Jack London and his Alcoholic Memoirs

Meet John Barleycorn.

In the early years of the 20th Century, writer Jack London was the equivalent of a rock star. A ruggedly good-looking sportswriter, globetrotting war correspondent, successful novelist and short story writer, London came up the hard way on the Oakland docks in California. He had his first drink at the age of 5, ran an oyster smuggling operation as a teenager, and allegedly brought the sport of surfing from Waikiki to the West Coast. At least one critic has referred to him as the Norman Mailer of the early 1900s.

In 1913, the author of the Call of the Wild published what was arguably his least successful book, John Barleycorn, a non-fiction account carrying the subtitle Alcoholic Memoirs. John Sutherland, professor of English Literature at University College in the UK, wrote in his introduction to the Oxford edition of Jack London’s book that London had pitched the book as “the bare, bald, absolute fact… of my own personal experiences in the realm of alcohol.” As Sutherland notes, “The drunk’s stigma was, however, indelible in 1913. No one of London’s public standing had ever come clean on the question of problem drinking before—at least not while at the zenith of their power and fame.”

Yet what are we to make, Sutherland asks, of London’s assertions, “three times in the first five pages, that drinker he may be, but ‘I was no hereditary alcoholic… I have no constitutional predisposition for alcohol.’”? Is this, the critic asks, “self-delusion or self-knowledge?”

After reading the book, I would have to say a little bit of both, given the limitations of medical knowledge at the time.  In London’s view, common back then, “dipsomania” was a chemical, congenital defect, much maligned and considered to be as rare as one in every several thousand drinkers. Nonetheless, several prominent London biographers have asserted that Jack London was chronically drunk-sick in his later years, ultimately dying of uremia and other complications brought on by years of excessive drinking. Writer Upton Sinclair claimed in 1915 that he had seen London wandering Oakland “dazed and disagreeably drunk.” Still others claim London’s bar bills were always modest and much of John Barleycorn is fiction. Yet London writes frankly of his morning shakes and hair-of-the-dog drinking and suicidal impulses. Describing his life in 1910, London writes: “I achieved a condition in which my body was never free from alcohol. Nor did I permit myself to be away from alcohol…. There was no time in all my waking time, that I didn’t want a drink.”

Was Jack London a Hemingway-style brawler or a hopeless alcoholic? As we have come to understand, it is sometimes possible to be both, for a while. Jack London was not writing for a medical journal, he was relating the experiences of his own life. And when the battle for universal suffrage began in earnest, London was an early an enthusiastic backer, on the grounds that if women got the vote, alcohol prohibition would surely follow, and the children of American would be saved from the wiles of John Barleycorn.

The lack of enthusiasm for the book when it was published stemmed, in part, from these built-in ambiguities. In addition, writes Sutherland, “John Barleycorn is an extended meditation on pessimism, or alcohol induced melancholy.” These days, we are more likely to refer to this condition as depression. This was not the Jack London his fans had come to know and love, even though London insisted in the book that he was “writing of the effects of alcohol on the normal, average man. I have no word to say for or about the microscopically unimportant excessivist, the dipsomaniac.”

For all the hedging, there is plenty of recognizable plain talk about the devotees of Mr. Barleycorn: “When good fortune comes, they drink. When they have no fortune, they drink to the hope of good fortune. If fortune be ill, they drink to forget it. If they meet a friend, they drink. If they quarrel with a friend and lose him, they drink…. He coarsens and grossens them, twists and malforms them out of the original goodness and fineness of their natures.”

In another passage describing the tavern life of tradesmen and laborers, he “saw men doing, drunk, what the would never dream of doing sober…. Time and again I heard the one explanation: If I hadn’t been drunk I wouldn’t a-done it.”

And as time passes, Jack London, the resolutely non-alcoholic, highly-regarded novelist, finds the terrain underneath his own feet is changing: “And the thing began so imperceptibly, that I, old intimate of John Barleycorn, never dreamed whither it was leading me…. It was at this time I became aware of waiting with expectancy for the pre-dinner cocktail. I wanted it, and I was conscious that I wanted it…. And right there John Barleycorn had me. I was beginning to drink regularly, I was beginning to drink alone.”

These developments shook up London sufficiently for him to ask himself: “Had I, a non-alcoholic, by long practice, become an alcoholic?” He has no trouble marshaling evidence for the argument: “The more I drank the more I was required to drink to get an equivalent effect…. Whenever I was in a hurry, I ordered double cocktails. It saved time.”

There were other warnings: “Where was this steady drinking leading? But trust John Barleycorn to silence such questions. ‘Come on and have a drink and I’ll tell you all about it,’ is his way.”

London concludes, before taking most of it back in later pages: “There are hundreds of thousands of men of this sort in the United States to-day, in clubs, hotels, and in their own homes—men who are never drunk, and who, though most of them will indignantly deny it, are rarely sober. And all of them fondly believe, as I fondly believed, that they are beating the game.”

And finally, this: “But a new and most diabolical complication arose: The work refused to be done without drinking. It just couldn’t be done. I had to drink in order to do it.”

In the end, let us hear from his last wife, Charmian, who made the following entry in her diary on July 1, 1912: “I know now that Jack, facing the writing of John Barleycorn, intends to drink moderately in the future, just to prove to an unbelieving public that he is the opposite of an ‘alcoholic’, that he is not afraid of being an alcoholic, and never was an alcoholic. Perhaps he is right, but I feel a trifle dashed.”

Photo Credit: http://www.erbzine.com/

Author’s Debut is a Tough, Lyrical Addiction Memoir

"If we don't change direction soon, we'll end up where we're going."

 –Prof. Irwin Corey

I’ve never made a secret of the fact that I don’t really like addiction memoirs—with notable literary exceptions, from Thomas de Quincey to William S. Burroughs, including worthy modern efforts from James Brown, Jerry Stahl, Sacha Z. Scoblic, and others. Writing well about addiction is a rare gift, and newcomer Jessica Hendry Nelson, in If Only You People Could Follow Directions: A Memoir, comes at the problem elliptically, in some cases deliberately pruned of strong emotion. This works in her favor, as she eschews over-the-top bravado for the facts of life. The book is, heartbreakingly, a book about family—about the power of substance abuse, self-destruction, grief, and remorse to tear away at every connection human beings share.

Childhood: We found his battered truck in a Shop Rite parking lot, the smashed headlights still pulsing lazily into the mist like two dying fireflies. The parking lot was empty except for the truck, a few wayward shopping carts, and the streetlight that had blocked my father’s passage. I wasn’t yet able to distinguish my waking life from my dream life, and so it all felt like fantastic fun.

Childhood’s End:  There were a couple sober years, when Eric and I were in early elementary school. Since then, he’s had at least two DUIs a year, and cycles from jail to rehab to halfway house and back again. Occasionally, he’ll manage a few sober months in a halfway house and occasionally he’ll stay with his mother in anticipation of getting his own place. During those months, there is lots of talk of the future, of our own bedrooms and weekends spent watching movies and skiing at the Pocono Mountains, but it never happens.

The father: Before talk therapy. Before asbestos removal jobs and wrecked cars. Nights so hot and black they burned like a solar eclipse through his insides. Before little league games and parent-teacher conferences. Before he fucked the three-hundred pound housewife next door for a couple of Klonopin. Before she killed herself with the rest.

The author is young, but as my friend James Brown, who wrote the powerful addiction memoir, This River, has put it: “Jessica Hendry Nelson knows the power of clean, sparse prose, and her keen eye for the small, most telling details of character show an insight into the human psyche well beyond her years. Her story is oftentimes a dark one, but Nelson holds strong, knowing that saving those we love may first begin, and end, with saving ourselves. A remarkable debut by a wonderfully talented writer.”

The brother: The first offense is theft, though many others will follow—a wildly colorful rap sheet—but the disease that makes him do such things is just an infant now, just an infant throwing its peas.

The mother: She is sad because Eric has taken to snorting Oxycontin in her bathroom, still lying and stealing and denying in that same fucking straight-faced way as the husband once did, until she feels she’s gone completely nuts. I know how she feels, and yet I am unable to change it.

