We need to hear more about bleak lowlands of sobriety
Alcoholism hurts. We know what drunks are like because we work with them, or they hit on us in bars, or they just hit us, or a human beer barrel speaks to us at a party and gibberish — the language of marmots, or possibly Sindarin — emerges from her mouth and we are appalled. I don’t like bulk drinking; it brings out the malevolence in people.
Drunks write a lot about being drunk. When they’re sober, they write a lot about having been drunk, and they do go on about it. The question isn’t why do writers drink, it’s why do drinkers write.
What’s strange is that they rarely write about sobriety. It’s the same with opioid abuse, about which we know little because people don’t slip pills into their mouths in pill bars and talk companionable nonsense all night and then mythologize it in print. It’s a more private habit.
When humans are in pain, they’re rightly given opioids. With time and ill luck, they’re hooked and then they buy illegally to avoid the new pain of stopping.
The revels ended long ago. Canada has been hit hard, with 120 people dying in Alberta last year from taking fentanyl, compared to six deaths in 2011, as the CBC has reported. How does it feel? How can we help?
Much as I love misery memoirs, where are the sobriety ones, the stories of the constant fight to stay straight? Chicago journalist Neil Steinberg and editor Sara Bader spent five years assembling Out of the Wreck I Rise: A Literary Companion to Recovery, a tremendous collection of quotes, chunks and little screams from the literature of not being high, drunk, baked, spaced out, unconscious, incontinent and, above all, boring.
It happily doesn’t restrict itself to Americans, nor to drinkers, nor to a style of misery. It takes in all modes, all landscapes.
The reason nobody talks about sobriety is that it has no narrative, in the sense that one unmedicated event happens after another, which is just life but with your protective skin removed.
“Standing here among the sword ferns my senses seem to be thin glass, so acute at their edges I am afraid Iwill cut myself simply by touching the silicon edge of a bamboo leaf,” writes the Canadian poet Patrick Lane.
“We are disclosing animals, wired for unburdening,” wrote the late Canadian essayist David Rakoff. “It’s what we do as a species.” But what is there to unburden about not ingesting pain relief? There is little to say that grabs the smug sober person.
“You dream of a laundromat,/ a place to unscrew your skull and toss your dirty/ thoughts in a machine, come back an hour later,/ your impulses all folded and clean,” writes the U. S. poet Jeffrey McDaniel. If only.
Coming down from opiates is rough, and the psychological pain of naloxone — the drug that will magically save you from an overdose death by blocking the capacity of the drug to give you pleasure — is beyond extreme.
As a young user said in “The Antidote,” an essay by Ian Frazier about a wave of heroin deaths in Staten Island, it won’t leave you grateful.
“All I remember is waking up and feeling so horrible that I thought the people I was with were being mean to me. I didn’t thank anybody for saving me — I was only angry and upset that they had made me feel like this. The withdrawal came on immediately and it was very, very painful, like 20 times worse than the worst flu I ever had.”
Donna Tartt’s 2013 novel, The Goldfinch, is as much about opiate use and abuse as it is about social class, art, loneliness, orphans, terrorism and the restoration of antique furniture. Tartt, who was fed opiates as a child and knows the brain- pleasure of it, describes her protagonist coming off drugs.
It was unendurable, “a sopping black curtain of horror.”
“This was a plunge encompassing sorrow and revulsion far beyond the personal: a sick, drenching nausea at all humanity . . . even the beautiful ones were like soft fruit about to spoil.” I can’t quote further as it’s too wretched, but how do people find the self- discipline to enter the bleak lowlands of sobriety?
They need all the help we can give them, including Steinberg and Bader’s fine book. Stopping isn’t the key, it’s staying that way. I wish we heard more about this. If only we celebrated the beauty of mundanity — the ordinary plodding day — a little more.