Recently, I wrote a post about the origins of the Drinking Diaries for a new website, Better After 50. When the founder and editor asked me to write an essay about how the Drinking Diaries got started, it provoked me to think about the evolution of this blog and how it morphed from a seed of an idea into a gratifying partnership and a forthcoming book–due out in October 2012!

Here’s the piece that originally ran on Better After 50–a site worth checking out even if you’re not yet the big 5-0 (which I’m not, but will be in a few years…).

Cheers to Us–and the Drinking Diaries

by Caren Osten Gerszberg

Leah & Caren, Drinking Diaries co-editors

Do you really need to check your blackberry again?” I ask repeatedly.

“Any new sales you need to vet on Gilt today?” Leah retorts.

On any given day, sitting and working at my round kitchen table—our computers lined up side by side—these are the kinds of quips that pass between me and my co-editor, friend and neighbor. Minutes later, the bickering behind us, we giggle proudly over our triumphant reworking of a long, twisted phrase we’ve teamed up to unwind.

Together, since June 2008, Leah Odze Epstein and I have been co-editing a blog called the Drinking Diaries—a website covering anything and everything related to women and drinking. From celebration to revelation we like to say. A place where there is no judgment, where the stories we and other women share range from comical and celebratory to sexy and despairing. Where we offer news, profiles, research and opinions—all about women and their relationship with alcohol.

Drinking Diaries was conceived, sadly, as a result of my own mother’s drinking. Well into her sixties, my mother’s wine habit went from socially acceptable and culturally expected (she’s French) to deeply problematic. A child survivor of the Holocaust, my mother began using alcohol to numb her pain. I watched in fear and bewilderment as her dependence on alcohol—something I’d never before been faced with—accelerated with warp speed.

Leah, also the child of an alcoholic, whose mother has been sober for over 35 years, was the person I turned to. In my spiraling confusion, I would sit on Leah’s front porch, lamenting about my mother’s drinking which worsened when my father was diagnosed with stage IV colon cancer. Then, over a Friday night dinner with our husbands, Leah and I decided that there was no place for women to share their stories—the sad, happy and everything in between—of drinking and the effect it has on their lives. We would provide that place.

In an effort to discover who the readers—of the future book we hoped to publish—would be, we started the Drinking Diaries blog. We queried women authors to do Q&A interviews, and let out shrieks of jubilation when we got a “yes” from accomplished writers like Joyce Maynard, Jackie Mitchard and Julie Powell. They all had tales to contribute. We went to blogging conferences and writing workshops, asking women along the way to share their stories. Sex and drinking. Parenting and drinking. Work and drinking. Family and drinking. Culture and drinking. Health and drinking. Nearly three years later, it’s all there.

Somewhere along the way, Leah and I were deemed “experts” on the subject of women and drinking. We’ve been interviewed for radio shows and TV-news programs, and featured on various blogs. Recently, I was asked to write an article, “The Art of Mindful Drinking,” and do a related podcast for a national magazine.

Last March, our efforts continued to pay off. We got a book deal from Seal Press (Perseus) and the anthology of essays we are currently working on, Drinking Diaries: Women Serve their Stories Straight Up, will be published in Fall 2012. Our list of writers is impressive, but more importantly covers a fascinating array of experiences, ages, backgrounds, perspectives and cultures.

Both mothers of three children each, Leah and I start our twice-weekly work sessions with a catch-up walk through a beautiful Long Island Sound-lined park before returning to our office—my kitchen. Over mugs of tea and handfuls of almonds, we bicker like an old married couple over grammar, her blackberry addiction, and my roving attention toward shopping websites. Some stories make us laugh hysterically like two teenage girls. Others hit very close to home. And when we “score” an interview or get a response from a high-profile person we never expected to get, we high-five like football players.

When we’re not working together on the forthcoming anthology, we are working independently from home on new posts for the blog, which we update every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. We touch base via email and phone several times a day, basking in glory on a day when the blog has a high number of hits, and sharing frustration when a writer fails to turn in a piece that she swore was coming yesterday.

This journey has grown from seed on Leah’s porch, to stalk with our blog, to blossoming flower next Fall, when the book hits the shelves—both virtual and in bookstores. Leah and my partnership is a labor of love more than a business venture. The stories are there. We are just asking women to scratch the surface and let them out.

By J.L. Scott

I love you more than anything right now. I love you even when you’re shitty beer, or at the bottom of somebody’s abandoned cocktail glass left on a sticky bar or when I drink an entire bottle of wine before a first date, then head to the bar, already knowing I’ll probably do something I regret. I love you more than the four iPhones, two friendships, and one pair of shoes I’ve lost or broken while drunk.

It wasn’t a straightforward romance. I knew I was looking for something, but I didn’t know it would be you. After all, bulimia and I were flirting pretty hard and heavy when I was introduced to you, a month after I turned 16. I met you via tequila shots in my friend Viv’s basement after a homecoming game. My hands were chapped from the cold of walking the mile from the football field to her house without gloves, and I hated the way my cracked skin tasted as I licked the salt that lay above the knuckle on my thumb. I hated the way the tequila burned down my throat. But I did four shots anyway. Afterwards I felt alive, funny, enervated. The world seemed a lot less scary and cold.

Still, for a long time, we maintained a pretty tepid affair. My main concern was the calories. I desired to be skinny more than anything else, and I didn’t know how to reconcile the amount of booze it would take to get a buzz, with the endless minutes on the treadmill or the effort it took to find an empty bathroom stall and stick my finger down my throat. Maybe I would have tried coke, but by then, I was attending a rural woman’s college, and the idea of trying find it seemed far too daunting. Besides, I was an annoyingly good girl—one of those people who never missed a lecture, who always had her hand raised, who felt guilty if I skipped a workout.

But I was also hungry—for carbs, always, but also for adventure, for breaking the rules, for the dark corners of my mind I was afraid to explore. And so even though I didn’t drink a ton, I still went out a lot, felt the rush of excitement when my roommate and I went to a neighboring school’s frat parties and I let a guy’s hands touch me everywhere, allowed his fingers to flutter against the waistband of my jeans and knew that was code for heading to a barely-used meeting room upstairs. And so although I wasn’t drunk when I lost my virginity—a frat boy on top of me, me still wearing my pink faux vintage t-shirt that read Wildcat in glittery script—I might as well have been. And that night, coming back to my own dorm room, after terrible sex, was when it clicked: Alcohol made things happen. It was a conduit to excitement, a conduit to being someone I wasn’t. Being someone extraordinary.

So the seed was planted. But I was still coy with you—I remember, I had leftover beers in my dorm room when I was packing up after freshman year. I tossed them in the free box without a second thought. “You actually have leftover alcohol?” a sophomore asked incredulously, popping the cap with her dorm key. “That’s incredible.”

I shrugged. I felt superior to her. I had better things to do than drink beer at 2 P.M. on a Saturday afternoon.

And then came sophomore year and a transfer to a college in New York City and endless amaretto sours and cosmos all over Manhattan. My roommate and I always got drinks for free, because we were pretty-ish and we ordered ridiculous technicolor drinks, and it seemed the drunker we were, the more boys and bartenders would pay attention to us. We drank like it was our job, and we were very, very good at it. I loved the fact that five drinks could slide a Saturday night into a night of adventure, into so many firsts: First time making out in the back of a cab, first time having sex outside, first time staying up all night and watching the sun rise while drinking wine from the night before.