The family: We are practiced in the art of pretend. We are able to convince ourselves that drinking and smoking are incidental, and not part of the fabric of our family, of the shared anxieties that causes us, each to varying degrees, to feel so dissatisfied with our own brain chemistry. We are trying to return to a place of innocence, to the time before, when Mother could still keep us safe. We keep trying, but morning light is unforgiving.

The book reads like the product of an older, more experienced writer. It's impressive, if somewhat digressive, but Nelson is undeniably talented, working in a terse, slightly distanced style, as if the truth of it all required some detachment for her own sake. Impressionistic, episodic, the book is composed of scenes weaving in and out of chronological time. We don’t get it all put together until the end, but when we do, we see an unbroken spirit standing in front of a long and dismal line of hospitals, police stations, institutions, and halfway houses.

The treatments: My mother picks Eric up from the halfway house in North- east Philly where he’s been staying. It is ten a.m. The halfway house is the right side of a narrow duplex. Houses brick and broken. Next to the halfway house is the crack house. Next to the crack house is the whorehouse. Next to the whorehouse is a family with two adorable little girls.

The cycle: That’s the disease talking, they say, and I try to believe that too. For years, I believed, but all I see, finally, is my brother’s hard familiar face and the illness that my mother continues to try and kiss away with love and money and blunt maternal strength until she, we, are all as sick as Eric—the dead father’s legacy, this disease.....

We bring the bottle. We have learned to just bring the bottle.....

Give it up, let it go, take it back, take control. Say yes. Say no. Say no, no, no. Stick to the script. Step One through Twelve. One through Twelve. Keep coming back. It works if you work it. If only you people could follow directions.

Addiction Inbox (D)Evolves Into Paperback

A curated collection of blog posts in print.

Online is where journalism is happening now, but it is a truism that most of the world’s repository of knowledge is still found in books. It is also true that Addiction Inbox now comes in paperback, from Amazon. For cheap. Also available in Kindle, for unbelievably cheap.

 I have selected and arranged a “best of the blog” collection,  meant to serve as a handy off-the-shelf compendium of science-based information on drugs and addiction. Is shoplifting the opiate of the masses? Does menthol really matter? Can ketamine and other party drugs cause permanent bladder damage? The posts are arranged in four sections: Research, The New Synthetics, Treatment, and Interviews/Book Reviews. This 330-page anthology of articles is designed to bring multiple perspectives to bear on questions of drugs, addiction, and treatment. For just ridiculously cheap.

Cassie Rodenberg at Scientific American’s White Noise blog was kind enough to review Addiction Inbox, the book: “The author relates the real life to the scientific, noting his own struggles with addiction, yet doesn’t get bogged down in personal tales. Rather, the writings use life tidbits as jumping off points for scientific explanation and an overarching discussion of addiction’s media landscape.”

Which was pretty much what I was hoping to do when I started this blog….

Craving Relief

Why is it so hard for addicts to say “enough?”

One of the useful things that may yet come out of the much-derided DSM-5 manual of mental disorders is the addition of craving as a criterion for addiction. “Cravings,” writes Dr. Omar Manejwala, a psychiatrist and the former medical director of Hazelden, “are at the heart of all addictive and compulsive behaviors.” Unlike the previous two volumes in this monthful of addiction books, Manejwala’s book, Craving: Why We Can’t Seem To Get Enough,  focuses on a specific aspect common to all addiction syndromes, and looks at what people might do to lessen its grip.

Why do cravings matter? Because they are the engine of addiction, and can lead people to “throw away all the things that really matter to them in exchange for a short-term fix that is often over before it even starts.” When Dr. Manejwala asked a group of patients to explain what they were thinking when they relapsed, their answer was often the same: “I was so STUPID.” But the author had tested these people. “I knew their IQs.” And the best explanation these intelligent addicts could offer “was the one explanation that could not possibly be true.”

In my book, The Chemical Carousel, I quoted former National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA) director T.K. Li on the subject of craving: “We already have a perfect drug to make alcohol aversive—and that’s Antabuse. But people don’t take it. Why don’t they take it? Because they still crave. And so they stop taking it. You have to attack the other side, and hit the craving.” However, if you ask addicts about craving when they are high, or have ready access, they will often downplay its importance. It is drug access unexpectedly denied that sets up some of the fiercest cravings of all. Conversely, many addicts find that they crave less in a situation where they cannot possibly score drugs or alcohol—at a health retreat, or on vacation at a remote locale.

Why are cravings so hard to explain? One reason is that “people use the word to mean so many different things.” You don’t crave everything you want, as Manejwala points out. Cravings are not the same as wants, desires, urges, passions, or interests. They are “stickier.” The brain science behind craving starts with the downregulation of dopamine and other neurotransmitters. As the brain is artificially flooded with neurotransmitters triggered by drug use, the brain goes into conservation mode and cuts back on, say, the number of dopamine receptors in a given part of the brain. In the absence of the drug, the brain is suddenly “lopsided,” and time has to pass while neural plasticity copes with the new (old) state of affairs. In the interim, the unbalanced state of affairs is a prime ingredient in the experience of craving.

Cravings are “disturbingly intense” (Manejwala) and “incomprehensibly demoralizing” (AA). Alcohol researcher George Koob called craving a state of “spiraling distress.” Cravings are not necessarily about reward, but about anticipating relief. “The overwhelming biological process in addictive craving is really a complex set of desperate, survival-based drives to feel ‘normal,’” says Manejwala.

The late Alan Marlatt, a psychologist who studied cravings for years, proposed that apparently irrelevant decisions could trigger or prevent relapse, almost without the addict knowing it. Turning left at an intersection, toward the supermarket, or turning right, toward the liquor store, can feel arbitrary and dissociated from desire. We also know that environmental cues can trigger craving, such as the site of a crack house where an addict used to do his business. Manejwala points to research showing that “some relapses related to cues and context are mediated by a small subgroup of neurons in the medial prefrontal cortex,” and suggests that it may be possible in the future to target this area with drug therapy.

Manejwala is unabashedly pro-12 Step, and favors traditional group work as the standard therapy. For example, he points to a Cochrane analysis of 50 trials showing that group participation roughly doubles a smoker’s chance of quitting. One of the reasons AA works for some people is that AA attendance reduces “pro-drinking social ties.” Simply put, if you are sitting with your AA pals in a meeting, you’re not out with your drinking buddies at the tavern. The author admits, however that alternatives such as SMART recovery work for some people, and that “sadly, much energy has been wasted as members of these various organizations bicker with each other about which works best, and this leaves the newcomer perplexed…. Over 20 million American are in recovery from addiction to alcohol and drugs. I can tell you this much: they didn’t all do it the same way.”

And along the way, you can be sure that all of them became familiar with cravings. Manejwala offers several strategies for managing cravings, and I paraphrase a few of them here:

—Join something. Participate. Get out of your own head and become actively involved in some group, any group, doing something you are interested in.

—Hang around people who are good at recovery. Long-timers, with a solid base of sobriety. You will not only learn HOW to do it, but that it CAN be done.

—Write stuff down. This makes you pay attention to what you’re doing. Keep a cigarette log. Count calories. Know what you’re spending per month on alcohol. Educate yourself about your addiction.

—Tell someone. Tell somebody you trust, because if there is anything harder than dealing with cravings from drinking, smoking, or drugging, it’s doing it in secret.

—Be teachable. Watch out for confirmation bias. “When you think you have the answers, it’s hard to hear alternatives.”

—Empathy matters. The author notes that the Big Book insists that by gaining sobriety, “you will learn the full meaning of ‘Love thy neighbor as thyself.’” Altruism may have evolutionary, physiological, and psychological implications we haven’t worked out yet.

Dawn or Dusk for Marijuana in the Emerald Triangle?

