Today we offer you an excerpt from prize-winning author Lily King’s new novel, which spans three decades of a volatile relationship between a frighteningly charismatic, alcoholic father and the daughter who cannot help but love him. Beginning in 1974 and ending in 2008, Father of the Rain traces the lives and loves of a family wrenched apart by one man’s drinking. Enjoy…

It’s all done with such precision: the ice into the monogrammed glass, the snap of the paper across the cap of a new bottle of Smirnoff’s, the splash of vermouth, the tiny onions jiggled out so carefully. Then the pause, and then the sip, his eyes pulled shut by pleasure. I’ve never noticed what an act of love it all is…

My father is watching the news in the den. It’s strange to see him back in that room with his ashtray and his drink, as if he never left it for the sunroom and all those years with Catherine. A couch has replaced the recliners that replaced the couch my mother took to Water Street. The room looks almost back to normal, though the slipcovers are made of a nubby wool, something my mother wouldn’t have chosen. He bends his head down to watch the television, his eyes straining up just beneath their hoods. A woman is discussing affirmative action on some courthouse steps. She speaks articulately, quickly, trying to get the most words into her few seconds of time on national TV.

“Why are black people always talking about black people?” my father says in his disgusting version of an African American accent, though the woman speaking has the regionless accent of a newscaster. “Have you noticed that?”

“Because in this country they are defined by their skin color, and they’ve had to fight for every basic right that we get automatically by being born white.”

“Fighting for their rights? This woman is fighting for inequality. This woman wants a black C student to be chosen over a straight A-student. She’s fighting for their right to cheat.”

My retort constructs itself swiftly. I’ve got a lot of ammo now on this question, yet none of my knowledge will help me win a fight with my father. He will cling to his position even when all reason fails him; he will cling to it as if it’s his life and not his opinion that is in peril. He will get vicious and personal, and every negative thing he ever felt about me will pour out of his mouth. Ridding my father of his racist and anti-Semitic rhetoric would take a long time. It would be a whole reeducation. His prejudices are a stew of self-hatred, ignorance, and fear. If those feelings could be rooted out and examined somehow, maybe he wouldn’t have to drink so much to squelch the pain of them.

“You don’t have much of an answer to that, do you?”

Would Jonathan be horrified at my cowardice? Would he understand that to argue would be futile, would wound me deeply and do nothing to change him.

“I’m going to get dinner started.” I can hear my mother in my tone with him. “Do you want me to call you when I’m ready to make the hollandaise?”

“The what?” Then he remembers. “Okay. Sure.”

But when it’s time, he slouches against the counter with his hands in his pockets, staring but unseeing as I whisk the egg yolks in a saucepan and add cubes of butter, one at a time.

“It’s so easy, Dad. The only trick is to get the flame as low as possible and keep stirring. It’ll curdle if it gets too hot. Here, you take the whisk.” He takes it and, in a fairly good imitation of me, flicks the wire bulb through the thickening sauce. Hope swells in my chest. I have this idea that if he can make his own hollandaise he’ll be okay. And if he can learn to make both hollandaise and wash his clothes, he won’t need a wife at all.

At the table, A-1 sauce slathered over his rib eye, hollandaise over his asparagus, he is grateful. And very drunk. “You’re a goddamn good cook, you know that?

Lily King is the author of three novels. The Pleasing Hour (1999) won the Barnes and Noble Discover Award and was a New York Times Notable Book and an alternate for the PEN/Hemingway Award. Her second, The English Teacher, was a Publishers Weekly Top Ten Book of the Year, a Chicago Tribune Best Book of the Year, and the winner of the Maine Fiction Award. Father of the Rain, her third novel, was published in July, 2010. Lily is the recipient of a MacDowell Fellowship and a Whiting Award. Her short fiction has appeared in literary magazines including Ploughshares and Glimmer Train, as well as in several anthologies. Her website is lilykingbooks.com. Read more about King in her recent Drinking Diaries interview.

How many novels can you name that have a sympathetic recovering alcoholic mother at the helm? For me, nothing comes immediately to mind except Anne Lamott’s Rosie trilogy: ROSIE, CROOKED LITTLE HEART, and now, IMPERFECT BIRDS.

Elizabeth Ferguson, Rosie’s mother, is one of my favorite characters to come around in a long, long time–maybe ever. She’s flawed, yet completely lovable–a widow who mourns for her lost husband, but finds a great guy to love, a bookworm who can’t seem to figure out what she’d like to do with herself in the real world, other than read and hang out with her family, a doting mother who has a hard time with the discipline part of parenting. And–a woman who struggles to stay sober.

I’m reading IMPERFECT BIRDS right now, and you can see the legacy of addictive behaviors from mother to daughter, and how Elizabeth is ripped apart with worry for her beautiful daughter Rosie, who is getting deeper and deeper into alcohol and drug use.

Throughout, there are priceless quotes about AA, mothering, alcoholism and life in general. Here’s one, from the point of view of teenage Rosie: “He told her stuff about the meetings….such as that people there said that AA was for problem drinkers, and Al-Anon for problem thinkers, spouses and parents of alcoholics, who hid out in their rooms, secretly thinking alone, having good ideas on how to rescue and fix the drinker. She pretended to listen.”