And then there were the bad firsts: First time blacking out (shitty complimentary boxed white wine at the Chinese restaurant that didn’t card), first time having no clue whether or not I had sex (a flurry of text message exchanges the next day confirmed that I had), first time throwing up all over myself (at a black tie affair where I was supposed to be a volunteer.)

But ultimately, it didn’t much matter, because I was in love. And once I graduated from college and began working an entry-level job at a magazine, it seemed the feeling was mutual. My salary wasn’t glamorous, but the perks—endless parties, open bars, plenty of three-course lunches with literary idols and an office where champagne was often uncorked as a reward for getting through late nights—were amazing. Drinking served as the common ground I had with my seemingly way more sophisticated colleagues, and the drunker I got, the more comfortable I felt in my skin. Each drink was bringing me closer to becoming the sexy, smart girl I desperately wanted to be.

“What do you like more, drinking or sex?” I was 23, and the question—ridiculous, implausible—was asked by the guy I was sleeping with. At one time, we had been on track to actually date, but that had been before I’d called his number 12 times in a row, before I showed up at his door, bleeding and crying, before he told me one night that I was too drunk to sleep with and put me to bed on his couch.

I paused, silence hanging between us. The answer was so obvious. Sex was awkward, embarrassing. It was the opposite of drinking.

“I know,” he sighed and rolled away: A jealous lover. “You love your booze.”

By that point, it was so obvious. I loved drinking, at happy hours, at work events, alone in my apartment. For the past five years, it’s been a one-sided love affair, and the stakes have only gotten higher and higher. I’m older. Fewer of my friends think that an open-bar invite has the same appeal that it did when we were in our early twenties. It’s not cute anymore. And I don’t seem to have the same handle on drinking as I did. I’ve had five blackouts in the past two months. I know that’s not okay. What’s even worse is the endless effort and energy it takes to parse together the events of the previous evening, and then, once the pieces are put together, to try as hard as humanly possible to forget them—usually by drinking again.

Snapshot: In bed with my ex-boyfriend, making myself throw up into his wastepaper basket next to his night table, so proud that I still remembered the exact right touch on the back of my throat that would make myself heave. I’d come to his place directly from girls’ happy hour. As soon as I came in, he was worried I had alcohol poisoning, and was about to bring me to the hospital. I thought vomiting in front of him on purpose would prove that I was okay.

Snapshot: In a cab with my boss, who was nice enough to take me home from a party, and me totally forgetting my address until she walked up and down the street with me until I finally recognized my building.

“Feeling okay today?” She asked the next morning, avoiding eye contact.

“I should have eaten last night,” I said ruefully, staring at a spot on the floor.

“Lesson learned?” She asked, half-grimacing.

I knew I was supposed to say something else: That I was sorry, that it would never happen again, that it was completely inappropriate and I really appreciated her trying to gloss over everything. But I didn’t. Because saying all that would be an admission that the night before had really happened.

I stayed at the office extra-late that night, chugging coffee, attempting to seem responsible and in control.

Snapshot: Waking up on my couch, surrounded by empty bottles and half-eaten plates of food. It had been my housewarming party, and I only remembered the first ten minutes.

Snapshot: Waking up next to my cracked phone in the hazy light of five A.M. I’m in my bed, but there’s a huge purple bruise that extends from the top of my shoulder to my elbow that takes my breath away. A trail of dried blood sticks on my forehead and in my hair, all coming from a scratch on my temple. Did I fall? Did I get into a fight? Was I attacked? I text the last friend I remember seeing that night, and she says she put me in a cab. That day at work, I kept shrugging my shoulder out of my cardigan, in awe of the purple-ish bruise spreading down my arm.

But after the embarrassments subside and the bruises disappear, I can smooth over each incident and make it sound like no more than a kind of cringe-worthy mishap. But I’m so terribly afraid that my luck is going to run out, that I’m going to lose what I’ve still managed to hang on to. My job, my friends, my life.

So I’m going to try so hard to quit. But right now, I love you so much that I can’t imagine how I’m going to live the rest of my life without you. There’s so much I still don’t know about you: I still don’t know the difference between Malbec and Merlot, I never got around to drinking Scotch straight up, I’ll never have you in my hands during my wedding.

If I even get married.

Because that’s the thing: In every possible way, I’m worried you’ve ruined me for anyone. You’ve turned my life into a series of mishaps and mistakes and awful nights and even worse mornings after, but I still keep going back to you. And you’re always there.

Which is why even though I’m scared and angry and confused as all hell, I’m going to bow out of happy hours. Pour out the vodka in my freezer. Head to A.A. I’m going to try to walk away from the twisted life we’ve created together. But I’m keeping the wine glasses in my cabinet. Just in case.

This piece originally appeared on The Fix, a website about addiction and recovery. J.L. Scott is the pseudonym for a prominent magazine writer who lives in New York.

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by Jill Talbot

The weekday bartender was asking Jeremy, a regular, if he had had anything to eat as I sat down on the fourth stool at Chili’s bar and opened up a copy of The Great Gatsby.  I was looking for lines spoken by Daisy, when she asks what they’re going to do today and the day after that.  I had alluded to it in my nonfiction writing class a few hours before, urging students to step away from the story and interject a statement, a philosophical pondering. “Open it up; develop it,” I’d suggested, “Make it mean something beyond what happened.”

Fitzgerald was always doing this—dragging his readers into “the dark night of the soul,” where it is “always three o’clock in the morning.”  I asked my students what he might have meant by this three-o’clock-in-the-morning business. Maybe, they suggested, he meant waiting in What-a-burger drive-thru lines.  Or sleeping. One young man confessed to a recent night of walking the streets at that very hour.   Another remembered that Fitzgerald himself was a drunk and guessed it might have been his “coming around” hour.  I liked that one.  Insomnia, a few mentioned.  ”Yes,” I said, “Hemingway ends a ‘A Clean, Well-Lighted Place’:   ‘“After all, many must have it.’”  The eager innocents wanted to know what “it” was—I told them I hoped they never knew.

They pressed, wanted to know if I knew.  I said, “Indeed,” and moved on.  I would not tell them of the nights I drank myself into the wee small hours of the morning in Utah, trading one glass of Chardonnay for another until I passed out, then woke to a glass in my hand, candles across the mantle and on top of the coffee table still flickering, a Dan Abrams re-run on MSNBC.  Nights I astounded myself with my wine stamina, the mornings of opening the front door to check the porch like a crime scene:  empty wine bottles, a glass on the top step, the worst nights evidenced by a glass still full:  a sign that suddenly, I shut down and went inside, where I’d wake, never in my bed, but somewhere else, the couch, the mattress I had lugged into the living room.  The empty bed too empty.

Those were the years I shouted through the evenings, Chardonnay taking me toward or away from the truth:  I had lost love.  Again.  And I knew my drinking to be part of the ruins, so now that I was on my own, I was going to drink, dammit.  A lot.  All day, if I wanted, days that carried over into nights and drinking that started earlier and earlier with each day.

I flipped through the novel’s pages, looking for the blue of my underlines.  Always blue.

That day was a Pinot Noir afternoon for me, and it was my last time in that bar, but I did not know it.  Jeremy was telling me about the latest episode of Robot Chicken as I found Nick Carraway at the end of another chapter, “watching over nothing.”  That afternoon, as Jeremy paid carefully before nodding to me on his way out, I asked the bartender, Angela, his story, and she told me he was a meth addict.   I felt guilty knowing.  This was too private.  This was not control and escape; it was desperation and captivity.  I shifted in my seat, looked around.