New book chronicles Mendocino’s “ganjapreneurs”

Every morning in California, thousands of marijuana growers wake up believing they are one day closer to becoming legitimate operators, like the state’s wine makers. Three generations ago, Northern California’s dope farmers dreamed the same dream—but it had nothing to do with “medical” marijuana. It had to do with a hilly, forested, secluded terrain with enough rain and sunshine to make it perfect for marijuana growing and utterly inhospitable to law enforcement without 4WD vehicles.

There are presently only a few disorders for which marijuana is clinically indicated (although that number is bound to go up.) These include glaucoma, HIV/AIDS-related nausea, certain forms of neuropathic pain, lack of appetite associated with chemotherapy, and some promising research having to do with the spasticity associated with Parkinson’s Disease and MS. But Doug Fine’s book, Too High to Fail: Cannabis and the New Green Economic Revolution, isn’t really about the medical specifics. It’s a paean by a true believer. “One tries not to sound like one of those ‘cannabis can do anything including bring about world peace and an end to Ring Around the Collar people,” he writes. But he does. Oh, how he does.  If you believe in cannabis legalization as the Higher Calling, this is the book for you.

Fine moves to Mendocino County to dwell among the ganjapreneurs and tell the tale of “horticultural civil disobedience” that is the hallmark of the Emerald Triangle of Mendocino, Humboldt, and Trinity counties in Northern California—a mythical adult Disneyland where juries tend to believe the assertion that “all 169 pounds of the marijuana on his property was medicinal in nature.” It is a land where the local sheriff acknowledges that “maybe five per cent” of medical cannabis claims are legit, but goes on to declare that “I’ve never seen a stoned man beat his wife.”

As a supporter of limited decriminalization, I tried hard to like Fine’s book. He has a breezy, colloquial style that makes for easy reading. And after all, the latest public opinion polls show American citizens poised 50-50 on the subject of cannabis legalization. The book has no source list, no back-of-the-book notes, and only the occasional footnote, but Fine does his journalistic part, following Lucille, his designated medical marijuana plant, from birth as a clone to death in the dope pipe of a cancer patient. But as his growing source, Fine picks a greenhorn grower whose poor planning and general lack of local knowledge give a Keystone Kops feel to the growing season. “Murphy’s Law rope-a-dope” is Fine’s description of his grower’s business strategy.  Fine’s Mendocino sometimes takes on aspects of a hip Lake Wobegon, where everybody is late for everything, and everybody thinks that’s fine.

In “Mendo,” organic cannabis growers envision a future in which arthritis-wracked senior citizens will go to their local pharmacy for insulin and amoxicillin, and to their local dispensary for an oh zee of Matanuska Valley Thunderfuck. Of course, Fine is correct to note that the vast majority of marijuana users do so without damage to their health and well-being. “What is the glass of red wine enjoyed by the fellow on his deck after a hard day of investment banking? I think that’s documented to be health maintenance. A long-term cost saver. An evening cannabis pipe… is the same thing for some people.”

If billions of dollars are poised to fall on our heads with the flick of a presidential pen, who would want to oppose legalization? The author has plenty of answers: Big Pharma, the private prison industry, law enforcement lobbies, and the banking industry (just too much profit laundering all that money from all those cartels).

Fine isn’t bothered by the menacing “Turn Around Now” signs, or the occasional shotgun volley over the tops of cars with an out-of-county look to them.  He doesn’t have much to say about booby-trapped fences, the county snitch line, the rampant foreclosures, or the stolen power from Pacific Gas & Electric. We don’t get many accounts of subpoenas for cannabis patient medical records, or opposition from the Mendocino County Board of Supervisors. To be fair, he does make note of all the young punks and career criminals drawn to tax-free grey markets like this one—“Real providers next to total thugs,” as one activist put it. There is no substantive discussion of other approaches, like Michigan’s medical cannabis model where there are no dispensaries, and cannabis patients either grow their own, or get it from a licensed grower. The in-your-face activism of growers and dispensary owners in California has led to a complete dispensary closure in Los Angeles (see below).

And there is the continuing “wet” and “dry” aspect to the California trade, reminiscent of the bootlegger era in the hills of Appalachia. To get their medicine to market, growers in the Emerald Triangle must run “The Gauntlet” south to San Francisco and Los Angeles, and the first hurdle—Sonoma County—has been the end of many “compassionate cannabis” deliveries. The situation is clearly untenable. Mendocino should have been a safe bet—all the arguments are settled, all the sheriffs are friendly, and the fix is generally in.

Except when it isn’t. Local constabulary may be green, and Fine delights in describing instances where growers called deputies to their aid when “rippers” show up at harvest time—but try going all green on the California Highway Patrol when they stop you on your merry way across Mendocino County with 50 pounds of pot in the trunk. Or even a pair of terpene-laced bud trimmer gloves in the back seat. Two words describe Fine’s book: bad timing. The “eye of Sauron,” as one grower described the federal presence in the Emerald Triangle, means that there are times when the habit of ignoring that pesky little federal cannabis scheduling problem can still land you in jail, official Mendocino yellow zip-tie program or not.

 On July 22, 2011, President Obama brought the Mendocino bubble in for a wobbly landing: “Am I willing to pursue a decriminalization strategy as an approach? No.” Federal authorities in the county seized a total of 725,000 plants in 2011. The Feds swooped down with “Operation Full Court Press” to clear growers out of Mendocino National Forest. Even the perennially optimistic Ethan Nadelman of the Drug Policy Alliance told Fine that “there’s only so much even a second-term Obama can do if the Republicans still control Congress.” This game, despite how it may look on the ground in Mendo, is still very much in the hands of the Feds. As an official for NORML admits, there could be “twenty years of this” yet to go.

To the DEA, local ordinances mean nothing. Shortly after Fine’s book ends, in early 2012, the cannabis market in the Emerald Triangle crashed after a series of raids and dispensary closures drastically limited medical outlets for their product.  By the end of the book, several of the growers have spent time in handcuffs—including the author himself, who didn’t care for the experience at all. It remains unclear whether he has written a celebratory book about the cannabis tipping point, or a eulogy for the death of the medical marijuana movement.

At this writing, cannabis activists appear to be genuinely baffled that Obama has not willingly adopted the mantle of “herb candidate” they wish to thrust upon him. But I do think Fine has at least a betting chance of being correct when he writes: “Like alcohol prohibition before it, commons sense, human desire, and economic inevitability will eventually prevail and the Drug War will end.”

Graphics Credit: http://humboldtherald.wordpress.com/

Addiction Books For the Beach

When 50 Shades of Grey doesn’t cut it.


The Science of Addiction: From Neurobiology to Treatment

Carlton K. Erickson
312 pages
Publisher: W. W. Norton and Company (2007)

Amazon Overview: Neuroscience is clarifying the causes of compulsive alcohol and drug use––while also shedding light on what addiction is, what it is not, and how it can best be treated––in exciting and innovative ways. Current neurobiological research complements and enhances the approaches to addiction traditionally taken in social work and psychology. However, this important research is generally not presented in a forthright, jargon-free way that clearly illustrates its relevance to addiction professionals. In The Science of Addiction, Carlton K. Erickson presents a comprehensive overview of the roles that brain function and genetics play in addiction.


The Addiction Solution: Unraveling the Mysteries of Addiction through Cutting-Edge Brain Science

David Kipper and Steven Whitney
304 pages
Publisher: Rodale Books (2010)

For decades addiction has been viewed and treated as a social and behavioral illness, afflicting people of “weak” character and “bad” moral fiber. However, recent breakthroughs in genetic technology have enabled doctors, for the first time, to correctly diagnose the disease and prove that addiction is an inherited, neuro-chemical disease originating in brain chemistry, determined by genetics, and triggered by stress. In their groundbreaking Addiction Breakthrough, David Kipper, MD, and Steven Whitney distill these exciting findings into a guide for the millions of adults who want to be free from the cycle of addiction, and for their loved ones who want to better understand it and to help.


