Interview with Jill Talbot, author of “Loaded: Women and Addiction”

Each week, we post short interviews with interesting people about their thoughts and feelings on women and drinking. There is such a wide array of perspectives about this topic, and we are excited to gain insight into as many as possible and to share them with you.

Jill Talbot is the author of Loaded: Women and Addiction (Seal Press, 2007).  Her work has appeared in journals such as Notre Dame Review, Under the Sun, Blue Mesa Review, Cimarron Review, Segue, and Ecotone.  She teaches at St. Lawrence University.

How old were you when you had your first drink and what was it?

When I was about ten, I think, I found a discarded can of Budweiser on the street in front of a neighbor’s house.   I was with some older kids, and they took turns sipping from it, but even then, I knew that beer was supposed to be cold, not warm and fizzy on the sidewalk, so I declined.  That can of beer stands out to me:  the drink I did not take.   I actually abstained longer than most of my friends.  I recall a ski trip in junior high when everyone else stocked booze from parental liquor cabinets into suitcases, but I didn’t partake then either (my parents were teetotalers, so I didn’t have a ready supply like other kids).  Looking back, I knew the pull that alcohol would have on me, so perhaps I was delaying the inevitable.  First drink I can remember (a true drinker’s answer, yes?):  a beer in my closet before school in the eighth grade, because I had had enough of waiting to see how it tasted and what it would do to me (I went to Mrs. Wolland’s English class tipsy on one beer), and because Kim M.’s dad, according to her, wouldn’t notice one missing from the veggie crisper where he kept his stash of Coors.

I spent my 16^th summer grounded after a girl from my high school wrote a letter to my parents that I had been drunk at a party and my defense–“I was holding it for someone else”–didn’t hold.   After that, my drinking came on hard and fast and I was out of control, always the one who took it too far at parties, in the back of trucks, out in the middle of suburban streets where no houses yet stood.

How did/does your family treat drinking?

My family treats alcohol as if it doesn’t exist, which reminds me of a boyfriend who told me, “Your family needs to drink.”  My maternal grandmother was a Jim Beam/Budweiser alcoholic, the hard stuff and lots of it in big tumblers that rendered her a complete, harrowing mess, so alcohol has a nightmare-like quality for my mother.    When I was growing up, my father used to snap at any server in a restaurant who suggested a cocktail or wine, and during delays at restaurants, he refused to “wait in the bar.”   So I grew up with alcohol as a ghost who wasn’t allowed in the room.

How do you approach alcohol in your every day life?

I have a friend who talks of his mother’s nightly glass or three of wine in a plastic cup with ice (ice!).  I admire my friend’s mother: she’s classy, accomplished, sophisticated (plastic cups and ice in wine notwithstanding).  I like to think I emulate such a tradition in my own drinking:  Wine must be earned—after a day of running, reading, and writing—something significant must be accomplished in order to deserve and enjoy the chardonnay.   Maybe that’s why I have four degrees, ha.  Every day, that’s for sure, though carefully, with consideration, control, and a promise not to call/text certain phone numbers, leave the house, or open e-mail after the third glass, and never before seven (pm).

What’s your drink of choice? Why?

Chardonnay.  When I was in rehab, my roommate and the woman across the hall from me were also “winos,” which dispelled a myth for many people in there with us (the meth addicts, the oxycontin mothers, the boozers, the coke fiends), that wine can be just as dangerous as any other drug.   The three of us shared stories of three-four bottle nights, of blackouts, of waking up to a nice glass of pinot grigio, of carrying Nalgene bottles of a California white in the car.  But as we learned in rehab, only 10% of those in a recovery center actually “recover” and go back to the bottle.

So now that I’m not drinking Chardonnay to remove myself from life, I will narrow down my affinity for the grape to the way a trip to the wine store assures me of a myriad of tastes, such as the weighty butterscotch of Toasted Head as opposed to the woodiness of Chile’s Santa Rita 120.  Though sometimes, I go on Chardonnay cruise control and stick with the same one for weeks at a time.