I saw that I had traded hiding in my house in the grips of a third bottle of Chardonnay for the blue and brown tiles of a bar.  I no longer had it in me to delve into desperation, allow myself to be captive to the glow from a glass and the thwop of a cork’s release all through the night; no, I drank with others, in public, in the daylight.  Look at me, how well I can control my drinking with an honest glass or four of wine.  But what if I all I had traded was time and place?

Dary plopped down two stools away, ordered her usual, the Grand Patron margarita, a dangerous drink served in a blue, oversized martini glass.  She’d knock back two of those swimming pool-size cocktails instead of a burger or a salad, then head back to work. She told me she fell asleep when she drank wine.  So do I, I thought.  In fact, it’s the only way I can.

I ordered another Pinot, watched a loud man amble into the bar area.  He said two words, “Bud.  Tall,” before Angela could place the requisite coaster in front of him.

Dary told me that she was “way hungover” from closing down the bar on the corner of Washington and Sixth the night before.  I never went to any of the bars in town, afraid to run into my students, fearful of my inability to control myself if given the chance not to control myself.  So, I reserved my drinking for restaurants during the day and my living room at night, but no more than one bottle, no more waking up to burning candles.

The love I had lost so long ago had become something I only wrote about, and even then, I couldn’t separate what I was writing from what I had known. Love had become a fiction, and so had I.  So had my drinking. The story I told myself was that drinking at a bar in a chain restaurant four or five days a week was far from waking up on the floor of my hallway wondering why I’d landed there.

The loud man demanded to know what everyone did for a living.  He broke protocol, as all of us sat, staring ahead in our own private Oklahomas.  But it was Angela’s job to engage him, so she smirked at me and told him I was a writer.

“Yeah?  Hey, that’s really cool.  Did you write that?”  He pointed to Gatsby.  I was polite, said no, understood that the world I lived in had no meaning for him whatsoever.  Honestly, it had little meaning for me.  I was drinking away any meaning my life could have had.

For a while that afternoon, a quiet man sat across the bar over a glass of Pinot Grigio, and I was surprised, convinced I had drained the supply during a recent Thursday’s long afternoon of Grigio and Didion.  A chapter, a glass, and on it went like that until every line I read was blue-underline poignant, and that’s when I knew it was time to go.   Strange, how we create ways to measure our limits.

The man’s name was Peter.  He had broken up with his lover.  Lover said he drank too much.  ”But,” Peter said, “we manage our vulnerabilities.”  I grabbed a napkin, wrote that down with my blue pen.

“What’ll we do with ourselves this afternoon,” cried Daisy, “and the day after that, and the next thirty years?”  Not this, I thought.  For two years, I’ve kept that napkin on my writing desk.  For two years, I have not gone to a bar alone to drink.  For two years, I have slept in my bed.

That afternoon, the restaurant empty except for those of us in the bar, I asked for my check, tipped Angela heartily, emptied the end of my Pinot, then tucked the napkin into that novel I had written and walked away.

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. You can read her Drinking Diaries interview here. 

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By Alma Katsu

You don’t have to get too far into my novel, The Taker, before you start to wonder about the author’s issues. It’s a dark book because I have a fairly dark outlook on life, which I’ve come by honestly.

My childhood was rough. I won’t go into the reasons to spare my family. Let’s just say my father had an addictive personality. His father had been an alcoholic and my father had been appalled by this, so there was very little drinking in our house. Growing up, I didn’t see people out-of-control drunk. It was all a mystery to me, and like many mysteries, a little bit glamorous to the uninitiated.

When I was in my twenties, I had a boyfriend who was a bad alcoholic. His father had been an alcoholic and had hanged himself in the family’s home. It’s hard to have a happily-ever-after life when something like that happens; his mother was left with three young children to raise and no resources. The boyfriend had a rough life growing up and seemed hell-bent to repeat his father’s fate.

I had no idea what I had gotten into. I kept trying to help him, to fix him, to save him. My mother had been an enabler my whole life so this was my example, this is what I thought you did if you loved someone. When he and I broke up, he did things that pretty much guaranteed the relationship was over, burnt to the ground. Luckily, some friends who understood alcoholism (they were mutual friends and alcoholics who decided to try sobriety) explained the complex emotional dynamics at work. Thanks to them, I saw that it wasn’t within my power to ‘save’ this guy. There was nothing I could do. I had to let go.

One morning, ten years later, I opened the newspaper and read that the former boyfriend had died from a gunshot wound to the head. He’d been playing Russian roulette in a garage with friends. I remember being angry: how typical of him to leave others to clean up the mess, to leave it to his mother to bury him. And I was angry that he hadn’t been able to get his life together and save himself. But that’s when I learned that not everybody is going to be saved.

Don’t take this story to mean that I’m against drinking. I’m not much of a drinker but I enjoy it when I do imbibe. I am very wary of people who seem to lack self-control, however. It’s probably the one character trait of which I can’t help being a bit judgmental.

Alma Katsu is a writer living in the Washington, DC area with her husband, musician Bruce Katsu. She graduated from Brandeis University, where she studied writing with novelist John Irving and children’s book author Margaret Rey, and received her MA in Fiction from the Johns Hopkins University. The Taker is her first novel and will be released on September 6 by Gallery Books/Simon and Schuster. 

“One Step at a Time” is a series of original essays by writer and mom Patty N.  who has been chronicling her first year of sobriety.

by Patty N.

The day after tomorrow, my handy 12-Step iPhone app – the one with the sobriety calculator that I compulsively check every day – will finally read, “You’ve been sober for one year / 12 months / 365 days / 8,760 hours.”  Yes!

Needless to say, I will not be celebrating with champagne, like I did after drying out in 2008.  That was the year I set out to prove to myself that I wasn’t an alcoholic. So I quit drinking – except at my 25th high school reunion when, in my whiskey-impaired state, I got into a car driven by an inebriated classmate and, thankfully, didn’t die on the way to Denny’s.  I also drank on New Year’s Eve and blacked out after only a few glasses of champagne.  Then there were the prescription drugs – which I took not exactly as prescribed but, hey, at least they weren’t alcohol.

After my year “on the wagon,” I bought myself a big bottle of bubbly and picked up where I left off.  But it became very clear, very fast, that I shouldn’t drink and that I couldn’t stop.  Embarrassed and ashamed, I started counting days in AA.  At first, I felt like I was being punished. I’m the good kid, the hard worker, the hands-on mom, I thought to myself.  How did I end up here?  And, every time I said, “My name is Patty and I’m an alcoholic,” I would think to myself, But I quit for a year! I didn’t drink everyday! I was high-functioning! I can’t be an alcoholic!”

Slowly, though, the veil of self-criticism and harsh judgement receded and a gentle, clear-headed, self-compassion took its place.  I started wondering:  Would I hate myself for having asthma?  Would I attack myself if I had diabetes? Would I be terrified of running into someone I knew at the dentist office if I had gingivitis?  No!!  So why didn’t I view my alcoholism in the same, straightforward manner?  As Dr. Drew says (I can’t help it, I love him), alcoholism is about chemistry, not character. So why would I be ashamed about a condition over which I have no control?

Looking back, I’ve spent a lot of time this year regretting the past and, oftentimes, wishing to shut the door on it.  I realize that’s part of the process. But as I mark this significant milestone, I’d like to quit mourning my old life and start celebrating my new one.  On Sunday, I will go to my regular AA meeting and announce that I have one year of continuous sobriety.  I’ll collect my special anniversary coin and an amazing group of people, whose last names I may never know, will greet me with applause and hugs and flowers from the corner deli.  And I will call myself an alcoholic, without reservation, without judgement, without shame, and with enough strength to finally bust through that cocoon of self-hatred and fly like a beautiful liberated butterfly.