In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction

Gabor Maté
520 pages
Publisher: North Atlantic Books (2010)

Based on Gabor Maté’s two decades of experience as a medical doctor and his groundbreaking work with the severely addicted on Vancouver’s skid row, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts radically reenvisions this much misunderstood field by taking a holistic approach. Dr. Maté presents addiction not as a discrete phenomenon confined to an unfortunate or weak-willed few, but as a continuum that runs throughout (and perhaps underpins) our society; not a medical "condition" distinct from the lives it affects, rather the result of a complex interplay among personal history, emotional, and neurological development, brain chemistry, and the drugs (and behaviors) of addiction. Simplifying a wide array of brain and addiction research findings from around the globe, the book avoids glib self-help remedies, instead promoting a thorough and compassionate self-understanding as the first key to healing and wellness.


Memoirs of an Addicted Brain: A Neuroscientist Examines his Former Life on Drugs

Marc Lewis
336 pages
Publisher: PublicAffairs (2012)

Marc Lewis’s relationship with drugs began in a New England boarding school where, as a bullied and homesick fifteen-year-old, he made brief escapes from reality by way of cough medicine, alcohol, and marijuana. In Berkeley, California, in its hippie heyday, he found methamphetamine and LSD and heroin. He sniffed nitrous oxide in Malaysia and frequented Calcutta’s opium dens. Ultimately, though, his journey took him where it takes most addicts: into a life of addiction, desperation, deception, and crime. But unlike most addicts, Lewis recovered and became a developmental psychologist and researcher in neuroscience. In Memoirs of an Addicted Brain, he applies his professional expertise to a study of his former self, using the story of his own journey through addiction to tell the universal story of addictions of every kind.


The Chemical Carousel: What Science Tells Us About Beating Addiction

Dirk Hanson
472 pages
Publisher: BookSurge (2009)

A book for anyone concerned with the care and healing of addiction, substance abuse, and the latest advances in the area of addiction science. In The Chemical Carousel, science writer Hanson takes the reader on a voyage through the heady world of addiction science, from the lab to the clinic to the junky on the street. Hanson explains the workings of common neurotransmitters and documents the direct effect drugs and alcohol produce on the reward pathways of the brain. He shows how scientists and treatment professionals have finally given us an answer to the perennial question about addiction: Why can't those people just say no?


An Anatomy of Addiction: Sigmund Freud, William Halsted, and the Miracle Drug, Cocaine

Howard Markel
336 pages
Publisher: Vintage (2012)

Acclaimed medical historian Howard Markel traces the careers of two brilliant young doctors--Sigmund Freud, neurologist, and William Halsted, surgeon--showing how their powerful addictions to cocaine shaped their enormous contributions to psychology and medicine. When Freud and Halsted began their experiments with cocaine in the 1880s, neither they, nor their colleagues, had any idea of the drug's potential to dominate and endanger their lives. An Anatomy of Addiction tells the tragic and heroic story of each man, accidentally struck down in his prime by an insidious malady: tragic because of the time, relationships, and health cocaine forced each to squander; heroic in the intense battle each man waged to overcome his affliction.


How to Change Your Drinking: a Harm Reduction Guide to Alcohol

Kenneth Anderson
86 pages
Publisher: CreateSpace (2010)

This book is the first comprehensive compilation of harm reduction strategies aimed specifically at people who drink alcohol. Whether your goal is safer drinking, reduced drinking, or quitting alcohol altogether, this is the book for you. It contains a large and detailed selection of harm reduction tools and strategies which you can choose from to build your own individualized alcohol harm reduction program. There are many practical exercises to help people change their behaviors, including risk-ranking worksheets, drinking charts, goal choice worksheets, and many more. There are also innumerable practical tips from folks who "have been there" and have turned their drinking habits around for the better.


Rethinking Substance Abuse: What the Science Shows, and What We Should Do about It

William R. Miller and Kathleen M. Carroll
320 pages
Publisher: Guilford Press (2010)

While knowledge on substance abuse and addictions is expanding rapidly, clinical practice still lags behind. This state-of-the-art book brings together leading experts to describe what treatment and prevention would look like if it were based on the best science available. The volume incorporates developmental, neurobiological, genetic, behavioral, and social–environmental perspectives. Tightly edited chapters summarize current thinking on the nature and causes of alcohol and other drug problems; discuss what works at the individual, family, and societal levels; and offer robust principles for developing more effective treatments and services.

Writers On The Edge: 22 Writers Speak About Addiction and Dependency

Diana Raab and James Brown
204 pages
Publisher: Modern History Press (2012)

Writers On The Edge offers a range of essays, memoirs and poetry written by major contemporary authors who bring fresh insight into the dark world of addiction, from drugs and alcohol, to sex, gambling and food. Editors Diana M. Raab and James Brown have assembled an array of talented and courageous writers who share their stories with heartbreaking honesty as they share their obsessions as well as the awe-inspiring power of hope and redemption. Frederick & Steven Barthelme, Kera Bolonik, Margaret Bullitt-Jonas, Maud Casey, Anna David, Denise Duhamel, B.H. Fairchild, Ruth Fowler, David Huddle Perie Longo, Gregory Orr, Victoria Patterson, Molly Peacock, Scott Russell Sanders, Stephen Jay Schwartz, Linda Gray Sexton, Sue William Silverman, Chase Twichell, and Rachel Yoder

Photo Credit: http://www.readingkingdom.com/

Books By Addicts: A Collection

The Up and the Down.
 
(Click titles for full review)

Steve Earle and the Ghost of Hank Williams: I’ll Never Get Out of This World Alive

Musician Steve Earle made a solo name for himself with "Guitar Town" and "Copperhead Road" after playing in legendary country and bluegrass bands as a young prodigy. He was nominated for a Grammy, his reputations soared, he added rock and roll to his range—until 1991, when Earle put out the aptly named live album, Shut Up and Die Like An Aviator. Shortly thereafter, he was dropped by his record label for long-standing drug problems, and landed in prison with a heavy sentence for possession of heroin….






When Did I Become the Junkie Auntie Mame? Courtney Love tells her tangled tale in a new e-book.

Maer Roshan, author of Courtney Comes Clean: The High Life and Dark Depths of Music’s Most Controversial Icon, logged a dozen “exhilarating and exhausting” sessions with the widow of Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain over the course of a year, pulling together a definitive look at Love’s drug addictions and other demons. Roshan taped countless hours of interviews, and received additional written material from the “Tolstoy of texting,” as Love refers to herself. The book is highly readable, almost, one is tempted to say, addictively so. Sure, it’s tabloid stuff—let he or she who has never peeked at Gawker or Jezebel cast the first stone….





Mike Doughty Talks About The Book of Drugs: Former Soul Coughing front man on sobriety and life as a solo artist.

Over the phone, Mike Doughty doesn’t have much to say about his former band, Soul Coughing. When I mention it, he gives out a low growl as a warning. He said it all in The Book of Drugs, and it doesn’t sound like he had much fun. Although the avant-garde rock band created music that was spiky and sneaky and immensely popular, topped off by Doughty’s monotonic but strangely penetrating vocal delivery on such classics as “Super Bon Bon,” “True Dreams of Wichita,” and “Circles,” Doughty was drug-dependent and miserable….






Writers On The Edge: A compendium of tough prose and poetry about addiction

Here’s a book I’m delighted to promote unabashedly. I even wrote a jacket blurb for it. I called it an “honest, unflinching book about addiction from a tough group of talented writers. These hard-hitters know whereof they speak, and the language in which they speak can be shocking to the uninitiated—naked prose and poetry about potentially fatal cravings the flesh is heir to—drugs, booze, cutting, overeating, depression, suicide. Not everybody makes it through. Writers On The Edge is about dependency, and the toll it takes, on the guilty and the innocent alike.”






Book Review of Drunken Angel: A hipster gets his shit straight—sort of.

Addiction memoirs remain one of the most popular forms of autobiography on the shelves. But now, when considering a new addition to the genre, it’s impossible not to wonder whether the claims being made by the author are genuine. Since serious drunks often end up visiting the lower circles of hell during the course of their disease, hair-raising and improbable scenes are lamentably common—that is part of the genre’s charm, if that is the right word for it. But how are we to react now? The answer is, you can’t know, and you never really could, that bastard James Frey notwithstanding....






