The Recovering Read online

  Heading downstairs into church basements made me remember that first party in an Iowa basement—when we’d gathered in a circle and performed our lives for one another, when I’d mimed riding a gentleman just to get a few laughs. This was another vision of storytelling altogether, not about glory but survival. Though at round-robin meetings, where we shared in a circle, I grew anxious if I was sitting next to someone who usually gave powerful shares—not resentful, exactly, but aware of trying to follow forceful words with my own cobbled offering.

  At the end of most meetings, someone stood up and handed out poker chips for sobriety birthdays: Thirty days. Ninety days. Six months. Nine months. It was powerful to see old men and women walk up for sixteen years—or twenty-seven, or thirty-two—and know they’d once been the person who’d just walked up for sixty days, the guy who’d just thanked his sponsor and then awkwardly hugged him, flannel to leather, arms locked firmly and without equivocation.

  Every Sunday evening, I went to a lottery meeting where I took a poker chip with a number on it. It worked like bingo: Maybe your number would get called, to come up to the podium and share, or maybe it wouldn’t. That was hard for me, because I liked being in control of when I was going to speak, and it was good for me, because I liked being in control of when I was going to speak. I always worried I didn’t have anything useful to say, but usually something just rose up and asserted itself: “I worry every day that there will never be anything that feels as good as drinking felt.” I said that once. I said that more than once. And every time I heard someone else say, “I’m so anxious about talking tonight, maybe I don’t have anything useful to say,” I thought: Thank you for saying so.

  Bill Wilson, the founder of AA, was a man whose life became myth—a stockbroker turned bathtub-gin drinker turned sober savior—but he didn’t trust his own mythology. He was uneasy with the burnished legend his life became, how much grit and difficulty it elided, even as he understood how useful it could be for a recovery movement to have an anchoring tale of origins. He never wanted his own story to become more important than the stories of others, even though the fact remained: His sobriety was the original legend.

  His story was the first chapter of Alcoholics Anonymous, the Big Book, first published in 1939. The narrative tracked his descent into chronic alcoholism as a stockbroker drinking his way through the booming stock market of the mid-twenties, then his crash into unemployment and round-the-clock dependence after Black Tuesday, in 1929. His story confessed many unsuccessful attempts to stop drinking: Willpower couldn’t make him stop, love couldn’t make him stop, medicine couldn’t make him stop. When he went to a hospital and his condition was finally explained to him, he was sure that “this was the answer—self-knowledge.” But it wasn’t. He kept drinking anyway.

  What eventually did save Wilson was the arrival of an old friend named Ebby, whose candor about his own drinking, and his newfound spirituality, opened Wilson to the possibility of belief. At first, Wilson wasn’t convinced. “Let him rant!” he thought. “My gin would last longer than his preaching.” But something shifted during their talk, and after it was done, Wilson went to the hospital to be “separated from alcohol for the last time.” As he wrote in the Big Book: “I have not had a drink since.”

  This switch to present perfect—“I have not had”—is how his readers know that this time was different from all the other times he stopped. Those times were all doomed to the past tense, the endless cycle: I still thought I could control the situation… there were periods of sobriety… Shortly afterward I came home drunk… I had written lots of sweet promises… In no time I was beating on the bar asking myself how it happened… I told myself I would manage better next time…

  At the hospital where he went to dry out, Wilson had a moment of intense connection with God: “I felt lifted up, as though the great clean wind of a mountain top blew through and through.” But the Big Book doesn’t frame Wilson’s moment of sublimity as the turning point in his sobriety—this visionary moment of being blown through by the mountain wind. It frames his turning point as the conversation with Ebby, when he saw eye to eye with a friend at his kitchen table. That’s the moral of the story: This communion is what made the mountain wind possible.

  AA itself began not when Wilson got sober, but when he helped another man get sober, an Akron doctor named Dr. Bob, who would become famous, too—as the stranger Wilson saved, the first of many.