Recently, there has been a spate of novels, short stories, memoirs and non-fiction books published that touch on the topic of women and alcohol–Here is just a sampling:

MOMMY DOESN’T DRINK HERE ANYMORE by Rachel Brownell (memoir)

IT’S NOT ME, IT’S YOU by Stefanie Wilder-Taylor (personal essays written before the popular blogger/memoirist announced she was quitting drinking)

BLAME by Michelle Huneven (novel)

LIT by Mary Karr (memoir, see excerpt in Drinking Diaries)

“Intervention” a short story in Jill McCorkle’s collection GOING AWAY SHOES

TROUBLE by Kate Christensen (novel w/ lots of unapologetic drinking)

ONCE WAS LOST by Sara Zarr (young adult novel with alcoholic mother)

And for those of you interested in poetry, there’s FLAWED LIGHT: American Women Poets and Alcohol, a non-fiction book about women poets and alcohol.

Some of my personal, perennial favorites:

SMASHED by Koren Zailckas (memoir)

ROSIE by Anne Lamott (novel, featuring a woman struggling with her relationship to alcohol)

AT HOME IN THE WORLD by Joyce Maynard (memoir, & she’s the daughter of an alcoholic)

What are your favorite books that touch on the subject of women and alcohol? Favorite movies? Poems? Please share!

by Leah Odze Epstein

The problem with Al-Anon meetings is they’re not fun. In fact, they’re so depressing, they could drive a person to drink. Okay, so maybe I’ve only ever been to two meetings in my life, and I’m open to being convinced otherwise, but still…

As the daughter of an alcoholic, I sometimes need to vent, and it’s better to vent to people who’ve been in the same position. But couldn’t we  lighten up the mood a little bit? Couldn’t we change up the location so we’re not sitting in the basement of a fluorescent-lit church, on a hard chair, drinking bad coffee?

Were the two Al-Anon meetings I went to eye-opening? Yes. Paradigm-shifting? Yes. But they kind of left me spooked.

One day when I was in my late twenties and living on the Upper West Side of  Manhattan and very few things in my life worked, I felt compelled to drag myself to my first Al-Anon meeting. I was used to fixing things by myself, but the nightly bottle or two of red wine I shared with my best friend just wasn’t working anymore. I was waking up flushed and hung over.

On my way to the meeting, I was riddled with the fear that I’d run into somebody I knew, or worse—that they would ask, “Where are you going?”

Irrational? Well, this is the kind of secrecy and shame I learned as the daughter of an alcoholic. My lifelong code: Don’t let them see you crack. It may have been hard at home, but no one had to know. That would only make them criticize my mother, and by extension, me.

That code made it kind of hard to want to go to a Meeting. In public. But I suppose that’s part of the battle: getting to the meeting to break that feeling of public shame.

As a teenager and young adult, I wore the façade of an untroubled free spirit, so when I walked into the Al-Anon meeting on that crisp Fall evening, it jarred me to look around at my fellow attendees. Like me, most people at the meeting were in their twenties. Unlike me, most of these people exposed their trauma right there for all to see. They were like live wires, with their unlit cigarettes and shaking hands clutching coffee cups. The room buzzed with energy.

I cringed as the guy beside me told of his alcoholic parents locking him in the basement–torturing him. I heard about incest. Evil stepmothers. Runaways. I was nothing like these people. What I’d suffered was long ago. Minimal, compared.

My memories of my mother’s drinking were as fuzzy as a drunk’s vision. I was nine when she stopped drinking. The stories I remembered seemed minor. And yet I carried them around inside of me, like my driver’s license in my wallet with its unflattering photo, slightly out of focus.

The people at the Al-Anon meeting told their stories willingly. I remember thinking they must be so messed up they had no choice but to tell. Then a girl—a beautiful folksinger with long, wavy blonde hair and faded jeans—stood up and spoke. She was an artist, a true free spirit; the girl I was pretending to be. I sat there, listening, my body trembling, as I tried not to cry. Not one single outward detail of her life story resembled mine, yet the emotions rang true.

There, in that room, I finally found people who got it–who felt like me, alone and alienated most of the time, except there, in that room, when they told their stories. I felt those people could help me, if I let them. But I couldn’t bring myself to go back to that depressing room.

Nearly a decade later, plagued by some of the same issues that seem to haunt adult children of alcoholics (control issues? Check. Accept nothing less than perfection? Check. Alienated? Yup), I went to another Al-Anon meeting in the suburbs. Again with the dimly lit room. Again with the hard chairs. Again with the basement. Were we trying to re-create our childhood suffering through the setting? I didn’t get it.

There were only eight of us sitting in a circle, and I was the youngest. No one smoked or drank coffee. The energy in the room was flat. I couldn’t breathe. But I sat there and listened to the forty-something woman with the twisted hands talk about her crippling rheumatoid arthritis and her nightmare mother. I listened to the nearly 300 pound man talk about his bad mother, too. And the woman whose lips barely moved when she, too, spoke of her evil mother.