Addiction Fiction: Coming-of-Age Drug Novels

Call it “addiction fiction.” In the past few years we have seen a blossoming of this genre, where the private eye goes to 12-Step meetings, and one day your sponsor may just save your life by gunning down a rival in the street. Or, where the wise-beyond-their-years prep school drug addicts engage in Brett Easton Ellis-style sex and ennui….








Addiction Noir: The Next Right Thing

To date, I’ve only reviewed one novel here at Addiction Inbox—Steve Earle’s I’ll Never Get Out of This World Alive, featuring the ghost of Hank Williams standing in for the addictive pleasures that musicians are heir to. Now comes The Next Right Thing by Dan Barden, an exemplar of a new literary genre I am going to call addiction noir….








John Berryman and the Poetry of “Irresistible Descent”: The penal colony’s prime scribe

A year before he committed suicide by jumping off a Minneapolis bridge in 1972, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet John Berryman had been in alcohol rehab three times, and had published a rambling, curious, unfinished book about his treatment experiences. Recovery is a time capsule. If you think we have little to offer addicts by way of treatment these days, consider the picture in the 60s and 70s. In Recovery, treatment consists almost entirely of Freudian group analysis, and while there is regular talk of alcoholism as a disease, AA style, there is no evidence that it was actually dealt with in this way, after detoxification....

What It Means to Say Alcoholism is Genetic

One woman’s journal.

From Insanity to Serenity, by Tommi Lloyd

Excerpts:

"I was born in 1963 in Toronto, Canada, to a family struggling long before I arrived. My dad was an alcoholic, born in Wales in 1921. His father and namesake was also an alcoholic who died at age 28…. My oldest sibling and only brother, Harry, entered a treatment centre at age 36 and has been sober for more than 20 years…. My Uncle Griff died from alcoholism when I was 10 years old…. There were no reprieves by which we spent a day or two in a sober environment. Dad drank from morning until night…. Christmas, Thanksgiving, and Easter—these were some of the worst days of the year…. Santa started leaving a carton of cigarettes next to my stocking at Christmas and I thought it was great.

"I yearned for some quality time before his drinking took center stage for the day… he drank from the minute he got up to the minute he passed out. At the height of his addiction, he was drinking more than 40 ounces of vodka a day…. There were many times when I would walk into the bedroom and see him guzzling the vodka straight from the bottle. It made me feel physical ill and utterly helpless.

"I too, am an alcoholic. In addition to alcohol, my teenage love of marijuana turned into a 30-year affair…. I have two nephews who are addicted to marijuana…. Rather than being sloppy drunks, my nephews opted for the mellow alternative that’s not addictive, (so we like to think) and you can pay for your habit by selling it to your friends.

"By age 11 I tried drinking for the first time…. I recall Susie telling us we could try drinking, but it had to be done quickly so as not to get caught. We poured some very strong rum and cokes and I guzzled mine down by holding my nose with my free hand…. As soon as I lay down on my bed the room started spinning and it wasn’t long before I was throwing up. Mom fussed over me, concluding I had the flu and I recall feeling both happy and guilty at the same time. I loved the attention but felt badly for the cause of my illness. I didn’t drink again for a few years….

"There is nothing more validating for me as a mother than to know I’m an inspiration to my children. I could not have asked for a better gift. This is what sobriety and a renewed spiritual life has brought my children and me…. Intellectually, I recognize how my childhood experiences and the disease of alcoholism molded a lot of my behavior and have been the root of much of my struggle with self-esteem. But self-knowledge does not change our circumstances, action does."

Review: Memoirs of an Addicted Brain

“I’m a drug addict turned neuroscientist.”

What’s it like to swallow 400 milligrams of dextromethorphan hydrobromide, better known as Romilar cough syrup? “Flashes of perception go by like clumps of scenery on either side, while you float along with the slow, irresistible momentum of a dream.” Marc Lewis, a former addict, now a practicing neuroscientist, further muses: “But what was Romilar? It sounded like an ancient kingdom. Would this dark elixir take me to some faraway place? Would it take me into another land? Would it be hard to come back?”

In Memoirs of an Addicted Brain: A Neuroscientist Examines his Former Life on Drugs, Dr. Marc Lewis follows his description of his gateway Romilar drug experience with the neurological basics of the matter: “The problem is that the NMDA receptors in my brain are now clogged with dextromethorphan molecules! The glutamate isn’t getting through. The receptor neurons aren’t firing, or they’re not firing fast enough…. Drugs like DM, ketamine, PCP, angel dust, and those most damaging of substances, glue and gasoline, are called dissociatives, because they do exactly what drugs are supposed to do: they dissociate feeling from reality, meaning from sense—and that’s all they do.”

Speaking of the self-reinforcing cycle “through which calamities of the mind arise from vulnerabilities of the brain,” Lewis argues that dissociatives only produce an absence. As a friend of his puts it with regard to another popular dissociative, “Nitrous oxide doesn’t give you consciousness. It takes it away.” And then, the friend adds: “Just bonk yourself on the head with a baseball bat if you want to lose consciousness.”

Lewis ultimately turns to opioids. “The emotional circuitry of the ventral striatum seems to derive its power from an intimate discourse between opioid liking and dopamine wanting.” In the end, this partnership does more than produce pleasure. It also, Lewis points out, “gets us to work for things.” And by doing that, addictive drugs demonstrate “the fundamental chemistry of learning which really means learning what feels good and how to get more of it. Yet there’s a downside: the slippery slope, the repetition compulsion, that constitutes addiction. In other words, addiction may be a form of learning gone bad. For me, this neurochemical sleight of hand promises much more pain than pleasure in the years to come.”

Lewis does a good job of capturing the feeling of existential despair brought on by uncontrolled addiction: “Contemptible. That’s what I was. Unbelievably stupid, unbelievably irresponsible: selfish, selfish, selfish! But that wasn’t quite it. What described me, what this inner voice accused me of, wasn’t exactly selfish, not exactly weak, but some meridian of self-blame that included both, and also, dirty, disgusting… maybe just BAD.”

How did heroin feel? “I feel relief from that pervasive hiss of wrongness. Every emotional wound, every bruise, every ache in my psyche, the background noise of angst itself, is soaked with a balm of unbelievable potency. There is a ringing stillness. The sense of impending harm, of danger, of attack, both from within and without, is washed away.”

And Lewis provides a memorable summation of the reward system, as dopamine streams from the ventral tegmental area to its targets, “the ventral striatum, where behavior is charged, focused, and released; the orbitofrontal cortex, where it infuses cells devoted to the value of this drug; and the amygdala, whose synapses provide a meeting place for the two most important components of associative memory, imagery and emotion.” In fact, “dopamine-powered desperation can change the brain forever, because its message of intense wanting narrows the field of synaptic change, focusing it like a powerful microscope on one particular reward. Whether in the service of food or heroin, love or gambling, dopamine forms a rut, a line of footprints in the neural flesh.”

And, of course, Lewis relapses, and eventually ends his addictive years in an amphetamine-induced psychosis, committing serial burglaries to fund his habit. “You’d think that getting busted, put on probation, kicked out of graduate school, and enduring a kind of infamy that was agonizing to experience and difficult to hide—all of that, an the need to start life over again—would be enough to get me to stop. It wasn’t.”

Not then, anyway. But Lewis has been clean now for 30 years. “Nobody likes an addict,” he writes. “Not even other addicts.”

If drugs are such feel-good engines, what goes wrong? Something big. “Because when drugs (or booze, sex, or gambling) are nowhere to be found, when the horizon is empty of their promise, the humming motor of the orbitofrontal cortex sputters to a halt. Orbitofrontal cells go dormant and dopamine just stops. Like a religious fundamentalist, the addict’s brain has only two stable states: rapture and disinterest. Addictive drugs convert the brain to recognize only one face of God, to thrill to only one suitor.”  The addict’s world narrows. Dopamine becomes “specialized, stilted, inaccessible through the ordinary pleasures and pursuits of life, but gushing suddenly when anything associated with the drug comes into awareness…. I wish this were just an exercise in biological reductionism, or neuro-scientific chauvinism, but it’s not. It’s the way things really work.”