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by Margot Magowan

I love sleeping. Everything about it. I love my bed with its firm, square pillows and its silky, indigo bedding. I love anticipating sleep, knowing its hours or minutes before I become so relaxed that I actually slip into another state of consciousness.

But recently, I had to make a choice between two of my great loves: sleeping and drinking.

These days, if I drink a glass of wine, invariably, I wake up in the middle of the night and have trouble falling asleep again. And let’s just say those waking hours aren’t the most peaceful for my brain.

If I drink two glasses of wine before bed, forget it. I’ll toss and turn the entire second half of the night. When it’s finally time for me to stumble out of bed, I feel tired and depressed. There are circles under my eyes and my skin isn’t exactly glowy. I’m likely to yell at my kids for tiny infractions that don’t get on my nerves when I’m well rested.

This reaction to alcohol is annoying, because like I said, I love sleeping. I love the moment when my husband comes into bed, usually about an hour or so after me, and I feel his warm body is resting next to mine. No matter how much my family is irritating me, I’m easily reminded of how much I love them all unconditionally when they’re sleeping. If any of my kids are driving me crazy, I make a point to go take a look at their sweet, little faces while they’re peacefully slumbering, and instantly, I feel overwhelmed with adoration.

I didn’t always fetishize sleep. To the contrary, I didn’t understand the point of it. When I was just out of college, I remember reading somewhere that humans spent a third of their lives in bed. I was shocked.  What a waste of time! One third of our short lives. The article went on to state that no one, not doctors or scientists, really understood what the point of all that sleep was. They still don’t.

But things changed for me. Absence makes the heart grow fonder. I fell in love with sleep when sleep abandoned me. I had a baby. A colicky baby who slept, at most, in three hour blocks. After months of nursing her 24/ 7, being exhausted, cranky and miserable (following months of restless nights of pregnancy, waking up to pee on the hour) all I could think about, all I wanted, all I craved, was sleep. I couldn’t believe I had taken something so glorious for granted. I would look around, envious, as strangers, thinking: “Most humans got to sleep every single night!” I promised myself that if ever I got the chance to sleep again, I’d appreciate it.

Then I had two more kids.

Now my youngest is one and a half years old and finally, all five of us are sleeping through the night. And like I wrote, I’m in bliss.

Except when I drink at night. Then my sleeping becomes so disrupted, I may as well be nine months pregnant or have a nursing baby at my bedside.

My sensitivity to alcohol while sleeping may seem extreme, but apparently, it’s not just me. An article about a new study published in Science Magazine and titled, “Alcohol Disrupts Women’s Sleep More than Men’s” found that: “Women who consumed alcohol had fewer hours of sleep, woke more frequently and for more minutes during the night, and had more disrupted sleep compared to men who drank alcohol.”

The study doesn’t say that missing sleep can turn your life or your face into a mess, but here’s the thing: If the point of wine is to relax me and give me some pleasure, which is why I drink it, at this time in my life, alcohol isn’t accomplishing that goal. In fact, it’s getting in the way. At some future date, I may enjoy wine again. But for tonight, I choose sleep.

Margot Magowan‘s blog ReelGirl is supposed to rate media and products for girl empowerment, but she often gets sidetracked into writing commentary on politics and culture. Her articles have also been published in Salon, Glamour, the San Jose Mercury News, and numerous other newspapers and online sites. She has appeared on “Good Morning America,” CNN, Fox News, and other TV and radio programs. Margot is the Director of the Fellows Program at the Woodhull Institute, providing media training and placement to extraordinary women leaders. Margot also worked as a talk radio producer creating top-rated programs. Her short story, “Light Me Up,” is featured in an anthology coming out in June 2011. She is currently writing a chapter book about the fairyworld. Margot lives with her husband and their three daughters in San Francisco.

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by Caren Osten Gerszberg

When I was a sophomore in high school, my brother—then a high school senior—planned a big party at our house. Not only did he have my parents’ blessing, but they even went out to dinner while he was setting things up in our basement. It must’ve been winter, because I remember my brother making a fire just before the guests began to arrive, when a spark flew and lit one of the couch pillows on fire.

I guess the quickest way to deal with the pillow was to toss it outside, presuming the flames had been put to their rest. Within a couple of hours, only when numerous firefighters and their big red engine pulled into our driveway, did any of us realize that the pillow had been smoldering outside the basement door. The neighbors evidently called 911 when the odor wafted their way.

The friendly firefighters tended to the pillow and most definitely noticed the scene—harmless high school beer-drinking revelers hanging out, listening to music, and playing pool. Once the pillow was extinguished for real, they smiled and took off.

Fast-forward 30 years and note a number of significant facts:

1. I’m the parent of the high school senior now.
2. The drinking age is 21, while it was 18 when I was in high school.
3. I live down the street from the local police station.
4. High school kids in our community routinely attempt, often successfully, to smuggle beer and booze into a house party.

Last Saturday night, it was my child’s turn to host the party. While we were glad to let our daughter invite friends and other students from her school’s performing arts program–in celebration of four days of play performances–my husband and I had no intention of going out while the festivities took place. In fact, we had a plan in place, which was to ask each and every teen who walked through our front door to leave their coat and any bag on the table by the front door. This seemed a reasonable request, especially since we know people who have hired off-duty police officers to stand outside and monitor any potential contraband being smuggled into their kid’s party.

Once the shindig began, hordes of kids began to pour through our front door. These days, it takes only seconds to text your posse and tell them where the fun is. My husband stood guard at the door, while I took to the stairs. Within 30 minutes, the police had arrived.

The two officers stood on our front lawn, amid the small groups of kids who’d most likely exited to get high or drink outside of our house. When word traveled to the basement that the police were on site, my daughter ran upstairs and asked us to stall for a few minutes–she needed to clean up the beer cans she’d already discovered in the guest bedroom downstairs. We told her we would try, but I couldn’t help but wonder: “How is possible that kids have the nerve to stick bottles and cans down their pants and in their shirts right in the face of two adults who are asking them not to?”

Well, live and learn. My husband eventually let one of the officers take a walk inside and around the house–despite my hesitation–and the officer concluded that all was well and we were “doing a great job.” We were asked to lower the music (oh, did I mention two of the kids brought their professional DJ equipment?) and the party rocked on.

Kids came and left, and though we continued to eye each one of them, more beer and a bottle of vodka made it passed our parental checkpoint. The fire alarm eventually went off–thanks to the DJ’s fog machine–but the party lasted until about 1:00 am. My daughter came up afterwards to thank us for the party, and told us she had a great time.

The following morning, while cleaning up, I found a water bottle with the words “Cousins’ Reunion” splashed across the front–with just a little water left in it. “Smell it,” my daughter said. “Oh yeah,” I instantly realized. “Pure vodka.” My husband, meanwhile, was outside busily picking up empty beer cans and bottles around our front yard and our neighbors’.

I couldn’t help but feel badly for these kids. They are growing up in an environment that has made alcohol so forbidden, so undeniably dangerous in nearly every way, that they feel the need to sneak it at every turn. While the dangers are obvious–and we’ve been clear to discuss them with our daughter in addition to what she’s learned in school–there seems to be such a focus on controlling our children that they are bursting at the seams to get their hands on the stuff.