I never went back to Al-Anon after that. I’m not saying it’s not a lifesaver for many people. I’m sure it is. Still…

Sometimes, I fantasize about the kind of meeting I might like to attend. First off, I wouldn’t call it a meeting. Maybe a Girl’s Night Out. There would be women my age, maybe a bit younger, some a bit older. The women would be smart and funny. Some would have battle scars, but they’d talk about them with humor. Maybe we’d laugh until we cried, sharing our stories, and how we turned out after all that craziness. I picture sitting in a warm cozy place, maybe on a red velvet couch–My fantasy Al-Anon meeting takes place in a restaurant, or a bar.

I shake my head to wake up from my dream–we’re supposed to be scarred by alcohol, bruised. But in my opinion, we’re the lucky ones, the ones who escaped, the ones who didn’t qualify for AA. That calls for celebration: bright lights, a nice glass of wine and a comfortable chair. Or at the very least, a latte.

Leah Odze Epstein is co-editor of Drinking Diaries. You can follow her on Twitter at @Leaheps and you can become a fan of drinking diaries on facebook.

by Caren Osten Gerszberg

I don’t know about you, but my Thanksgiving came with a mixed blessing.

Surrounded by a large number—18 to be exact—of family and close friends, I revel in the togetherness of this day. It is with great joy and appreciation that we fill our family’s table with people we love and consider as family, even if we are not of blood relation. I cook for days, mostly alone, and without stress or anxiety develop a menu including an array of dishes that I know most at our table—kids included—will enjoy. With abandon, I sauté and carmelize, roast and bake and love practically every minute of it. With my husband, I select wines we will drink throughout the afternoon and evening, and make sure all beverages are in check.

Yesterday arrived, and although I wondered if my 24-pound turkey, who I’d named Matilda, would ever actually be done (she took about 6 hours), my hopes were high for a lovely day. My husband and kids played basketball out front in our driveway, and my dog trailed me, sensing when I was going to use the turkey baster and hoping she’d get to lick a drip of anything meat-related. Following an urge to blast some loud music, I decided to be a bit zen and put on Mozart instead of Dave Matthews. The day was going without a hitch.

And then, my mother arrived. At 75, she looks good physically, and I was glad to see her. But the predictable was only moments away.

“Can I please have a glass of wine?” she asked.

“You can have one glass, with dinner, so just wait until then,” I answered.

My mother, a French native who has always loved wine, grew to love it too much about ten years ago, and her love morphed into an addiction which continues to plague me at every event—both big and small, mundane and celebratory.

Moments later, a friend was chasing me around the kitchen, clutching a glass and obviously uncomfortable as my mother anxiously followed her.

“Here, Caren,” she said. “This belongs to your cousin but your mother was drinking it when he got up to go to the restroom. I thought you may want to know.”

I looked at my mother-turned-child, and like the stern authority I needed to be—lest she get drunk, slur her words, and become an embarrassment to her grandchildren—I told her: “NO! You can have some wine with dinner and you need to wait.”

We sat down at the table. She drank a glass of Sauvignon Blanc, and without hesitation, asked for more. This continued throughout the meal. And dessert. While we talked Thanksgiving trivia and my son told Thanksgiving jokes, friends were moving the bottles to the other end of the table, trying to make the temptation a little less for my mom. She followed me into the kitchen, asking again and again, until finally, I picked up the phone.

“I need a taxi. How long will it take?” I inquired, trying to breathe deeply and keep calm.

Ten minutes later, I ushered her into a taxi. She complained but I stood firm. I was just trying to cut my losses before it got worse for both of us.

Once she was gone, I could finally relax, but not without feeling brokenhearted. I wanted my mother to be here, to share in a tradition to which she exposed me. For years, she had seamlessly hosted a house full of people, where being grateful went along with a table laden with scrumptious food.

But she’s not the mother I knew. I miss my mother. But I still love Thanksgiving.

Today, one of our favorite social websites, SHE WRITES, is encouraging everyone to buy at least one book written by a woman in 2009. Why? Well, to support women writers, but also in protest of Publishers Weekly’s Top Ten Books of 2009–which featured NOT ONE book by a woman. So, with our hats off to SHE WRITES, here is our pick for a Great Book Written by a Woman in 2009–Mary Karr’s LIT:

We are thrilled to bring you an excerpt from this amazing memoir (reprinted with permission from her publisher, HarperCollins). In this passage, Ms. Karr explores how she bonded with her father through drinking. Something to think about: How has drinking (or not drinking) bonded you with people, or separated you from them?

From LIT:

For the first time in front of me, he drew a pint bottle from under his seat. He put the upended lid in the ashtray, and before he handed the bottle over, he drew out a corner of his shirttail to wipe the top with, saying, Want a swig?

As a kid sitting on the bar, I’d sipped beer through the salted tri- angle of his aluminum can, but Daddy had so long and adamantly denied drinking every day that Mother had long since stopped asking. And he’d sure as hell never handed me any hard liquor.

Daddy’s wink echoed our old conspiracy: me and him against Mother and Lecia, whose tightly guarded collusions were traded in whispers and giggles that he and I were meant to stay deaf to.

The bottle gleamed in the air between us. I took the whiskey, planning a courtesy sip. But the aroma stopped me just as my tongue touched the glass mouth. The warm silk flowered in my mouth and down my gullet, after which a little blue flame of pleasure roared back up my spine. A poof of sequins went sparkling through my middle.

