America Anonymous—Book Review

Sex, drugs, and shoplifting.

New York Times magazine contributor Benoit Denizet-Lewis interweaves eight personal stories of addiction and obsession and ties them in with a well-researched summary of the drug treatment business in his new book, America Anonymous. Offering deft portraits of people suffering from various forms of addiction and compulsion, Denizet-Lewis brings to life much of the denial, prevarication, giddy hopes of victory, incomprehensible relapses, and endless stream of lies and broken promises with which so many active addicts string together their fractured narratives.

By design, Denizet-Lewis swings wide when it comes to defining addiction. In addition to alcoholics and drug addicts, the author, a self-confessed sex addict, includes in his case histories a woman who is a serial shoplifter, a body builder addicted to steroids, a fifty year-old compulsive eater, and a college student addicted to pornography.

“I believe in an expanded understanding of addiction, “ Denizet-Lewis writes. “That is, I believe that gambling, sex, food, spending, and work (to name a few) can, for some people be as addictive and debilitating as an addiction to drugs.”

While I am not as convinced as the author that the scientific evidence is beginning to weigh heavily on the side of accepting behavioral compulsions as classic addictions, I can only agree when he points out that, for all the heady buzz about addiction medicine and pills for alcoholism, 12 Step programs—which originated more than 50 years ago--still arguably represent the most effective approach to treating addiction that we know of. In addition, Denizet-Lewis writes, doctors and clinicians have been promising medical treatments for addiction for 200 years now, and only in the last ten years or so has there been any real progress.

Point taken. The author basically accepts that addictions are chronic diseases with genetic components, “and an onset and course that vary depending on behavior and environmental factors.” Scientific information is presented accurately and in an understandable fashion. Denizet-Lewis knows his subject, even if he uses that data to reach different conclusions than I do. I liked this book, even though I am at odds with many of its arguments.

So, what do Denizet-Lewis’s people teach us about addiction? The crucial need for honesty, to begin with. “If we’re not rigorously honest,” one addict says, “we can’t recover. It’s impossible.” This rule applies to the healers as well. The author quotes one researcher succinctly: “I would distrust anyone who says they can cure addiction.” This sentence alone, if absorbed by addicts seeking treatment, could save them considerable time, money and self-esteem. The author also quotes addiction researcher Anna Rose Childress to good effect: “Relapse is not a failure of treatment. Relapse is part of the disorder.”

What runs through all the personal sagas is the desire of the subjects to feel normal—to “feel feelings” in a normal way. The author offers compelling narratives that catch the flavor of the addicted way of life, a combination of monotony, mood swings, and fear. Denizet-Lewis is particularly adept at making us care about what happens to these people, and we read the book with a hopefulness laced with dread. We know it cannot end happily for everyone. And it does not.

In the end, the author concludes that most forms of addiction can be accounted for by the childhood trauma model. Since a good deal of sex therapy centers on this conception, perhaps the author’s conclusions in this regard are not surprising. However, trauma theories about the origin of addiction have not translated into reliable and effective treatments for addiction, either. And such theories have had a long run, starting even before Freud.

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