I wish things were a bit more relaxed, like when we were in high school. If the authorities showed up, rather than ask you to search your house, they’d survey the scene, see the responsible parents on hand, and go merrily on their way.

Caren Osten Gerszberg is a co-editor of the Drinking Diaries.

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“One Step at a Time” is a series of original essays we will be running monthly. We are excited to have writer and mom Patty N. share her fresh perspective as she embarks on the road to sobriety.

by Patty N.

“The seventh and eighth grades were for me, and for every single good and interesting person I’ve ever known, what the writers of the Bible meant when they used the words hell and the pit.” –Anne Lamott, Operating Instructions

When I was in 8^th grade, my nickname was Spaz.  I didn’t choose this unflattering (although not entirely inaccurate) moniker.  It was handed to me on the first day of my new school by a Mean Girl named Molly.

“We’re all wearing cute skirts and sandals,” Molly said when I asked for her first-day-of-school wardrobe advice. “And you MUST wear bright red toenail polish.”  Molly had been a friend and classmate at Mount St. Mary’s before she transferred to the public middle school in 6^th grade.  She was the only person I would know in the class and I trusted her.  But when I met Molly and her gang on the big day, I was the only one with colorful toes.

“Wow!” Molly said laughing as she and her followers looked down at my feet. I had chosen a fire engine red – this was the late ‘70s so most girls my age wore pale pink if any polish at all. My toes looked like Red Hots in a sea of pearls.

My stomach lurched. Sure, it was just nail polish, but I had wanted so badly to fit in, to stop feeling so much like an outsider.  It was hard enough that all my Catholic friends’ parents like Molly’s were still married while mine were divorced – in fact, my mom had just left her second husband and was dating a 23 year-old hippie/musician.

The other moms drove station wagons with wholesome names like Country Squire while mine drove a flashy, Japanese sports car with personalized license plates.  Molly’s mom was a cookie-baking homemaker and Girl Scout troop leader; my mom owned a funky clothing store, worked six days a week and modeled for her own ads in the local paper. The other moms wore sweater sets, minimal make-up, pageboy haircuts and sensible shoes. My mom, with her lacquered lips, wavy, blonde mane, bell-bottom jeans and platform espadrilles, looked like she had walked off the set of Charlie’s Angels – even at Sunday mass. The other moms went to PTA meetings; my mom went out for drinks. In retrospect, my mom seems pretty cool.  But to a gawky 12 year-old who just wanted to be “normal,” she was so embarrassing, so conspicuous. Everyone was always staring at her.  And now this gaggle of giggling girls was staring at me.

“Oh, I’m such a spaz,” I said, chuckling and rolling my eyes exaggeratedly. I really wanted to run to the bathroom and let myself dissolve into tears.  But instead, I did what I had learned to do whenever I didn’t feel safe revealing my true feelings:  I became the clown, a happy-go-lucky jokester who could laugh her way out of any uncomfortable situation.

“C’mon, Spaz,” Molly said when the class bell rang.  “Let’s go.”

The name stuck (to this day, I have a handful of friends who still call me Spaz) and the kooky class clown helped me navigate the shark-infested waters of middle school and my first year of high school.  When I discovered alcohol my sophomore year, I knew I’d found the perfect prop.  When I drank, it was even easier to hide my feelings and completely numb out and to finally feel like I fit in. And, uninhibited by the booze, Spaz became funnier and even more entertaining – or at least that’s the way it seemed.

Over the next twenty years, I continued to call upon Spaz to protect me. But this self-imposed bodyguard was blocking everyone – including myself – from seeing who I really was. And around my 40^th birthday, I felt like this elaborate emotional security system I had created was short-circuiting. I had planned a huge party for myself — an over-the-top celebration with 125 guests, a drag queen named Diandra, an endless supply of pink Prosecco cocktails, and three costume changes. Everyone thought it was so fabulous. But I wasn’t celebrating – I was just entertaining, trying desperately to live up to this party-girl persona I’d created.  After the party, I felt such an emptiness, the kind Karen Carpenter sang about: “Walking around/some kind of lonely clown/rainy days and Mondays always get me down.”  Even though so many people had shown up to toast me, I felt isolated as if I was on a big stage and everyone else was far away in the audience.  I wanted to connect, to cross over, but I truly didn’t know how.

In sobriety, it has been so liberating to discover that I don’t need Spaz or booze or anything but a Higher Power of my understanding to protect me anymore.  But it’s also terrifying.  I feel like a kid who’s taking the training wheels off her bike or swimming without her water wings for the first time.  I just have to be willing to trust and be willing to let go.  And when I do, I will finally be able to reveal to the world (and to myself) the person I’ve been hiding underneath the clown mask.

*To read Patty’s previous posts in this series, click here.

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by Julie Powell

A couple of years ago now, I was finishing up copy-edits on my second book, and came across a query regarding the name of a local upstate beer that I had recounted sitting around drinking with friends after work hours.  I figured this would be a simple thing to clear up, but a google search insisted that the only beer by the name was brewed in Belgium.  Well, the brewery is a small outfit – maybe even this far into the 21^st century they don’t have a web site.  So I emailed my erstwhile boss, Josh, who’d introduced me to the stuff.

“Is the beer you guys drink up there called ‘Witch’s Brew’ or ‘Witches’ Brew’?  Fact checking here and can’t find anything online, so far.”

Josh, being Josh, never got back to me on this query, getting distracted as he does by his peripatetic life as a rock-star butcher, business co-owner and father of a young child.  I asked other people I’d remembered drinking with at the shop, and got only quizzical looks and promises to think about it.  Finally I got to Aaron, who made the connection.  After turning his baby blues up toward the ceiling in a theatrical pose of deep thought, he said, “Oh!  Do you mean Mother’s Milk?”

I had been convinced – convinced, I tell you – that the beer was named “Witch’s Brew.”  Or some variation thereof.  But of course Aaron was right, I knew as soon as he said it.

As Freudian slips go, this one seemed particularly ominous to me.

I come from a family of very highly functioning alcoholics, and we all get along just fine together.  We’re none of us belligerent or reckless when deep in our cups; probably the most dangerous thing that happens is when, usually while playing a board game, some turn of events makes my dad laugh so hard that he turns red and wheezes and begins to resemble someone suffering some sort of attack.  So please don’t picture this mental mix-up of mine as indicative of some sort of horrific, Long Day’s Journey Into Night-type of childhood.  Although booze has always figured prominently in the fabric of our daily lives, so haveresponsible parenting and civic responsibility.  For instance, on the day that mother mistook the margarita mix in a jar in the fridge for lemonade and poured it into my thermos, I responded as any well-bred child would, raising my hand for the cafeteria monitor and announcing before dozens of 3^rd graders, in stentorian tones, “There’s whiskey in my lemonade!!!” Also, conveniently, Mom was volunteering in the library that day, so it was easy for the principal to locate her to ask her a few questions.

So honestly, I really didn’t change the beer’s name around in my head because I think my mother is an evil hag.  (Though don’t tell her about this; she might get just that very wrong idea.)  Rather, I suspect that as I get older and the cheerful booziness I was raised with begins to accrue consequences it never before had – extra pounds, hazier memories, even the occasional hangover I’d always thought my DNA gave me immunity to – alcohol seems not only the sweet sustenance my family has always treated it as, but also something of a dangerous potion.  And too, as I crawl slowly toward the upper limits of my child-bearing years, there’s always the theoretical but looming possibility that I might one day be required to give up that mother’s milk, for nine months, anyway.