  Early in my sobriety I met a stranger I wanted to save. Dave and I had a few people over one night, and I was trying hard to be a good host, unloading pink boxes from work full of jam-oozing scones and caramel cinnamon buns that had been gooey at breakfast but were harder now, stale cardboard approximations of their morning selves.

  When I came back from the kitchen with the pastries arranged on plates, I found a girl in a gold Lycra bodysuit holding court in our living room. Everyone assumed someone else knew her, but no one did. We were all getting to know her, or at least we were learning that she was looking for this party where her friend was supposed to be. She was very drunk. She’d just wandered through our unlocked front door and come upstairs. She’d heard voices and thought perhaps this was the party she’d been looking for. Her Lycra bodysuit was truly astonishing.

  “We’re playing a board game,” someone explained to her. But she wasn’t interested in our board game. She was interested in her friend’s party. Her face was glazed, her eyes rolling around like marbles. I offered to drive her home, already imagining how it would play out: We’d have a conversation in the car—about drinking, where it had gotten her, where it had gotten me. Maybe I’d take her to the Sunday-night meeting, or maybe I’d just tell the story of her there. It would be my first act of sober heroism. I went to the bedroom to get my keys.

  But when I came back, she was gone. She’d just wandered off, the others said. Just like she’d wandered in. I got in my car anyway, and cruised the dark streets looking for her shiny gold suit shambling through the shadows. But I never found her.

  Every meeting was a chorus. You got to know the regulars. A man named Mitch remembered waking up one morning—after a bender, in a car that wasn’t his, in the middle of a field—to see a cow sticking her nose through the open window. A woman named Gloria described taking long “naps” when her daughter was young, drinking alone in her bedroom and answering, groggy and irritated, whenever her daughter knocked on the door. A man named Carl remembered drinking thermos after thermos of instant coffee—compulsively, into jittery oblivion—as a boy in elementary school. A man named Keith, in his polyester tracksuit, was usually quiet, but one day he said simply: “When I drink, hope dies in me.” A man named Felix, an aging heroin addict in a red beanie, said he loved being hungry. It was his body telling him it wanted to live.

  A woman named Dana had half her hair shaved, with purple streaks in what was left. She rarely smiled those first few months after she got off heroin. The way she glared at me sometimes, I was sure she found me tiresome and long-winded. But one day she laughed so hard at something I shared about tuning the car radio to NPR before turning off the ignition, so that when Dave started the car he would think I’d been listening to NPR, because it seemed like I should listen to NPR, rather than the ridiculous pop music I played instead. It was a trivial thing, but also not; it was about lying to give the world what we wanted it to see.

  “That’s me,” Dana said. “That’s totally me.”

  When I started giving her rides to meetings, we never played NPR. After a few months clean, she really bloomed: You could see it in her eyes and body, how tightly she hugged other women. One morning I picked her up during a huge snowstorm, with the roads nearly empty. My car was shit in the snow. I blasted the heat and clenched the wheel. We fishtailed all the way but made the meeting. We had a time now, the two of us. We had a story: That day we drove through the snow; that day we weren’t sure we’d make it, but then we did.

  Bill Wilson told the story of his sobriety different way
s depending on where he was telling it, or to whom. While the Big Book version of his story featured his kitchen-table conversation with Ebby as an unequivocal epiphany—“My ideas about miracles were drastically revised right then”—his autobiography confessed a few more binges after this visit. It was only after the wind on the mountain, he said, that he stayed sober for good.

  The disjunction between these two versions wasn’t a question of vanity or authenticity so much as pragmatism. For the Big Book, Wilson wanted to stress the importance of what AA offered, which was identification and fellowship, rather than pinning sobriety on the type of intense spiritual experience that some people might never have. He didn’t alter his story out of self-concern but from a nearly opposite impulse—he understood his own life as a public tool rather than a private artifact.