As he went to screw the lid back on, my hand swung out of its own accord, and I said, Can I have another taste?

That taste started me seeking out more hard liquor once I was back at school, though drugs were still easier to come by even than beer. I did okay at old Lackluster College—in no way a star, but neither the abject flop I’d figured on. Daddy carried my grade reports in his ancient wallet.

But it’s a truism, I think, that drunks like to run off. Every reality, no matter how pressing—save maybe death row—has an escape route or rabbit hole. Some drinkers go inward into a sullen spiral, and my daddy was one of these; others favor the geographic cure. My mother taught me to seek external agents of transformation—pick a new town or man or job.

That’s why I left college at the end of my sophomore year: I just got this urge to run off, maybe because friends in a band were heading for Austin. Or all the rich kids were going abroad. Or maybe the course work was getting too hard, and I couldn’t face losing my scholarships and reentering the hairnet. I floundered and skipped classes that winter till, shortly before finals that spring, I just stopped showing up. LIT. Copyright © 2009 by Mary Karr.

Mary Karr is an award-winning poet and best-selling memoirist. Her memoir Lit, which is excerpted above, is the long-awaited sequel to her critically acclaimed and New York Times bestselling memoirs The Liars’ Club and Cherry. To find out more about Mary Karr, or to order a copy of LIT, go to www.harpercollins.com

By Erin St. John Kelly

Late in the afternoon of Easter Sunday, my mother arrived at my house for dinner holding on hard to my stepfather’s arm, sporting a fresh, scabby shiner. She’d managed to fall up the stairs, slamming into the baluster of her staircase the night before. I nudged her towards a chair in my little kitchen as efficiently and subtly as I could, hoping to minimize her mobility and the possibility of another accident.

My mother sat at the head of the table, having a slur of a rant to no one in particular. Among my assembled friends and family, one of my sisters and her daughter sat quietly leaking tears at their places. My eldest daughter left the table after a short while and the rest of the children followed her. Their grandmother was scaring them during the appetizer and they opted for crackers and cheese in the next room instead. She was impenetrable, only vaguely resembling the person they’d known as their grandmother.

My brother James had died earlier that year. It was sudden, out of the blue, and far, far away from my mother’s bucolic college town. She hadn’t been able to say goodbye. She hadn’t seen his body. After he died she lamented that she never should have let him go. As if he’d asked, and as if he would have obeyed. She couldn’t relate to the distant place he’d died except through the story of “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” because they too had died in Tupiza, Bolivia. James wasn’t robbing banks and he didn’t die in a shoot-out. He and his wife were backpacking around the world, doing good works, before they would settle down to raise a family. He died of altitude sickness in an Andean emergency room that had no oxygen mask. He came home as a box of ashes.

My mother was raised on an apple farm in Southern Quebec, the middle child of seven girls. She was the first ever in her family to go to college. She survived a bout with breast cancer, a stint in women’s prison for civil disobedience, and Woodstock in the rain, but it was her despair from James’ death that triggered her descent into raging alcoholism.

My mother was so drunk she smelled. She wore the same sweatpants and sweatshirt day in and day out. She had once loved a martini – we called them garbage-tinis because she’d pretend it was good for her by adorning it with limp, brown vegetables culled from the drawers of the fridge, creating a stinky salad in a fancy glass. Now she was pared right down to gin, in a coffee mug, while lying in bed.

My mother has read all of Proust.  She has probably spent more time immersed in the matters of Congress, albeit via C-SPAN, than have most actual Members. As a matter of course, three televisions and at least one radio were on at all times, and two or three daily newspapers were ingested. When we were growing up she took us to rock concerts, peace rallies and hitchhiking through the Yukon.

Then, a cacophonous slide into nothing. The televisions were all on but she didn’t care about what was happening on them. She didn’t know what time of day it was– it was irrelevant. She was either in a rage, or on the verge of one.  She complained that she didn’t hear from us, her children, enough. We did call, but she didn’t remember having spoken to us. One winter my eight-year-old daughter realized that my mother was surprised to see her every time she walked past.  She said to me, “Mom, I am worried about Granny’s memory.”  Mom had provided me a tremendous opportunity to explain the nexus of martinis, mourning and memory.

My five remaining siblings and I felt helpless for more than a year to address her drinking, except among each other.  His death brought the revelation that the family had depended on James, the middle child, to be our emotional and cultural center. Now we had lost him, and it. He was so steadfast, earnest and good. He signed off all his emails from abroad with this Mark Twain quote: “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts.”

James was also a worry-wort. Be it concern for the global state of humanity or trying to eat healthier, he was on it. No one hated my mother’s drinking like James had.

I hadn’t planned to confront Mom for everyone’s Easter dinner.  I had planned to serve a specially ordered ham instead. I had been rolling around the need to deal with her in my mind, but hadn’t been able to form a real plan of how and when to do it. Turns out, there’s no good time for an intervention with your mother.

It started by accident. I sat next to her and suggested she eat something every now and again, maybe even drink a glass of water. I offered to get her one. She mumbled that she couldn’t, that I just didn’t understand how it felt to be her. She dropped the sickening bomb I knew she had, but didn’t think I had it in me to withstand. She didn’t save it up. It came out fast. “You haven’t lost a child,” she moaned. And everything froze.  All the chopping, washing, table-setting and chat ceased.