We all know that these slips mean something.  This one, I think, was telling me to grow up.  Just maybe, it might be time to put away the sippy cup – or at least not refill it with cabernet quite so often.

Julie Powell was born and raised in Austin, Texas. A theater and fiction-writing major, she moved to New York with her husband-to-be Eric and worked temp jobs for seven years. She started a blog – The Julie/Julia Project – that became a best-selling book and later a film, “Julie & Julia,” starring Meryl Streep and Amy Adams. Her second book, Cleaving was published in 2009.

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For our latest essay series, we are inviting men to share a story, an episode, or an experience that involves women and drinking. We hope you will enjoy reading these stories as they appear each Monday.

by James Kullander

I’ve always liked a glass or two of wine or a cocktail in the evening and I’ve always liked the women in my life to like that, too. So it was out of character that, years ago, I married a woman who didn’t drink because she was allergic to alcohol. I thought having a wife who didn’t drink would keep my own drinking at bay. And, mirabile dictu, it worked.

For most of us, a cold gin and tonic on a hot summer evening or a bottle of wine anytime is better shared. Like falling in love, drinking is something you don’t really want to do alone. After we divorced I never steadily dated a woman who didn’t drink. I didn’t plan it that way. Nor did I plan the fights that happened as a result.

Try as we might to avoid it, we often find ourselves drawn almost unwillingly into all sorts of relationships that touch our sore spots. I’ve found that two common sort spots touched in most any intimate relationship are jealousy and authority. If you drink and have a tendency to be jealous, then when your partner appears to flirt with the wait staff during a lovely dinner out, a vicious fight on the drive home will likely leave you both feeling you’ve been thrown from the wreckage of some crash you’ll barely recall in the morning. If you drink and resent authority, God help your partner who tells you how to mince the garlic as you cook dinner together.

Sadly, looking back on my life the past several years, I can see that the women I’ve dated who have liked to drink the most are the ones with whom I have fought the most. Two come to mind.

With the first woman, we’d start to fight–in the middle of dinner and well into our second bottle of wine–over her being jealous of, say, an old girlfriend I’d mentioned talking to in town. I, not keen on being told what to do, would get up from the table, slam the door, and peel out in my car like some hoodlum in a James Dean movie. I’d see her stunned figure staring out the window at me as I sped away into the night and for a split second, I felt a softening within me, a sense of compassion or pity or sadness that would almost make me turn around, but I never did. Not until the next day. One day, I didn’t go back at all.

Another woman I dated for only a few months invited me to a party in a remote cabin with a half dozen other couples. It was a new crowd to me. Turned out she and her friends were a hard drinking bunch; there were bottles of scotch, tequila, vodka, Kahlua, gin, and cheap wine all stacked on the kitchen table like bowling pins after a first poorly aimed throw. I spent a small part of the evening talking to another woman because I found her interesting, and when I circled back to be with my girlfriend, she seemed distant and cool, not to mention barely coherent.

When we all paired off and stumbled to bed, my girlfriend scolded me in front of everyone to go sleep with the other woman since I seemed to be so smitten with her. I blanched. Reeling, I climbed into bed with my girlfriend, the two of us fully clothed, our backs to each other, the small space between us as fathomless as the light-years between the stars. All night long while she was passed out those existential questions that come up when we find ourselves hovering in a delirium between sleep and wakefulness haunted me: Who is this person in bed with me? Who am I? How the hell did I end up here?

The next day during our entire two-hour drive from the cabin to her home, we fought about the night before. “I have you,” I said. “I don’t want anyone else.” The effect of her alcohol-induced delusion had clouded her thinking so thickly that, even sober, if not a little hung over, there was nothing I could say to exonerate myself. It’s hell to be falsely accused of anything but perhaps I was a little too zealous in defending my innocence. Later that day sitting on the edge of her bed I finally said: “If you don’t tell me right now that you believe me, then I am packing up, getting in my car, driving home, and never coming back.” This was no idle threat; ours was a long-distance relationship and home for me was 1,500 miles and two-day drive away. I packed up, got in my car, drove home, and never went back.

“Drink made her contrary,” a live-in cook confesses about her long-dead sister in a John Cheever story I love, The Sorrows of Gin. “If I’d say the weather was fine, she’d tell me I was wrong. If I’d say it was raining, she’d say it was clearing. She’d correct me about everything I said, however small it was.”

When we drank, this is often how I felt with these two women.

Although I still have a weakness for a woman who purrs after the first sip of a full-bodied cabernet, or pinches a speck of lime pulp from her smiling lips as she compliments me on the gin and tonic I’ve just concocted, I have scratched a fondness for alcohol off the list of qualities I must have before committing to a second date. I’ve learned the hard way that I’m both happier and less argumentative when there isn’t a bottle of anything but water between a woman and me.

James Kullander lives in New York’s Hudson Valley, where he works as a writer, a program curriculum consultant for Omega Institute and other organizations, and an online program specialist. His work has appeared in a variety of print and online publications, including a personal essay, “Love’s Legacy Lost,” in the September 2009 issue of the Shambhala Sun and another personal essay, “My Marital Status,” published in The Sun magazine in December 2007. That essay is anthologized in The Best Buddhist Writing 2008 and The Mysterious Life of the Heart: Writing from The Sun about Passion, Longing, and Love. Some of his work in progress on a book about writing and meditation is available on his blog, writingandmediation.com, and on another blog, theleapintothevoid.wordpress.com.

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by GUEST February 4, 2011

“One Step at a Time” is a series of original essays we will be running monthly. We are excited to have writer and mom Patty N. share her fresh perspective as she embarks on the road to sobriety.

WHAT’S A NICE JEWISH GIRL DOING IN A CHURCH LIKE THIS?

by Patty N.

A funny thing happened on the way to sobriety; I went to church – and not just to the basement where most recovery meetings are held.  No, fifteen years after converting to Judaism, I found myself in a pew, on my knees, seeking solace in my old stomping ground rather than in a synagogue. At the risk of sounding too much like Sybil, I thought it couldn’t possibly be the Jewish me who struggled with alcohol; it had to be the Irish Catholic, the part of me I’d given up along with Easter eggs and Christmas trees. Because in my mind, Jews didn’t have drinking problems.  That was part of the attraction.

I grew up in a small, working class, culturally homogenous town in northern California called Grass Valley.  I went to parochial school, Catholic sleep away camp and St. Patrick’s Day celebrations with corned beef and green cocktails and “Kiss Me, I’m Irish” buttons. My parents drank. My friends’ parents drank. Even the parish priest, Father Christian, drank. It was an accepted fact among his congregants that he was an alcoholic.

There were no Jews (or blacks or Asians) in Grass Valley.  I had some knowledge of the Jewish experience thanks to the 1978 mini-series, Holocaust, and my high school production of The Diary of Anne Frank (where Anne was played by a zaftig Italian, Catholic girl named Gigi). And, when I was 15, my mom briefly dated a garmento she’d met in L.A.  His name was Max and he was “in the schmatte business.”  I think he was the first Jewish person I’d ever met.