  Wilson’s story was a complicated tool, because it created certain pressures of its own. What about the reader who didn’t stay sober for good after his first conversation with a sober friend? Perhaps that reader relapsed six more times, called his sober friend drunk, and said, Sorry that I can’t stay sober like that guy in the Big Book.

  That’s why Wilson wanted to put out a book that reflected the structure of a meeting—that held the stories of others, not just his own. He gave the Big Book a fitting subtitle: The Story of How Many Thousands of Men and Women Have Recovered from Alcoholism. The single story of the whole book held the plural population of its many tales. Wilson didn’t want his story to become binding archetype or narrative legislation: You must be sober like this. He wanted to make room for everyone who hadn’t found great winds on mountaintops, or deliverance in a single conversation. He wanted to “play the foundations of this movement down,” because he thought it worked better “without too much sanction from the top.”

  Wilson didn’t want to become a saint, but he found himself the “number-one man” in a movement he’d sculpted to resist the whole notion of being number-one anything. At an AA conference in 1958, he told the crowd: “I am like you… I, too, am fallible.” He wrote a letter to an AA member named Barbara explaining that a perch had been constructed for him that no human man could possibly occupy. That was part of why he hated the idea of writing an autobiography: the fear that it would elevate his perch even further. “Of course I have always been intensely averse to anything autobiographical being done in print,” he wrote in the foreword to an autobiography that was eventually published after his death. Titled Bill W.: My First Forty Years, it was actually a series of transcribed conversations Wilson had conducted with a fellow sober friend named Ed Bierstadt in 1954. The book’s structure replaced the standard one-man show of memoir with the conversation of fellowship.

  The book framed itself as an inoculation—an attempt to preempt the hagiographies that might follow—and during its conversations, Wilson is constantly reckoning with the question of his own ego. He’s worried about the ways that telling his story might threaten to inflate it, that he might take too much pride in his old sins, or his new redemption. “Ed and I just had a good laugh about the Wall Street days of the last record,” he confesses at one point; “it is all too clear that I reverted to type. The whole tone of the thing sounds like I was in a barroom pounding on the bar, talking big deals, financial omnipotence and power.”

  It’s a narrative relapse. For a moment, Wilson’s voice loses its sobriety and reverts to drunken self-aggrandizement—bragging about his financial escapades. For a moment, self-exposure lapses into its dark alter ego: self-promotion. This is an occupational hazard when it comes to conversation narratives. What if your pleasure in telling stories about the old prodigal days betrays that part of you still wants to return to them? But Wilson confesses it—the slip, the creep of pride—and by confessing that his old drunk ego has momentarily hijacked the story, he trusts he can reclaim it.

  One of the first major media features about AA, Jack Alexander’s 1941 article for the Saturday Evening Post, was skeptical about the dramatic storytelling habits of its members. They “behaved like a bunch of actors sent out by some Broadway casting agency,” Alexander wrote. But he happily reproduced a catalog of their tales:

  They tell of the eight-ounce bottles of gin hidden behind pictures and in caches from cellar to attic; of spending whole days in motion-picture houses to stave off the temptation to drink; of sneaking out of the office for quickies during the day. They talk of losing jobs and stealing money from their wives’ purses; of putting pepper into whiskey to give it a tang; of tippling on bitters and sedative tablets, or on mouthwash or hair tonic; of getting into the habit of camping outside the neighborhood tavern ten minutes before opening time. They describe a hand so jittery that it could not lift a pony to the lips without spilling the contents; drinking liquor from a beer stein because it can be steadied with two hands, although at the risk of chipping a front tooth; tying an end of a towel about a glass, looping the towel around the back of the neck, and drawing the free end with the other hand, pulley fashion, to advance the glass to the mouth; hands so shaky they feel as if they were about to snap off and fly into space; sitting on hands for hours to keep them from doing this.

