Addiction memoirs have similar lead-ups but recoveries are as varied as people. Making the decision itself is the binding force on an isolating journey where alcohol is now a socially endorsed method of self-care, especially for women. Making the decision by listening to that voice under the lies is one of the hardest parts.
My recovery was and is fostered by reading and writing. In that order.
Reading I always turn to books. Over the last year, I have read a lot of incredible women’s recovery stories, some from fine literary minds and all with varying philosophies on recovery, as there should be.
Women’s relationship with alcohol, as for BIPOC and LGBTQIA2S folk, is complex. Most memoirs below will also attest to the commingling of alcohol abuse and eating disorders. Feminists are beginning to deconstruct the idea that drinking equates with independence, especially given society’s engineered consent to Big Alcohol:
spending a night out drinking is akin to dismantling every piece of protection we have — our cognition, our decision making, our reaction time, our memory, our standards, our voice. If we thought about alcohol in this way — as something that undermines our collective momentum and personal agency and vitality and self-worth — what would that mean for us? What if we all rejected the poison — then what? I’ll tell you what: world domination, bitches.
― Holly Whitaker
Whether you are in recovery or just interested in culture and biography, these books are changing the way we think about drinking culture:
Sarah Hepola — Blackout : Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget
A reverse narration in vivid prose of Hepola’s life riddled by terrifying blackouts. Hepola demystifies the science behind blackouts (which are waking episodes cut off from short-term memory) and illustrates how people who experience frequent blackouts live in fear. Some of it is incredibly funny and raw, but what strikes me most about Hepola’s story is the lengths she went to, myself included, to drink like men.
Kristi Coulter — Nothing Good Can Come from This
Coulter’s witty, no-bullshit creative non-fiction essays on recovery are a departure from novel-length memoir and her essays stand alone as shining examples of the genre. You can read or listen to Coulter’s groundbreaking feature essay Enjoli , published right here on Medium in 2016, where she gets to the heart of the ill-begotten, reductive signifiers we are using for women who drink:
a woman with a single malt scotch is bold and discerning and might fire you from her life if you fuck with her. A woman with a PBR is a Cool Girl who will not be shamed for belching. A woman drinking MommyJuice wine is saying she’s more than the unpaid labor she gave birth to. The things women drink are signifiers for free time and self-care and conversation — you know, luxuries we can’t afford.
Annie Grace — This Naked Mind : Control Alcohol
This is my least favourite, but Grace’s work is seminal in recovery communities and is a great place to start for men and women alike. Her book considers the general science of addiction through her personal story and compassionately defines alcoholism as a de facto result of the highly addictive poison: ethanol. This shifts the focus from self-loathing and stigma of the alcoholic to the real work of recovery.
Holly Whitaker — Quit Like a Woman : The Radical Choice Not to Drink in a Culture Obsessed with Alcohol
Whitaker challenges stigmas on recovery, promoting a progressive perspective on an emerging sobriety culture. Her book is uneven, but she gives a brilliant analysis of the spin in Big Alcohol’s patriarchal exploitation of women, BIPOC and LGBTQIA2S folk. Whitaker outlines why everyone should be concerned why we are stopping short of investigating our willful ignorance about Alcohol along with the other systems that are creating inequity. For every person with a substance abuse issue, there is a connected community — family — still blaming the person who is already at odds with the system and not the substance. Whitaker asks:
why are we so mad at everything and not mad at what alcohol is doing to us, or how Big Alcohol lines its pockets from our exploitation and death? Why are we not raging against all the oppressive and absolutely murderous ways shows up in women’s lives, our kids’ lives, our sisters’ lives, in the LGBTQIA community, in communities of people of color or Indigenous peoples?
Leslie Jamison — The Recovering : Intoxication and Its Aftermath
Deemed as “required reading” by Stephen King, The Recovering is an acclaimed, profoundly deep read that also unveils the inequity of addiction treatment among its other explorations. Leslie Jamison emulates all recovery lit in her trailblazing, academic research disentangling our lionization, our “ white logic ” of the troubled, yet brilliant alcoholic writer. She does so as part of her own ambiguous recovery narrative as an emerging writer. Jamison writes with some of the sharpest prose I’ve read in the genre. She observes:
addiction wasn’t simply creative gasoline, but it wasn’t just blunt-force trauma either. I’d been so eager to dismiss the myths of whiskey and ink that it took me a while to stomach their truths: that yearning is our most powerful narrative engine, and addiction is one of its dialects; that addiction is a primal and compelling story, structured by irony and hinged by betrayal, the fantasy of escape colliding with the body in ruin.
Jessica Lee McMillan © 2021 Recovering The most amazing thing about recovery stories, in all their commonalities, is that it is no less of a revelation to those experiencing it. Mine is a private, mundane, daily revelation.
I had already experienced long, enjoyable periods of abstinence as an attempt at moderation but the abstinence was never the problem. The drinking was. I did not lose everything but I had injuries, humiliating blackouts that I thought I could control, lost self-esteem and probably some friendships. I could have lost so much more if I did not listen to that voice .
It was past time to make the call and I thank the books I read to help me over months of torturously processing the fact that I had already intrinsically decided it was over forever.
What I learned is that determining what to label yourself should not cause delay in the work you need to do. I didn’t need to make moralizing, quasi-evangelical admissions of having no control to admit that alcohol is highly addictive and creating more holes in my life than patches.
Holly Whitaker’s Hip Sobriety and The Temper challenge the reductive definitions of alcoholism that prevent people from getting help earlier due to stigma. She effectively debases tropes of “hitting rock bottom” for this reason. You don’t have to have lost everything to make a change. In fact, with a growing cohort of primarily millennials, sobriety is becoming a way of life for people who never abused substances.
Insular pandemic life has made it easier for non-problem drinkers to cross the line into drinking when they would normally abstain. The initial stages of the pandemic would have been an easy time to give in but when it was other people’s turn to normalize excess, doing “the best they could”, I refused this drinker’s golden ticket and took my quiet, introverted path undisturbed.
Writing I needed to give myself an outlet I had been denying myself: my creativity and resultant spiritual wellbeing. I needed to express the things I had been drowning in booze.
For me, poetry has become the lens through which I balance my perspective of the world in all its flaws and beauty. I began writing sporadically again before I quit and I now have my writing to thank, as well as the lovely group of writers I’ve met on this online writing community.
Such is the work of recovery, examining the things that make us put things in our bodies or hurt ourselves. It is looking squarely at emotions that were too hard to work through. Because my writing has been such a healing process, I have only specifically written about my recovery a handful of times.
There is something fateful about choosing Valentine’s Day 2020 as my last sip. I chose myself. Before the world changed forever, mine already had. And here is the boring, wonderful, non-trainwreck part of every recovery story: I am happier, more energetic, creative and mentally dextrous. I have restored self-esteem and can better channel my overexcitable awe and existential pain .
The recovery narratives I astutely chose to line my path allowed me to see that the swell of emotions and deep sensitivity I shoved into the background will not break me if I am not numbing myself. Learning that, I know I can cope with anything, bitches.
Jessica Lee McMillan © 2021
