Road to recovery
Odysseus wanted to hear the Sirens sing. No one had ever heard the song and lived, but Odysseus figured that if he got his men to bind him with rope to the ship’s mast, he’d be safe. When he actually hears the song, logic goes out the window. In the moment, Odysseus wants nothing but to break free from the rope and go to the thing that will destroy him.
This fight is the central metaphor in Joshua Mohr’s memoir “Sirens.” Where addiction memoirs are often written from a place of safety, “Sirens” is not. The same Sirens that got Mohr into Fernet and cocaine still call out to him. They want to take his life away. They want to take his young daughter and his wife. They want to ruin the life he’s built for himself. “Siren” re-creates these calls, and with urgency. In his mind, sober or not, Mohr is still bound to the mast, fighting.
Different Mohrs blur in these pages. One is blotto. He’s a chauvinistic bartender drinking Champagne from a shoe. One is sober, playing guitar with his young daughter in his lap. Ten a.m. at Vesuvio, one accepts a stranger’s bottle of unknown pills. One holds hands with his wife at a treatment center. Identity is compounded, and Mohr walks a tenuous balance. On the printed page, self-destruction and relapse are literal inches away.
What’s good is that Mohr is too smart to show the journey of self as a simple before and after. “Drugs and drink and strokes and heart surgery,” he says to his wife. “You should have picked a better husband.” “Leave my husband alone,” she replies. Mohr’s self-lacerating interiority is often at odds with reality. Others have a different perception of him, and Mohr is at his best when he shows an interplay between his reality and theirs. In a restaurant, for example, when Mohr interviews another writer, he blurts out that he wants a scotch and soda. The call of the Sirens becomes incredibly shrill. Chaotic inner conflict about the drink is stylized with line-breaks and combinations of words. But Mohr doesn’t wind up drinking the alcohol. And when he goes back and listens to the tape, he hears no chaos. On the tape all he hears is 45 minutes of “two writers talking shop, bulls—ing about books.”
Mohr has written five novels, and “Sirens” is his first work of nonfiction. Readers of Mohr’s other work will recognize similarities here. There’s a sadistic stepfather, and a mother who leaves her son at home with pizza money and boxed wine. These don’t read as incriminations, but rather as Mohr’s attempt to complicate characters. These complications often lead back to reveal more about Mohr himself. Going to pick up cocaine in Las Vegas, for example, he’s left on a couch with a stripper’s young son. He thinks about how the kid will remember him. He thinks about how the kid’s memory will likely be as weird and messed up as his own, remembering the many strange men who came through his own house as a child.
Whether he wants to or not, Mohr accepts responsibility for the time spent with drugs and alcohol. His body fails him. There’s a hole in his heart (a literal hole, as thick as eight dimes). And the hole is big enough to let blood clots travel through to his brain, causing potentially fatal strokes. In the latter half of the book, Mohr meets a talking dog named Boots and hallucinates a Nobel Prize-winning Nazi, Dr. Werner Forsmann (1904-1979). These hallucinations (also familiar from Mohr’s fiction) are devices used to explore ideas. Their presence is treated with none of the disbelief of the fantastic; instead, they’re a watered-down-surrealistic manifestation of Mohr’s interiority. Forsmann, in real life, invented the cardiac procedure that would eventually plug the hole in Mohr’s heart. In “Sirens,” he’s in the kitchen, cooking eggs. He stomps into the room on Halloween and asks Mohr why he’s wearing a pink wig. Forsmann is a way for Mohr to meditate on how it’s necessary for people to own up to their past. But the treatment is quick and cartoony. Forsmann’s inclusion is a casual appropriation of a historical figure, used to complicate Mohr’s idea of self.
“Sirens” gives a picture of Mohr’s life as a balancing act with real danger and consequences. In many ways the book feels incredibly alive. The prose moves fast. There’s nothing at all calcified or fossilized here, and Mohr makes himself likable and compelling and charming, with a real ear for fast-moving unsentimental language. Mohr knows addiction and has rendered an honest portrait of it here. Days spent in a bar with Fernet never feel far behind. The fight is ongoing. In “Sirens,” the fight is for Mohr’s life, and it’s real.