BEST BOOKS FOR...
DEALING WITH A DRINK PROBLEM
THE author and broadcaster suggests key novels to help you through the trickier times in life
I GAVE up drinking about a year ago, and it was the best thing I ever did. I wasn’t an alcoholic, but I did like to climb down after a hard day with a generous dose of lady petrol.
Since I went almost teetotal (I still have a glass of champagne at parties) I sleep better, my moods have lightened and I have lost about 10 kilos.
There are drawbacks: it’s hard to be the life and soul of the party on sparkling water and I find my eyelids drooping by 10.30pm, but the glory of waking up with a clear head is worth the pain of always being the designated driver.
Luckily I don’t crave alcohol any more, but when I do get a fleeting fancy for a gin and tonic, I turn to the brilliantly funny Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis, which has the best description of waking up after an evening of excess ever written — ‘spewed up like a broken spider-crab on the tarry shingle of morning’.
Jim Dixon, the hero, is staying at the house of his boss, Professor Welch, and he opens his eyes not only to the world’s worst hangover but to a room that he has completely trashed.
The combination of shame and nausea is also nailed by Helen Fielding in Bridget Jones’s Diary. Singleton Bridget is well aware she is exceeding her quota of alcohol units but life and dastardly Daniel Cleaver keep defeating her efforts to live virtuously. Fielding’s description of a dinner party where Bridget drunkenly produces blue soup is the literary equivalent of a glass of vintage champagne.
Jim and Bridget are lovable drunks, but for a sobering account of the misery an alcoholic can wreak on those around them, it’s worth reading Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh.
The book charts the Oxford friendship between Charles Ryder and aristocratic Sebastian Flyte. Sebastian appears to have everything — looks, charm, position — but he cannot stop drinking. Slowly he loses everything he loves and ends up broken in mind and spirit. I have read this book many times and on each occasion I long to pick up Sebastian and shake him into sobriety, but as the book makes clear so elegantly, alcoholism is not so easily dealt with.