Photo Credit: http://ebookstore.sony.com/

“Addiction Fiction”

Coming-of-Age Drug Novels

Call it “addiction fiction.” In the past few years we have seen a blossoming of this genre, where the private eye goes to 12-Step meetings, and one day your sponsor may just save your life by gunning down a rival in the street. Or, where the wise-beyond-their-years prep school drug addicts engage in Brett Easton Ellis-style sex and ennui.

Fiction readers of a certain age will recall that this is not a new thing under the sun. From Junky to The Man With the Golden Arm, from Naked Lunch to Less Than Zero, drug novels have always been with us. Addiction fiction has two distinct subgenres: addicts with money, and addicts without money. For obvious reasons, the latter genre is the prevailing one—Trainspotting and Requiem for a Dream come to mind. But the wealthy end of the spectrum is not without representation. Consider The Basketball Diaries, or Bright Lights, Big City.

As an example of the first type of book, the one where the addict has no money, we have Spoonful, by first-time author Chris Mendius. As for the upscale second type, there is the recently released novel, No Alternative,  by William Dickerson, a budding film director with an MFA. I would judge both authors to be well south of the age of 40, making both of them pure examples of Generation X. 

Ah, the 90s. As time passes, it seems clear that the death of Kurt Cobain has been added to the touchstones of American youth culture, in a tradition going back to the 60s. Where were you when Kennedy died? When Lennon died? When Cobain died? This last question matters, since Nirvana and Cobain are threaded thematically through both of these new novels. As Chris Willman wrote at Stop the Presses: “April 5 is to many contemporary rock fans what November 22 is to older baby boomers: the day you can almost certainly remember where you were or what you were doing when you heard that ___ died. That's not to say that Kurt Cobain's suicide represented a loss of national innocence in the same way that JFK's assassination did. For one thing, Cobain's whole life and career already symbolized lost innocence, long before he died.”

In Generation X drug novels, lost innocence isn’t lost—there was never any innocence in the first place.

Michael, the narrator of Spoonful, is the kind of drug addict with no money. Michael is forthright, if not one to probe the philosophical ironies of his condition: “Nobody ever says, ‘When I grow up, I want to be a junkie.’” End of story. Well, the beginning, really. In this well-written junky novel, author Chris Mendius brings his tragic characters to life in a manner that calls to mind Hubert Selby, Jr.’s stark New York classics of addiction without redemption.

Set in Chicago’s Wicker Park area, young Michael and his pal Sal find their way to heroin in a hurry. They also quickly learn the flip side of the illness—the sickness of withdrawal, “like having a debilitating combination of food poisoning and the flu, with periodic muscle cramps.” No matter. “Once we made it through all that, we decided to stay off dope. A month passed with no discernible improvement in our lives and we promptly resumed getting high.”

It’s heroin he craves. Michael is no fan of cocaine: “You’re up all night, running your mouth, jaw twitching, nose burning. You might want to fuck but you can’t. All you can do is keep going. Before you know it, the birds are chirping and the garbage trucks are rolling. You’re out hundreds of dollars and for what?” And they scoff at pharmaceutical efforts at non-addictive synthetic opiates, “engineered to not let anyone feel a moment of undeserved pleasure.” One character likens kicking methadone to “getting your skin pulled off with pliers.”

The debate over freely distributing the drug naloxone as an anti-OD safety measure is referred to obliquely: “That’s the thing with smack. It’s a fine line between the time of your life and the end of your life…. More often than not, the difference between life and death was having someone there to revive you or call somebody who could.”

Mendius is good at drawing a picture of the addict’s endless grind: “Finding the ways and means to score is a twenty-four-seven gig. You might get lucky and hit it big now and then but you’re always looking ahead. Plotting. Planning. No matter how much you get or how close the scrape, you always gotta keep at it. Day in and day out.”

Michael never quits for long, and when he is off heroin, he buries himself in marijuana and booze. There is no redemptive ending. He walks off into the sunset.

From seedy Chicago to the upper reaches of Westchester, New York. Like Spoonful, No Alternative by William Dickerson features characters whose collective memory goes back no farther than the 80s. Which sucked, as we all know, and as Thomas, the narrator, never tires of telling us. Thomas and his friends are drug and alcohol abusers with money. The drugs of choice are prescription medications, not heroin or cocaine, for these products of Fordham Prep. 

It is 1994, and the grunge youth of Yonkers, the children of Vietnam vets and hippies, are rootless and confused. “There was no clear-cut path beckoning them. No modus operandi.” It was a generation, Dickerson writes, that “earned a label that was just about as vague as their sense of what to do with their lives: Generation X.” In this version, not much has changed since the crack-crazy L.A. 80s of Brett Easton Ellis. The names and the drugs have been altered, but otherwise the trappings are indistinguishable: high disposable income and excessive ennui.

Thomas supports his crazy little sister Bridget, who becomes a white rapper named Bri Da B. His sister’s drug of choice is cutting herself: “She was determined to be in control. If she was going to bleed, it was going to be a decision, it was going to be controlled, and she was going to bleed everywhere, not just from the abyss between her legs. If pain was to be a constant, might as well get used to it and build up a tolerance.”

No Alternative is readable enough, but it does not carry the campy forward motion of other rich-kid addiction books. It is more measured, dry, and there is an odd hitch in the narration, which is resolved, rather shakily, at the end, with a big Reveal that distracts the reader from the central relationships in the story.

So, two early novels, by promising young writers, about drugs and what they do to you. It will be interesting to find out what becomes of these authors, and what manner of new work they get up to in the future. The story never ends where you think it does.

Book Review: Addiction Noir

 
The Next Right Thing by Dan Barden

To date, I’ve only reviewed one novel here at Addiction Inbox—Steve Earle’s I’ll Never Get Out of This World Alive, featuring the ghost of Hank Williams standing in for the addictive pleasures that musicians are heir to. Now comes The Next Right Thing by Dan Barden, an exemplar of a new literary genre I am going to call addiction noir. Dial Press, the Random House imprint that published the book, is putting Barden forward as a recovering alcoholic who has grokked this scene from the inside. “Dan Barden knows firsthand the difficulties of sobriety…. The Next Right Thing is a powerful new take on the recovery narrative.”

“I’m a recovering alcoholic,” Barden said in the press release, “and I had always wanted to write something about that experience but I couldn’t find a way to tell that story that didn’t seem stupid.”

That changed one morning while Barden was reading the New York Times. “It occurred to me that I could put everything I knew about recovery into a crime story…. There are a lot of great novels about the disease of addiction itself but not so many about recovery, mostly because there’s something very oblique and mysterious about recovery.”

The elements of Barden’s novel certainly aren’t new—a knowing, seen-it-all reformed alcoholic who happens to be an ex-cop, for starters—and plenty of unsavory bad guys. Add in the requisite women, attractive and troubled, or, as our hero Randy Chalmers prefers them, “insane and beautiful.” Chalmers is looking into the suspicious heroin overdose of his AA sponsor, Terry, in a rundown Santa Ana motel, fifteen years sober at the time of his death. The investigation leads Chalmers, sober himself for 8 years, into a tangle of recovery houses fronting as marijuana grow sites and secret shooting sets for amateur porn videos. The crisp quips and one-liners are often focused on the world of addiction. There are nice set pieces, and Chandleresque observations:

--“Those were the days of crack pipes and precious little eating. Even after she got her bearings back, she moved with the anxious, staticky jerks of a cartoon cat. She radiated disease.”

--“I hit him without thinking… but I was surprised to be once again acting without my own consent. That’s the way people talk about taking a drink, as though it’s happening to someone else at some gauzy distance. Like your arm is lifting the glass, and your consciousness has nothing to do with it.”