  What Alexander begins to realize, or at least frames as a realization for his article, is that these sober men aren’t telling their stories as performance pieces—to play the parts of feckless dilettantes or sanctimonious altruists. They’re offering their stories as cures, for other people and for themselves. Of course it’s not an either/or. Someone can be trying to seduce a crowd and save their lives; can crave glory and earnest utility at once. Alexander insists that AA members are like diabetics, with “drunk-saving” as their insulin. He doesn’t build them up as selfless saints, but as people whose self-preservation involves making themselves useful. They don’t just tell their stories as cocktail party anecdotes (see what I’ve lived!) or wound badges (see what I’ve suffered!) but so they can reach people who need them.

  Take Sarah Martin, who jumped (or fell) out of a window drunk, landed face-first on the pavement, and suffered through six months of dental work and plastic surgery. Now she “spends many of her nights,” Alexander observes, “sitting on hysterical women drinkers to prevent them from diving out of windows.” Sarah talks about jumping out of a window not because it distinguishes her, but because it doesn’t.

  Alexander’s article was written with Bill Wilson’s help, and it was published with his endorsement and his gratitude. “For many a day,” Wilson wrote to Alexander, “you will be the toast of AA—in coca cola, of course!” In the first twelve days after the article was published, AA heard from nearly a thousand alcoholics who wanted help. By the end of 1941, the program had more than 8,000 members. By 1950, it had 100,000. By 2015, it had more than 2 million.

  What does the concept of recovery mean? It can mean healing, repair, relocation, reclamation, or recuperation. French philosopher Catherine Malabou proposes three different visions of recovery, attaching each one to an animal: the phoenix, the spider, and the salamander. The phoenix represents a version of recovery in which the wound is utterly erased—“an annulment of the defect, the mark, the lesion”—just as the phoenix rises unscathed from the ashes, perfectly unblemished, precisely as it was before. It’s like skin healing without a scar, and it’s something close to the psychic opposite of AA, in which wounds are not forgotten but fundamental, their narration the glue binding every Sarah Martin and her flock of newcomers.

  AA lives somewhere between Malabou’s other creatures: The spider offers a model of recovery that involves something like an endless accumulation of scars spun into a web, like a text “covered with marks, nicks, scratches” that refuses the possibility of “taking on a new skin” without blemishes—while the salamander, Malabou’s third recovery mascot, grows a new limb that is neither scarred nor identical to the one it had before. This new limb is not the spider’s endless web of scars, but it’s not a phoenix-style resurrection either, recovery bringing back an unchanged version of the former self, because the Sa
lamander’s new limb has a different size, shape, and weight. “There is no scar, but there is a difference,” Malabou writes. “The difference is neither a form of higher life nor a monstrous gap.”

  AA’s vision of regeneration proposes a sober identity that is neither a replica of the prior self, with the drinking excised like a tumor, nor a version of this self covered with calluses and scars, but a new organ entirely. The transformation is neither holy nor grievous. It’s just a strategy of survival. The program’s twelve steps have become famous, reaching from surrender to confession: admitting that your life has become unmanageable in the First Step; surrendering to a Higher Power in the Third; sharing an inventory of your resentments and character defects in the Fifth; making amends to those you’ve harmed in the Ninth; and reaching out to help others in the Twelfth: Having had a spiritual awakening as a result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics. In this way—in this ongoingness—the steps are never done.

  When I first heard the phrase “witness authority,” it was like hearing someone say “Dihydrogen monoxide,” and then thinking: Of course. Water. Dr. Meg Chisolm, a psychiatrist at Johns Hopkins, was telling me she recommends AA to patients mainly for its social infrastructure and for this witness authority, meaning the way other AA members offer—by sharing their experiences—a lived authority distinct from her own. So that’s what you call it, I thought. I’d already been living on it for years: Bug getting me right that first night, or Dana saying, “That’s me,” as if her whole life had been spent listening to the wrong radio station. Dr. Kaplin told me that his patients often say to him: “You’d be doing heroin, too, Doctor. You don’t know what it means to walk a mile in my shoes.” He works with Baltimore addicts whose lives often differ sharply from his own, and part of what these patients find in recovery is recognition.