Hard liquor scares me—maybe it’s my grandmother’s legacy of hard drinking and harsher words or what one of my friends calls “brown liquor moments.”

What about the worst time you had drinking?

Freshman year of college:  Jenny B., a girl who lived down the hall, and I went to the Busy Bee Liquor Store, a drive thru on the strip in Lubbock, Texas, to get a pint of vodka so that we could make Red Russians (Big Red/vodka—over twenty years later, I still shudder at Big Red in the grocery aisle).  At some point, we ran out of Big Red, so we took turns swigging from the vodka pint before heading out to a fraternity party.   The Phi Delts had a trash can next to a wall with a built-in spout of some kind of punch.  The punch shot out in a steady stream; I was mesmerized by the ingenuity and the idea that there was an endless supply of the stuff.   We didn’t make it back to our dorm that night, but to the bathroom floor of some guy I (she?) knew.  The next day, not even my clock radio could be on, as the radio waves were like earthquakes around my bed.

Do you have a favorite book, song, or movie about drinking?

Book(s):  First, two engaging chapters:  The opening chapter of Pete Hamill’s Why Sinatra Matters, about Hamill’s after-midnight drinking session one night in a New York City bar with Frank, and Chapter 11 of John Steinbeck’s The Wayward Bus.

James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces, which I actually read in rehab and stand by for Frey’s truth (sorry, Oprah):  “Drink or don’t drink.  It’s your choice.”   It’s a shame that that message got lost in a media maelstrom.

I like the way that some writers “write” drinking:  Ernest Hemingway in “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” or The Sun Also Rises.  Raymond Carver, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Jack Kerouac.   Men who drank who knew how to write about it straightforwardly.

Songs:   I have a line in Loaded about my father’s penchant for classic country:  “All the years of listening with him put regret and honky-tonks in me, too, because I knew of ramblin’ men who rode whiskey rivers at too early an age. . . . I used to think that I must have been a barfly in a past life, until I figured out that I actually was one, at age six, in my own living room.”

So Jerry Lee Lewis, for sure, he has some great ones, “What’s Made Milwaukee Famous (Has Made a Loser out of Me)”; Merle Haggard, “Tonight the Bottle Let Me Down,” “Swinging Doors.”  I would add Emmy Lou Harris’s “Two More Bottles of Wine,” and especially Frank Sinatra’s “Wee Small Hours of the Morning” (don’t tell me that’s not about someone staying up late drinking and missing somebody).  Kris Kristofferson’s “Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down” (sung by Johnny Cash).

Movies:  Billy Wilder’s The Lost Weekend, (1945), Mike Figgis’s Leaving Las Vegas (1995), Peter Cohn’s Drunks (1995), Robert Redford’s drunken lovemaking in The Way We Were (1973).  And let me add, television-wise, that I love the sherry-drinking oenophiles, Niles and Frasier.

What do you like most about drinking?

I go somewhere else, as if there’s a separate realm removed and apart from the “real” world.   An invisible barrier—it’s an adult version of a child’s secret hiding place.  That’s if I’m lucky.   Then there are the wines that put everything on dim, and on those days, the wine travels to a different place, and I go deeper, further into the darkest corners of my own head, which can be a threatening place made of words that come back to me, my own and others’; turns I made or didn’t take, a gaping emptiness of how did I get here.  A chasm of feel-sorry-for-myselfness.  I haven’t had one of those in a long, long time.

Why do, or don’t you, choose to drink?

I had a psychiatrist tell me, a few years ago, that my drinking is not one of alcoholism, but ritual.  I am indeed ritualistic—even when I’m not on a schedule, I create one.  According to her, the ritual is the drinking that begins and ends at a certain time each night.  It’s not the release of the wine or the apply-oakiness I crave, but the comfort of the ritual.  I actually get nervous—nervous—if I miss the wine hour.