Then I went to college and, during my first few weeks at UCSB, a cute ZBT named Dan approached me at a party anddelivered one of the best (or worst) pick-up lines I’ve ever heard:  “Hi, you look like a nice Jewish girl – do you want to come home for the holidays with me?”  Unlike my redheaded, freckle-faced Irish looking brother, I inherited my dad’s brown eyes, olive skin and dark hair which was unnaturally curly thanks to my big ‘80s perm.  I guess I looked Jewish, whatever that meant, and I had had no idea what holidays Dan was talking about since Christmas was still several months away.  I didn’t go with him to Beverly Hills, but we did go out on a date.  Rather than taking me to a typical college hangout – the campus pub for nachos and margaritas or Pizza Bob’s for pitchers and slices – he took me to a restaurant. A nice restaurant.  And he seemed way more interested in the food than the booze.

“Makes sense,” my roommate said when I told her about our date.  “Jews don’t drink.”

Over the next ten years, until I met my future husband, I dated Jewish guys almost exclusively.  They really didn’t drink so much (or maybe it just seemed that way compared to the generous amount I liked to consume.) One boyfriend brought me home for a Passover Seder and there was so much wine, but nobody seemed to be getting drunk. After dinner, when everyone switched to coffee, I was still refilling my wine glass. He made a crack about me being Irish and, although I was tipsy, I felt the sting of humiliation and shame about my background, where drinking to excess was the norm.  I wanted so badly to be like these mysterious people who could just stop drinking before the bottles were empty.

In 1996, I converted to Judaism six weeks before I got married.  I didn’t choose to become a Jew in order to stop drinking. But, in retrospect, maybe I believed on some level that I could shed my Irish Catholic past and with it, the love/hate relationship I had with alcohol. Maybe I could outrun this family curse by moving 3,000 miles away to New York and changing my religion.  Maybe my new life as a Jew would cure me.  But, obviously, it didn’t. And I now wonder: did I go back to church because I was looking for help, or was I really just looking for someone to blame?

But addiction doesn’t discriminate. Of course Jews drink. We struggle with alcoholism and substance abuse just like any other group.  So it doesn’t matter if I pray in a synagogue or a church, or if I celebrate Palm Sunday or Tu Bishvat.  The only thing that matters is that I don’t drink today.

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For our latest essay series, we are inviting men to share a story, an episode, or an experience that involves women and drinking. We hope you will enjoy reading these stories as they appear each Monday.

By Timothy Gager

I. My younger phase: I drink, you drink.

We have so much in common. I drink, you drink. We talk between sips, go home and pass out. There are dysfunctional symptoms in each of us which give us excuses to drink as much as we can. This is the point in my life where I can only date women who drink. It is a good cover—if you drink, you can never tell me to stop. All I ask is that you take care of yourself, so I don’t have to drag you across the parking lot when you pass out after I stay too long. Oh, and no wetting the bed and no throwing things at me. These are not high standards, but if you choose to accept them we might have a long and miserable relationship.

Afterthought 1: Usually I outlasted most of these types. My drinking was always far worse than theirs.

II. Intermittent phase after early phase fails: I stay sober, you stay sober.

We’re in this together baby! Sounds very much like sharing a common cause but in reality it is because I need to stop drinking. I need to say, hey, I’m a good boy if I can date a good girl. Looking back, I’ve had a few of these women, but I wasn’t serious about staying sober. I hurt a really nice churchgoing good girl because I needed to go on a bender. My friend had killed himself and I self-destructed. I dumped the good girl and proceeded to meet a fine couple and break up their engagement. I met the happy couple on the roof of my apartment. They were waving beer bottles at me and invited me up. Later, I told myself that it was her–that she was unhappy with the potential marriage, but I knew it was me.

Afterthought 2: Those women were so nice they wanted to be great friends after the post-traumatic stress disorder wore off.

III. Getting older phase: I drink, you stay sober.

This type of girl involves a lot of convincing that my drinking isn’t a problem. It also helps that her difficult recovery involves an untreated sexual acting out on her part. This sounds rarer than the two phases above, but it’s actually not that rare. I dated a fantastic woman who was in recovery for five years and she had no idea about how I drank. Even her experience being around recovering alcoholics didn’t help her figure me out.  Sex was great; anytime, anywhere, in the car, on the floor, slamming more against a door. It was Green Eggs and Horn.

On Thanksgiving, a few years ago, I took her to a party where I drank all night. When we went to bed, before I passed out I told her I wished I could take the bottle of scotch to bed with us. A few days later I was alone in that bed for months.

Afterthought 3: Besides sexually acting out, many individuals in recovery have OCD. The rituals, the counting, the need for order combined with a full blown recovery; the instances of OCD become progressive. The woman above was attracted to me when she discovered I had laundry OCD. When I discovered my washing machine had a compartment for the fabric softener I was very disappointed.

IV. Current status: I stay sober, you drink or you don’t drink—it’s all good.

As of January 18, 2011 I’ve been sober for 75 days. What you do with alcohol is fine, so drink, get messed up, use socially, go to town;  better you than me. I’ve gone out on a few dates during those 75 days. AA tells people not to date because it allegedly messes you up. It’s a sin. Fine, I’m a sinner.

On dates, I’ve been totally honest. One woman tried to pull her wine glass away from me when I confessed. She is a fabulous woman. She’s a writer and her writing is so good, I’m embarrassed that I even attempt the craft. It was the first time I’ve had a sober first date and it was great, but there were other obstacles for us that didn’t involve my or  her drinking.

Another woman and I hit it off recently. We’d text back and forth such things as, “I’m happy” or “I’m so glad we are doing this.” She is an AA member and they must have gotten to her. That’s the only way I can explain it. They must have thrown her in a room, shined a light in her eyes and made her confess to Thirteen-Stepping me. It ended…damn AA to hell.

Afterthought 4:  The ruling on the field is, AA dropped the ball. The referees are under the hood: “Upon further review the potential couple moved too fast, the man might potentially trigger the female to start drinking and drugging, but also the potential pair weren’t compatible in bed, in age and in some other areas.  The call has been overruled,  AA keeps the ball and everyone involved should keep coming.

Timothy Gager is the author of eight books of fiction and poetry. He is recently a sober person living on www.timothygager.com.

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by Kathryn Harrison

I never drank as a teenager, and I drank infrequently in college and graduate school.  It wasn’t until I was thirty and had quit my day job to work full-time at home that I began to appreciate the effects of alcohol, and discovered I could drink most of my friends under the table.  After a night of dissipation I bounded out of bed, bright-eyed, bushy-tailed, and highly irritating to my hung-over friends.  A gift, I thought, especially for an introvert who likes going to the occasional party.

Alcohol dissolves my anxiety about meeting people and making conversation.  After a couple of martinis the prospect of socializing goes from a painful test I’m afraid I’m going to fail to something I know I’ll enjoy.  It loosens and sharpens my tongue, fuels ill-advised conversations and the kind of fleeting and delicious flirtations available even to those of us who have been faithfully bonded for a quarter of a century.   It’s the catalyst required for transactions that will be fodder for party post-mortems, which, truth to tell, my husband and I often enjoy more than the parties themselves.  “Come on,” one of us will say in response to the other’s threatening to duck an invitation to the kind of function we’re likely to attend less as a couple than as separate collectors of impressions to share later, in the cab, or over breakfast.  “Think about who else is coming.  Think about tomorrow.”  If, as when I was pregnant, I won’t allow myself to drink, I avoid situations that make me feel as I did when I was ten or fifteen: awkward, tongue-tied, and looking for an opportunity to bolt.  But that’s about my life out in the world, different from my life at home.