My voice shook and I paused. Then I continued, motivated by the eternal regret and sorrow that I’d experience if I let her die without trying to make her stop, just once.

“You haven’t lost a child.” It was what I feared she would say. I felt almost guilty for not having a dead child myself. That without one, I had no understanding and therefore no grounds to complain. “No, I haven’t,” I said. Then it came to me why I could confront her. “But I have lost a brother. And now I am losing my mother. And my children are losing their grandmother.” There was more that just tumbled out, but I can no longer remember what else I said. My mother sat quietly waiting for me to finish. “Well, dear, Mommy loves you very much, but now she has to go,” she said, as she put her hand on my shoulder to raise herself up from the table.

I know that it is completely irrational to feel like James’ death was a personal failure of mine, but there it is. I did. As the oldest child I had always felt a conflicted mix of power and responsibility. I fixed things. I adjudicated. I felt I had failed everyone by not bringing him back from Bolivia alive. At the funeral home in La Paz, I saw him for the last time through the glass window of a little blue coffin.  His shoulders were cramped against the wooden walls of a box built for a small Andean native – the biggest coffin his wife was able to find. I am haunted by his face with his lips pursed in the way they looked before he was going to say something that mattered to him. I couldn’t be so weak as to fail him and the family again, by letting Mom die a drunk.

At my desk on Monday, I wrote my mother an email to restate in print what I’d said at Easter dinner – I was afraid that my spoken words wouldn’t stick. I didn’t know how else to try to get through. I hoped that she would be able to process it, staring at the screen in her own time. In my email I begged her to stop, to take some pity on us – the survivors – her children and her grandchildren. Must we watch her kill herself? And then I typed what I had been unable to say: was the death of one of us worth more than the other five of us alive?

I sent a copy of my email to my siblings right after sending it to my mother. I wanted them to be aware of what I’d done, the possible horrors I’d unleashed. I waited with a panicky, shiny sense of dread for reaction – from them and from her.

Two days later, I was sitting at my desk when an email gently floated across my computer screen that simply said, “You’re right. I quit.” Oh my God, it’s a suicide note I thought, and I dialed the phone, to see if I could stop her or if it was too late. There she was on the other end of the phone. I was at work so I couldn’t say much except, “Really? What can I do to help?”

I thought rehab. “Let me try it my way,” my mother said. “If that doesn’t work then I promise to do it your way,” she said. She and my stepfather joined AA.

It’s been more than a year. She showers. She drinks seltzer and fruit juice spritzers in wine glasses. She goes to weekly AA meetings. A former reporter, she listens intently to other people’s tales of horror and redemption. And she thanks me all the time for writing the note. “I want to be sober until the day that I die,” she announced last summer. I believe her. My mother is nothing if not a zealous participator, a whole-hearted committer to things. She’s recommenced being her old quirky self, protesting for peace in front of the post office, glutting herself on news and stuffing her grandchildren full of snacks.

And now, even her sense of humor is reviving. On Mother’s Day this year she took me and two of my sisters out for dinner. She explained it was to make up for whatever she’d done wrong during our entire lives. She was practicing an AA step, and we had about an hour. We sipped delicious, unembellished tap water and I asked her what the secret element to her resolve was. “Maternal instinct,” she said. “I don’t want to worry the children. It’s not the way it’s supposed be.”

Erin St. John Kelly is the eldest of the eight children from her parents’ many marriages. She and her husband have two daughters. She has lived in Brooklyn, New York for almost 20 years. The writing she is most proud of has appeared in The New York Times, Gourmet Magazine, Brain Child Magazine and on WBFO, the Buffalo NPR station. This essay originally appeared in “Knowing Pains,” an anthology that is a fundraiser for a breast cancer non-profit (http://www.knowingpains.com/about.html“)

By Becky Sherrick Harks

I am an adult child of two alcoholics, and although there are nifty acronyms used to refer to us, I prefer my real name: Becky. The Internet knows me as Aunt Becky and I blog over at a seemingly incongruently named site: “Mommy Wants Vodka.” Perhaps you have heard of me, mixed into articles about Diane Schuler, the lady who killed her kids, bashing me for being a Cocktail Mom.

My blog was named as a tongue-in-cheek joke, which is easily lost in the negativity swirling about the tragedy. Perhaps on paper (or computer screen) this is how I sound: like a lousy drunk who is unfortunately a mother. When, you know, I can sober up enough to actually, you know, parent my children. I hate to shatter expectations to those looking for a quick target to let their anger at alcoholics out on, but I am not a drunk. Humor–tasteless to you, perhaps–is the way that I cope.

In reading up on the other issues facing my cohorts, my fellow children of alcoholics–who also, presumably, have names–I think that in spite of the flack that I get, humor is the far healthier way to handle it. I’ve somehow, by the grace of God, perhaps, been able to avoid many of the nastier lasting effects of my childhood. I am not shy, I do not suffer from low self esteem, and I don’t obsessively hoard china cat figurines.

I do have anxiety and guilt, and I frequently blame myself for things that never had anything to do with me. I cannot trust even my husband with certain things, not because he wouldn’t be unfailingly kind, but because it is ingrained in me to not trust other people.

