude.” Her rage was inside her “like a shaken can of soda.”

    In “Rebel Girl,” Melissa Febos writes, “I knew that I was queer and that it wasn’t safe to admit that at school.” She burned with self-hatred that was “slowly blackening my insides.” Then she met Nadia, who was “six feet tall in combat boots … with a shaved head and arms emblazoned with tattoos. She stomped rather than walked.” 

    Lisa Marie Basile describes living with chronic pain and all of the stupid, condescending advice that dismissed her very real symptoms in “My Body Is a Sickness Called Anger.” One doc tells her she probably stuck her finger in her eye too hard. She writes, “I gently remind the doctor…that feeling like absolute shit with two enlarged assholes for eyes just cannot be normal.” Friends say she looks fine, then offer useless unsolicited advice like yoga, green juices, and giving up gluten. Basile’s snarky inner dialogue is hilarious. 

    There is an energizing quality to women’s rage and it builds a united front. Dancyger has succeeded with her goal to “create a place where anger could live” and her vision to display rage on pages that “sizzle and smoke.” As the last sentence of her intro reads, “Our collective silence-breaking will make us larger, expansive, like fire, ready to burn it all down.” 

    Burn It Down is now available on Amazon and elsewhere.

    View the original article at thefix.com