--“Even with all the step work and therapy and success, people still imagine they will be okay when the are rich. Or married. Or have a baby. Life for an alcoholic is often a process of discovering all the things that don’t make any difference.”

However, the book is marred by the kind of bewildering rumination that can result when a soap opera full of characters is at full boil: “Something about the recovery house scheme didn’t sit right with me. And why was this Simon Busansky character missing in action? Why had Mutt Kelly parked outside my house? Who had made that call to Cathy? Who was the business partner who so preoccupied Terry during the birth of the child he’d always wanted?”

Nevertheless, the book reads quickly, like a noirish mystery should. For influences, Barden lists the usual suspects—Raymond Chandler, Elmore Leonard, Robert B. Parker, George Pelecanos. With decent sales, I could see this becoming a book series, with our sober ex-cop getting himself involved in helping the wrong addict, or helping acquit the right one. With the public recognition of addiction seemingly at an all-time high, and with the ranks of the recently recovered always in the process of being replenished, there just might be a market for this sort of thing.

In a press release, Barden said the book was about “people who are trying to live sober lives against all odds. And what that’s like for me and my friends is complicated and beautiful and dramatic and terrifying. What’s it like to try to do the right thing by your family and friends when many of your instincts run against that?”

Or, as Randy Chalmers puts it: “Here’s another thing you learn in A.A.: when the drunk loses the woman he loves, you know you’re not at the end of the story. You know it’s going to get much worse.”

Photo credit: http://www.danbarden.com

Book Review: Writers On The Edge

A compendium of tough prose and poetry about addiction.

Here’s a book I’m delighted to promote unabashedly. I even wrote a jacket blurb for it. I called it an “honest, unflinching book about addiction from a tough group of talented writers. These hard-hitters know whereof they speak, and the language in which they speak can be shocking to the uninitiated—naked prose and poetry about potentially fatal cravings the flesh is heir to—drugs, booze, cutting, overeating, depression, suicide. Not everybody makes it through. Writers On The Edge is about dependency, and the toll it takes, on the guilty and the innocent alike.”

I am happy to stand by that statement, content to note that this collection of prose and poetry on the subject of addiction and dependency by 22 talented writers, with an introduction by Jerry Stahl of “Permanent Midnight” junky fame, includes a number of names familiar to me. That makes it all the easier to recommend this book—I know some of the talent. Take James Brown, a professor in the M.F.A program at Cal State San Bernardino, the book’s co-editor, who offers an excerpt from his excellent memoir, This River.  James is no stranger to the subject, having pulled out of a drug and alcohol-fueled nosedive that would have felled lesser mortals for good. “Even though you’ll always be struggling with your addiction, and may wind up back in rehab,” Brown writes, “at least for now, if only for this day, you are free of the miracle potions, powders and pills. If only for this day, you are not among the walking dead.” Or my friend Anna David, who is an editor at The Fix, an online addiction and recovery magazine to which I frequently contribute, and author of several books, including Party Girl and Falling for Me. Anna poignantly recalls “my shock over the power than booze had… it was the greatest discovery of my life.” And Ruth Fowler, another Fix contributor and author of Girl Undressed, delivers up a brilliantly detached story of her life as an addict on both coasts and just about everywhere else, which begins with the line, “I gravitated to the fucked up writers.”

Then there are the contributors I don’t know but wish I did, like co-editor Diana Raab, a registered nurse and award-winning poet, as well as co-author of Writers and Their Notebooks, who offers a poem to her grandmother: “Your ashen face and blond bob/disheveled upon white sheets/on the stretcher held by paramedics/lightly grasping each end, and tiptoeing.” Or another poet, B. H. Fairchild, author of the marvelous collection, Early Occult Memory Systems of the Lower Midwest: “When I would go into bars in those days/the hard round faces would turn/to speak something like loneliness/but deeper, the rain spilling into gutters/or the sound of a car pulling away/in a moment of sleeplessness just before dawn.”

And more: Frederick Barthelme, author of Double Down: Reflections on Gambling and Loss. Stephen Jay Schwartz, best-selling crime novelist  and former director of development for filmmaker Wolfgang Petersen. Writers Rachel Yoder, Victoria Patterson, David Huddle, and Scott Russell Sanders. Etc. This collection is a rich brew of essay, poetry, and memoir. A tough book, a brutal book, a real heartbreaker with grit. Some people get stronger and rise; some don’t. It is a thoughtful and creative compendium of addiction stories, and some of them will surprise you. All of them are solidly written, laid out with an unrelenting realism.

Here it is, these authors are saying. This is how it plays out. Unforgettable stuff.

Book Review of "Drunken Angel"

A hipster gets his shit straight—sort of.

Addiction memoirs remain one of the most popular forms of autobiography on the shelves. But now, when considering a new addition to the genre, it’s impossible not to wonder whether the claims being made by the author are genuine. Since serious drunks often end up visiting the lower circles of hell during the course of their disease, hair-raising and improbable scenes are lamentably common—that is part of the genre’s charm, if that is the right word for it. But how are we to react now? The answer is, you can’t know, and you never really could, that bastard James Frey notwithstanding.

But read them we do. Alan Kaufman, the author of the lively but exasperating autobiography of alcoholism, Drunken Angel, sweetens the pot considerably. He drops so many names, and finds himself involved in so many improbably episodes of transnational mayhem and kinky sex, that the escapades could almost fill a Bond novel. But to be fair, there’s nothing debonair going on here; not from a man who describes himself at one stage as “filthy, nauseous, hungover, astonished at my gargantuan appetite for the abyss.” And a willing suspension of disbelief, an attitude of innocent until proven guilty, must hold sway in the end, else why read them at all?

Alan Kaufman is more Jack Kerouac than James Bond: One of the founding members of California’s Spoken Word scene, editor of The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry, Kaufman bounced through the beat/hippie/downtown scenes in New York, and San Francisco and Israel, writing for Jewish publications, treating his wives shabbily, and blacking out all over whatever town he happened to be in. It’s not pretty, and it’s not meant to be. The deep layer of poverty and grunge that settles over the author’s existence between bouts of the literary high life caused Kirkus Reviews to complain that “Drunken Angels” was marred by the author’s tendency to whip schizophrenically “between manic moments of literary self-aggrandizing and deeply depressive moments of shocking wreckage.” That’s true—but Kaufman is also a classic case of dual diagnosis, an alcoholic who also suffers from delusions, hallucinations, and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder after his time spent in the Israeli Army. (It’s complicated.) Also known as co-morbidity, this combination often makes for complicated, even potentially fatal difficulties, as on a bus ride with his wife one night, when he “realized that certain passengers were Satanists who had singled out Anna and me for human sacrifice.” Not good.

Down and almost out, he is scooped from the gutter by an acceptance letter from the Columbia University Master of Fine Arts program, where he hobnobs with Tama Janowitz and Steve Jobs’ sister, the writer Mona Simpson. But always, there are “the nightmares, the operatives, the unfolding skein of sinister designs” that Kaufman must negotiate as his mental health deteriorated. And the drinking never really stopped.

Finally, in order to both prove he’s sick and to signal his distress, Kaufman slit his wrists, then “staggered to the bathroom, wrapped white towels around the bloody wounds, and with a sense of exhilaration, called 911.” Perhaps the reader may be forgiven for not sharing in the exhilaration at this stage of the narrative, after reading about the author being ejected from crash pads by acid dealers for bad debts, dodging alimony and child support, neglecting a daughter on another continent, veering into sadomasochistic sex (in considerable detail), sleeping in filthy gutters, on warm street grates, on park benches. Kaufman made a habit of sitting down at restaurant tables to finish off the leftovers. “Ate donuts from garbage cans, pizza crusts from sidewalks, half-rotten fruit found in doorways. I kept my cash for booze…” In one excruciating scene, he tracks down an ex-girlfriend in her class at Columbia, calls her a whore in front of the class, and hits her in the face. A roomful of witnesses to that one, presumably. “In all this,” he tells us,” I never once lost my grip on the scotch bottle. Not a drop lost.”