For all of the controversy surrounding me on The Internet, on the sites that bash me, nothing–NOTHING–can compare to what swirls within me. Every day, every single day that I wake up, I wonder if today will be the day that it hits. We adult children of alcoholics are four times more likely than the general population to develop issues with substance abuse. FOUR TIMES.

For someone like me, who has not one, but two alcoholic parents, this number must be infinitesimally higher. So I wait. Somewhat impatiently, I wait for the day when I will feel the need to become staggeringly drunk and fall down the stairs. Or take to my bed, weeping at what has become of me.

It’s exhausting, this waiting for the other shoe to drop.

But I don’t think that drinking is Of The Devil, no matter how much I hate the smell of scotch and the scent memories that live on, well beyond their lifespan. While I do not recall the last time I had a drink, I have had one and I will continue to have them now and again. The liquor cabinet is well-stocked at my house, and always has been. I’ve not felt the urge to drink myself to obliteration in at least five years and I don’t longingly wait for a cocktail at the end of a long day. Frankly, for as uncool as I will no doubt paint myself now, forever banned from the tattoo-biker moms, I’d be horrified to drink at a playdate.

So I sit and I wait, and while I do this, I build a life for myself: I’m a mother, a writer, a wife and a friend. A daughter. A sister. A niece and a cousin.

My name is Becky, and I am not an alcoholic.

Becky Sherrick Harks is an overachieving nurse who retired from the profession after an admirable 3 months. She stays home now, writing, raising kids and making mischief. She blogs at Mommy Wants Vodka (http://www.mommywantsvodka.com) pretty much every day that ends in “day.”

I’m Leah Odze Epstein, and I am a blogger. Actually, I’m co-editor of Drinking Diaries, and this is my first official off-the-cuff blog post, spurred on by a reader who threw down the gauntlet and said, “Why don’t these bloggers just BLOG?” Hmmm. Good question.

Last night, when I couldn’t sleep (probably because of an overloaded back-to-school schedule, as the mother of three kids), I was thinking about how my mom, a recovered alcoholic who has been sober for over 30 years, explained to me that alcoholism was a disease, and alcohol was not the only cause. It is a disease of the emotions as well as a chemical disease (involving blood sugar issues, the body’s ability to metabolize alcoholic, etc.). She always said to me, “You don’t have the personality for it,” which somehow made me feel better.

Over the years, I’ve debated many people on the disease front–people who don’t believe alcoholism is as much a disease, but a failure of will or a lifestyle choice. It’s confusing, because so-called high functioning alcoholics throw a wrench in the works–can’t everyone just cut down? Isn’t it just a question of moderation and self-control?

For alcoholics, it’s not that easy. My mother had to go through detox–and after that, she was told she should never drink again because she is allergic to alcohol, and she hasn’t.

I would argue that my mother’s definition is true: an alcoholic is someone who is allergic to alcohol, and should never drink again. Just as my husband and daughter have celiac disease, and their bodies cannot tolerate wheat or gluten-containing products, some people have an allergy to alcohol. I think a distinction needs to be made between alcoholics and heavy drinkers, and that the label high-functioning alcoholic can be misleading. Most alcoholics eventually hit rock bottom. Many people can benefit from moderation management, I am sure, but they are probably not alcoholics.

I’m not saying that alcoholics should not make amends to the people they hurt, using their “disease” as an excuse. I’m just arguing for  increased understanding of the distinction between heavy drinking, a drinking problem and the disease of alcoholism.

What do you think, readers? What is your definition of an alcoholic?

by Jacquelyn Mitchard

1. Start drinking early in the afternoon on Christmas Eve. Come out of the bedroom in a Santa Claus bikini at midnight. After you pass out, forget Santa. Send the kids back into their rooms until noon and tell them Santa was hung over. Laugh. When the kids beg you to stop, tell them to grow up.

2. Pretend it never happened. None of it – the weeping-clown eyes, the shouts and fights, the makeout sessions on the coats in the bedroom with the lady from down the street – never happened. At all.

3. Go out on New Year’s Eve – for three days. There are plenty of Good Humor bars in the refrigerator. And Grandma and Grandpa didn’t leave for Florida yet? Or did they?

4. Nuzzle a waitress’ boobs, even after your friend, the owner of the place, asks you to stop, until your wife and kids get up and walk home. Six miles.

5. Tell your kid he better start on the team. When he does, show up for one game.

6. Talk about how much you drank on vacation the way other people talk about vacation.

7. When your son asks what you’re going to do tonight , say, “I’m going to drink. And you’re going to stay home.”

8. When your daughter, who’s 11, calls you at a dinner party from home to say that someone has broken into the apartment building, tell her to call the cops.

9. When your best friend suggests you slow down, on the night of your birthday, wait until he’s facing the other way and kick him through the TV.

10. Show up at eighth grade graduation, drunk. Show up at high school graduation drunk. Explain that you can’t make it to college graduation.

11. Shout out your requests for Trini Lopez songs so loudly that the bandleader refers to you as “Lawrence Welk and Mrs. Robinson.”

12. When one of the kids is seventeen and gets drunk for the first of three times in her life, throwing up until she’s weak and sobbing, tell her not to worry – everyone feels this way.

13. Be beautiful and charming and funny and complex and inquisitive when you’re sober. Be diminishing, surly, humiliating and cruel when you’re drunk.

14. Die young.

Jacquelyn Mitchard is the author of the number one New York Times bestselling novel, The Deep End of the Ocean, chosen as the first book for Oprah’s Book Club and named by USA Today the second most influential novel of the past 25 years. She has written four other bestsellers and is a contributing editor for Wondertime magazine as well as the author of four novels for young adults. Her new novel, No Time to Wave Goodbye, comes out this week.

by Leah Odze Epstein

I waited a long time for my first drink. I’d had a few sips, swigs, and nips–Manischewitz, at Passover; a wine cooler on a camping trip with friends; whiskey, at an eighth grade sleepover. Still–I never had a proper drink until graduation night, senior year.

Why was I immune to peer pressure–a paragon of willpower who tagged along with her friends while they drank, got drunk, and let loose?  In high school, I mostly avoided parties and I stopped kissing boys, since kissing boys was something you usually did at social gatherings, with the help of alcohol. Did I enjoy standing in the corner at parties, observing the other humans at play? I was shy to start with. I could have used a boost.

But I was petrified I’d end up an alcoholic–like my mother. Or that my parents would send me to drug rehab–like my older sister. As soon as my mother stopped drinking, my parents didn’t let one drop of alcohol cross the threshold of our house. My mother felt that being around alcohol would cause a relapse. She told me about the dangers, for an alcoholic, of having vanilla extract in the kitchen cabinet.  

How did I know I wasn’t a potential alcoholic? What if I had too much, and lost control? Alcohol might make a person go Helter Skelter, like Charles Manson; or it could kill a whole family, like the pair of murderers in Capote’s ”In Cold Blood.” I did not want to fall prey to that serial killer, like my wild-child sister, who pretty much failed high school; or my mother, who spent years trying to get her life back on track. No–I would not veer off the path, a happy idiot, tempted by alcohol’s crooked, beckoning finger. All I had to do was lay low, get good grades, and get into an Ivy League school. Then, I’d be safe.

At my “sibling interview” for the rehab where my sister ended up, they asked me if I drank. I confessed that I’d had a “sip of beer.” They told my sister, who expressed her deep concern. I remember thinking: I might as well have been drinking, all those years. They still suspected me. I knew if I didn’t watch myself, I’d end up in Florida, too–seventeen hours by car from our house in the suburbs of D.C.

Graduation Night, Senior Year: That morning, I’d cut my waist-length hair off, up to my ears. My mother cried, but I was ready to start fresh. The week before, I’d gotten my braces off. At one of the graduation after-parties, I finally allowed myself my first full drink: a bottle of beer. Hadn’t I sailed through high school near the top of my class, gotten into the Ivy League, and escaped the drug rehab? For all that, I deserved a reward.

One beer. Just one.

The first sip tasted bitter but cool, refreshing on a humid June night. In the center of the room stood the boy I loved. I’d always loved him, but he’d never loved me back. I was tame. He was wild. He had a sexy blonde girlfriend who drank and smoked.

I eyed the boy I loved and took one sip of the beer, then another and another, until I tilted my head back to catch the last drops. The beer gave me a pleasant, floating-above-it-all feeling. My body tingled–alive–as if one beer had fertilized all the seeds inside me, and I could finally flower. My secret thoughts gave way to impulses that could finally be acted upon. I walked up to the boy I loved and smiled: Courage in a bottle.

I must have spoken the ancient language of “beer,” because somehow, he and I ended up on the front lawn, my face tilted toward his, poised for a kiss–

Just as he leaned forward to kiss me– his eyes fusing; his face, a dizzying blur–his girlfriend drove up in her car and honked the horn, startling us. “Come on, K!” she called out.

He shrugged his shoulders and off he went. I stood there, alone on the lawn as the car pulled away, my beer buzz crashing down. Later, at our diner hangout, I sobbed to my friends. I thought I was crying about the boy, but now I know I was probably crying about the beer. I didn’t know then the merits of two beers, or that three beers might have erased the disappointment, the humiliation. Blotted it out.

That I learned with my second, third and fourth drinks, only three months later, as a Freshman in college, Night One. I went room to room–greedy–drinking everything I could get my hands on: gin & vodka & rum & beer–until I blacked out.

As the daughter of an alcoholic, I had no concept of moderation. It was either none, or ten. But that’s another story…

Leah Odze Epstein is the co-editor of DRINKING DIARIES.

by Caren Osten Gerszberg

I don’t drink on Mondays. Sometimes I’d like to, but I’ve decided that for at least one day during the week, I need to rest my liver from the dinner-time wine I drink each of the other six days. (Note: when on vacation, non-drinking Mondays do not apply.)

I’m not an alcoholic. At least I don’t think I am. But I’m trying to figure out when fun drinking becomes serious drinking—like it did for my mother.

When I was growing up, my French-born mother sipped wine freely and daily. I can picture her in the kitchen, stirring a bubbly cassoulet in a dark blue enamel pot, preparing a plate of cheeses, churning the pepper mill—with a glass in hand or waiting close by. An habitual part of her cooking process, wine was also served at every evening meal. Long, narrow, green-tinted bottles with strangely spelled words were as much of a staple in our fridge as a container of milk.