So, that was it for Columbia. “All my life,” Kaufman writes, “ I had been going, fleeing. Leaving. Home, friends, jobs. Cities, countries, armies. Marriages, families—everything…. Anything but this, anyone but you, anywhere but here.” That was also about it for common sense from our anti-hero. We are pretty safe, it seems to me, in assuming that only a blackout alcoholic with severe mental problems is likely to wake up with a cruel hangover, married to the total stranger he finds lying in bed next to him. And then proceed to try and make the marriage work.

But in time, the story arc swings toward redemption, and Kaufmann falls in with AA and the Twelve Steppers.  “You’re allergic to alcohol and obsessed with it at the same time," an AA companion tells him. “The combination is fatal and unstoppable. Once booze hits your system, the jig’s up: you must drink.” And, to his immense credit, at long last, Kaufman gets straight, and eventually stays that way, even if the sordid circumstances of his life do not instantly change for the better. One of the most valuable lessons Kaufman takes away from AA (one of the most valuable lessons many people learn there) is a hoary old maxim called HALT: Don’t get too Hungry, Angry, Lonely, or Tired. All serious trigger conditions for relapse in freshly abstinent alcoholics and other drug addicts.

His book is a reminder that all of an addict’s life problems do not blessedly vanish the instant he or she stops drinking or using, any more than a regular schedule of insulin injections ends all problems for diabetics—the more so in cases where addiction is mixed with diagnosable mental illness. Getting clean and sober does not eliminate Kaufman’s sexual aggression, his tendency to lie to his wives, or bring back his ability to write steadily for a living.

In the end, Kaufman met a lot of famous people, managed to get published in some very hip venues, helped spark a poetry movement in San Francisco—and has now been clean and sober for more than 20 years. So what does he have to say about the prime mover of this amped-up narrative, alcoholism itself? It happened in the usual way—a formative alcohol experience at a young age. In early high school, a football player, Kaufman went out with some school buddies and without much thought began passing around those big gallon jugs of cheap Gallo wine. “I felt the universe swim into view. I stumble, drunk, to the grass and lay with arms and legs akimbo, like an altar sacrifice smiling at the blazing stars. For the first time in my life, I felt connected, happy, sure that life belonged to me and I to it. And I drank myself unconscious.”

Travelling alone in Germany, late in the book, after a nightmarish tableaux of temptation arranged for him by a cadre of Russian soldiers ready to pour vodka down his gullet in the spirit of macho brotherhood, Kaufman breaks away and finds a quiet spot in a deserted train car, and holds his own AA meeting in his head. “My name is Alan, I’m an alcoholic,” he says silently to himself. And then he says the Serenity Prayer, “then the 12 steps, and, appointing myself as guest speaker, shared about the experience I’d just had with Russian soldiers and endless vodka.” The phantom faces of his AA friends “kept me company right until I reached Berlin. And they are always with me, to this day, the meeting that I carry in my soul.”

Photo credit: http://www.booksmith.com/

Falling Down and Getting Up: Nic Sheff’s New Addiction Book

 

Sheff jumps back on the carousel, lives to tell about it.

What would it be like to have written a drug memoir and an autobiography before you turned 30? Would it seem like the end or the beginning? Are there any worlds left to conquer?

The last decade has brought us fleshed-out young examples by Augusten Burroughs, age 37 (Dry); Joshua Lyons, 35 (Pill Head); and Benoit Denizet-Lewis, 33 (America Anonymous). This more or less fits the pattern established by the doyenne of the genre, Elizabeth Wurtzel, who, at age 35, wrote the addiction memoir More, Now, Again. And now along comes Nic Sheff to put them all to shame, making geezers out of every one of them.  Sheff wrote Tweak at 24, telling the world about addiction and how he’d conquered it. Well, as it turns out, not really. But for twenty-somethings, a week is like a year, so two years later, in actual time, comes We All Fall Down, in which we learn—if we didn’t learn it the first time—that the author is still learning about addiction, doesn’t have it figured, and isn’t really qualified to give out lessons to anybody just yet. Or perhaps I should wait for We All Stood Up Again two years from now before drawing any conclusions.

I know I am being a bit unfair to this well-intentioned young author. I blame it on the flood of weighty pronouncements found in the addiction memoirs that have flooded the market lately. God bless ‘em all, but Amazon, by listing Sheff’s book as “Young Adult,” probably gets it about right. You can’t go into these projects expecting great literature. Sheff’s text, perhaps in a deliberate appeal to younger readers, is peppered with whatevers, and clauses that begin with “like.” His favorite adjective, without question, is “super.” Too many one-sentence paragraphs give the book an irritatingly staccato effect at times.

But let’s get beyond that. There are good things here, and Sheff is certainly qualified to tell an addiction story: “We stayed locked in our apartment. I went into convulsions shooting cocaine. My arm swelled up with an abscess the size of a baseball. My body stopped producing stool, so I had to reach up inside with a gloved hand and….” And so forth.

There is a standard tension in addiction memoirs by young writers. The dictates of group therapy and 12-step treatment programs clash mightily with their innately sensitive bullshit detectors. It is hard—understandably—to buy into some of the more narrow-minded and coercive treatment programs they’ve been tossed into along the way. I was chilled to hear Sheff quoting substance abuse counselors threatening to commit him to lockdown psych wards, or blackmailing him into signing contracts about who he could or could not be friends with in the compound. For a free-spirited, open-minded young artist, the distinction between rehab and a Chinese re-education camp is pretty much lost entirely when personal freedoms are arbitrarily limited by lightly qualified drug counselors. One of the more compelling themes of the book is that rehab, as practiced in many treatment centers across the country, is something of a cuckoo’s nest joke.  It is a mutual con, where everybody fools everybody in order to turn a profit, on the one hand, and discharge legal or parental obligations, on the other. “Infallible institutions,” as Sheff derides them, “that know, absolutely, the difference between right and wrong.”

So Sheff plays along, he shucks, he jives, he lies, and it’s hard not to sympathize with him as he summarizes one counselor’s admonitions: “We don’t allow any non-twelve-step-related reading material, and you won’t be able to play that guitar you brought with you—so we’ll go ahead and keep that locked in the office.” Much like prisoners who leave prison chomping at the bit to commit new and more lucrative crimes, these kids are coming out of misguided drug rehab centers with nothing but an urgent desire to wipe away the bad memories of mandatory treatment by getting wasted as soon as possible.

And yet, and yet… “Once I had some knowledge about alcoholism and addiction, it was impossible to go back to using all carefree and fun,” Sheff writes. “The meetings and the things people told me had pierced the armor of my fantasy world. Somewhere inside I knew the truth.”

Maybe there won’t be a need for a third memoir. The book has a provisionally happy ending. Sheff found the right doctor, got on the right medications after a diagnosis of Bipolar Disorder (comorbidity, the elephant in the rehab room), and, when last seen, is clean and optimistic.

Sheff does have an appealing, Holden Caulfield-type persona, and this Catcher in the Rye mentality perhaps excuses the litany of things in this world that are phony, fucked up, and lame to this endlessly hip kid. All carpets are faded, all motel rooms are dingy. Even his airline boarding pass is “stupid.” But the style sometimes works for him: “Thinking, man, even that cat’s got enough sense not to jump on a hot grill twice, no matter how good whatever’s left cooking on there might look to her.” Or the time when he realizes that, like any old alkie, it was time to “start switching up liquor stores. That goddamn woman makes me feel as guilty as hell. And, I mean, who is she to judge? Christ.” And he’s got some nice truisms to deliver: “The most fucked-up detoxes I’ve ever seen are the people coming off alcohol. It’s worse than heroin, worse than benzos, worse than anything. Alcohol can pickle your brain—leaving you helpless, like a child—infantilized—shitting in your pants—ranting madness—disoriented—angry—terrified… You don’t go out like Nic Cage in Leaving Las Vegas, with a gorgeous woman riding you till your heart stops.”

Photo Credit: http://www.goodreads.com/