Drinking was part of her culture, and a seemingly harmless one. But later in her life, my mother started using wine as a way to escape, numbing herself from demons past and transitions present. My biggest fear is that I may, one day, do the same.

I mean, I do indulge in those regular glasses of vino. And in minutes, they seem to calm me, relax me, dull me from the stresses of my daily life as a freelance writer struggling in an economic crisis, a mother of three—two of whom are hormonal adolescents—and the daughter of a depressed, recently widowed Holocaust survivor.

I try to focus on the good things in my life—my loving husband who has a stable income, so far, and my three healthy, beautiful kids. But still, I like to drink.

Of course, there were times in my life that I didn’t drink for months, and I survived. I can count them for you–one, two, three–cause that’s how many kids I have. I didn’t drink for the first three months of each pregnancy, and then with my obstetrician’s blessing, I had the occasional half glass of wine, and it felt so good. You see, I don’t drink simply because of the wine’s soothing effects as it enters my blood stream, but also for the taste. The touches of citrus and oak in a complex chardonnay, the berry flavors and tannins that roll from my tongue and down my throat from an intense cabernet—those are flavors I savor.

I don’t think I have a drinking problem. But it’s my personality to grapple with the question, praying that I don’t ever abuse it. So in my effort to keep control, maintain my joie de vivre, be true to my European heritage, and not ever slide down that slippery slope, I’ll keep on drinking. Except on Mondays.

Caren Osten Gerszberg is a writer and the co-editor of the Drinking Diaries. To see her work, go to www.carenosten.com

by Liza Monroy

No one who’s ever had a happy hour cocktail or wine with dinner with me would guess the amount of fear and calculation that goes into my every sip.  Am I drinking slowly enough?  If I order another, is that one too many? If I enjoy a slight buzz, the carefree giddiness that arrives after that second or third round, does that mean I will eventually become an alcoholic? Most of the time—as I appear to be talking, laughing, having fun—I am actually calculating, watching, paying attention. Emir is three sips into his second martini. When the waiter comes by, will Mel and Jess want to order another, too? Should I start with a Mojito, or just stick with wine tonight? 

I am a social drinker, but I am afraid of what might lurk dormant in my genes.  Alcohol makes me nervous even though I pass the alcohol-dependency quizzes with flying colors: do I drink to get drunk? Never.  Do I ever black out?  No.  Have I ever felt remorseful after drinking or needed a drink the next morning: not even a little.

Still, I have paranoid thoughts when it comes to drinking.  Last summer, my father died of liver failure, a direct result of years of alcoholism.  Despite our being estranged for long periods, I never imagined he wouldn’t be around for my thirtieth birthday.  I always assumed there would be time for us to reconnect, even if I didn’t know how, or never quite felt like I was “there yet” when it came to reaching out to him in any other way than the snail-mail letters we had exchanged periodically over the years after he moved back to his native Italy. 

Now I try to understand alcoholism by reading books (Adult Children of Alcoholics) and watching TV (“Intervention”).  On A&E’s “Intervention,” I see the most disturbing things—a young man guzzling down a quart of vodka as if it were water, a man screaming at his best friend to bring him another bottle or he would kill himself—and I think of my dad.  Was he in this bad of shape?  If he drank until it caused his death, he must have been, right? I can only speculate.  Even though I show no signs of a problem today, I am afraid that one day some switch inside my brain will flip and I, too, will find myself wondering how it happened.

Unlikely, friends have told me when I’ve expressed my fears.  You’re too ambitious about your work, you’re such a lightweight, you don’t enjoy drunkenness or being around drunk people.  You are so focused, you wouldn’t let yourself get derailed.

But my mother seems to share this fear about her daughter and the drink.  She lived with my father for eleven years, and she rarely drinks.  When she does, it’s a watered-down glass of white wine.   One night when I was a senior in college and visiting her in Greece (she is a U.S. diplomat in the Foreign Service), we went to a nightclub to hear a band.  My drink of choice was the same since I first tried it at fourteen: a sickly-sweet mixture of Amaretto and orange juice.  It was hardly a strong cocktail, but when I tried to order a second one, she looked at me sternly and said no, as if already afraid I might turn into him.  It’s genetic, you know, she would say.  I don’t know if my own paranoia came from her worrying, or if her worrying came from noticing something in me that I don’t see.  And so I keep drinking—lightly, socially—and keep paying close attention.

Why not just stop drinking entirely if you’re so concerned? you might ask.

Well, see, that’s the thing: I don’t want to.  A Lychee Martini before Thai food, a Sidecar in a bar that brings back a speakeasy vibe, a hearty glass of good Pinot Noir with pasta, a Magic Hat #9 on tap at happy hour—drinking is one of life’s tasty pleasures, and I love every drop.

So does that mean I can’t stop?

 
Liza Monroy is the author of the novel Mexican High. She is currently writing a memoir, some of which involves her father’s battle with alcoholism.  She has written for The New York Times, The LA Times, Newsweek, Jane, and other publications.  Visit her on the web at www.lizamonroy.com