It’s been twenty years now that I’ve made a living in the same physical environment in which I sleep and wake, in which I cook and eat and wash dishes and clothes.  For all those years the one reliable means of ending a workday has been alcohol.  Although I can’t leave work, I can leave my working self behind; I can change the way I perceive and respond to my surroundings.  Uncorking a bottle of wine means I’ve stopped writing—struggling, striving—to spend time with my family and catch up on chores I refuse to acknowledge during hours set aside for work.  I’ve tried to come up with a substitute—going for a run, or to the gym—but I’m a mom.  I have to be home most evenings, presiding over homework, making dinner, and listening to viola practice, which sounds a lot better to the intoxicated ear.

And there’s my constitution, my overachieving liver: from the start, a glass of wine barely took the edge off.   The years went by, I bought bigger wine glasses, but eventually two glasses weren’t enough, and then, suddenly, neither were three, and martinis became something I drank at home rather than the occasional treat out at a restaurant or bar.  Was it in 2008 that I began to make sure there was always a bottle of Grey Goose in the freezer?   Admittedly—I admitted it—I was firmly in the habit of pouring myself a drink when I came downstairs at five.  More often than not, by dinner I’d had two.  The old saw about martinis—that they were like breasts, two were perfect; a third, one too many—didn’t apply to me.  I could enjoy being a three-breasted drinker.

I like drinking; I like it a lot.  Actually, I love it.  I love the way it slows the world down—slows me down—insulating me from life’s endless little aggravations, and I love the gradual whole-body release of tension it brings.  As the workday winds down I tend in the opposite direction, wound tighter and tauter; Sitting at my desk, I once clenched my teeth so hard I broke a molar, and the first thing I do after a first drink is luxuriate in how easily I can move my neck and shoulders.  Even more, I love how alcohol acts on my mind, granting me passage to latitudes of my psyche I don’t visit when sober.

Alcohol renders me completely, savagely honest with myself, about myself.  That’s why I stopped drinking at the new year, not forever, probably not for more than a month or two, but long enough to get used to living without drinking, long enough to redefine my relationship with alcohol and return myself to the drink-no-more-than-two-nights-a-week-three-for-a-really-good-reason version of me.

I didn’t stop when my husband said it wasn’t okay to drink three glasses of wine or two martinis every night; I didn’t stop when he pointed out that some might judge my behavior that of an alcoholic.  I stopped after I’d deliberately considered how I depended on alcohol while I was under its influence.  Drunk, I asked myself if I was an alcoholic and answered, no, I wasn’t.  Not yet.  But I did drink twice as much as the politically correct acceptable norm (one drink per day and no more than twelve per week for a woman).   The honest, intoxicated me considered just how much I was relying on ending my day in a state of intoxication and concluded I might be in danger of becoming an alcoholic.

It was, as I expected, not only possible to quit, but relatively easy—easy enough that I could do it on my own, from one day to the next, without the support of a group or a therapist.  It didn’t hurt that, as I discovered after a week of abstinence, the antidepressants on which I depend are much more effective when I don’t drink, infusing me with unfamiliar optimism.  Too, while I’m no longer an anorexic, I retain that persona’s steely willpower and her discipline with respect to physical exercise, as well as her aesthetic preference for lean lines over curves.  A middle-aged woman can’t continue to drink as I was, and keep eating, too, without gradually gaining weight, and there was no way I was going to buy jeans in a larger size.

Perhaps anorexia continues to save me from alcoholism, as it did in college, when I always chose calorie-free intoxication via drugs over the wicked empty calories of alcohol.   Anorexia was something my former analyst called a “maladaptation,” conceived at a time in my life when I felt angry, frightened, and powerless, and not all of its aspects are negative.  It requires self-discipline and the ability to work tirelessly toward a goal; both attributes have served me well over the years.  It’s also, in my experience, as much an addiction as a disease, one I learned to manage in the same way a dry drunk controls his or her intake of alcohol.  My behavior around food has been forcibly normalized, my anorexic self fettered if not destroyed.  It took decades, but I learned how to dismantle a bad habit and salvage its useful elements.  To establish good eating habits—to eat—I needed what an alcoholic needs to abstain: willpower.

After all, I have a son and two daughters who I pray never know the misery of an eating disorder, and who I want to have healthy relationships to alcohol.  I can be childishly defiant when my husband makes paternalistic pronouncements, and I didn’t answer when he asked if I wanted to be a mother who modeled drinking every evening as normal behavior.  But I heard him, and I stopped.

I’m lucky, I know, because while I miss those glasses of wine and inexpertly mixed martinis, it was possible for me to walk away from them, just as I can smoke as many cigarettes as I like at a party without wanting one the next day, just as I was lucky when, in college, I experimented with drugs without getting hooked on them.  An accident of brain chemistry, perhaps, or of DNA, like the one that left me vulnerable to anorexia.  But a lucky accident.  Otherwise, given a few more years, I might be in a church basement, clutching a Styrofoam cup of coffee and introducing myself to my fellow AA members, a social contretemps that, for me, would be tolerable (and fodder for post-meeting-post-mortems) only with a martini in my hand.

Kathryn Harrison is the author of the novels THICKER THAN WATER, EXPOSURE, POISON, THE BINDING CHAIR,  THE SEAL WIFE, ENVY, and the forthcoming ENCHANTMENTS.  She has also written memoirs, including THE KISS, to be reissued in APr and THE MOTHER KNOT, a travel memoir, THE ROAD TO SANTIAGO, a biography, SAINT THERESE OF LISIEUX, and a collection of personal essays, SEEKING RAPTURE. Ms. Harrison is a frequent reviewer for THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW; her essays, which have been included in many anthologies, have appeared in THE NEW YORKER, HARPER’S MAGAZINE, VOGUE, O MAGAZINE, SALON, and other publications.

By Terese Svoboda

We tried an intervention on my mother when she reached middle age. The family had convened to help one of my brothers who had had a breakdown, and she felt ambushed. She puffed herself up and said she had no alcohol problem and that was that. Except for the next twenty years that she spent in bed, Fox News on so loud you couldn’t talk to her, scotch at her side, and an ever-present cigarillo. Took to her bed, literally.

My father, a farmer, managed the house, cooked for her and bought her booze. When he refused, she put a coat on over her nightgown and drove to the liquor store herself. When she came down with pellagra, a vitamin-deficiency caused by alcoholism, Dad reduced her intake to one drink after dinner. Since she weighed only eighty pounds, one drink still had the wanted effect. She fell once but didn’t break anything. The subsequent exam at the hospital revealed that her liver was in fine shape. She was annoyed.

Irish, she was proud of her ability to drink. She also felt she had wasted her life raising her nine children. In my childhood she and a friend, or just the housekeeper, would begin drinking at four. Dad often joined them when he arrived home from the farm at six. She died last year at the age of eighty-four, of no particular ailment other than old age.

I married a man whose stepfather, a major, beat him and his brothers whenever he was drunk. We drink the occasional gin and tonic at five, a glass of red wine with a meal, a beer on a hot afternoon.

Does alcoholism skip a generation? One of my sons likes a martini at lunch, the other drank a Four Loko as a freshman at college and “didn’t feel a thing.” But they are experimenters and of the age of experiment. That terrifies me.

Terese Svoboda is the author of fourteen books of poetry, prose, translation, memoir and over a hundred short stories. Her poetry has been published in the New Yorker, the Atlantic, the Paris Review, TLS and Poetry magazines. Bohemian Girl, her sixth novel, is scheduled to appear this year. She’s taught at many schools, including Columbia, The New School, and Williams, as well as in Kenya and Russia for the Summer Literary Seminars.

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I have a confession to make.

I’m addicted to “Intervention.” More than once, I have been known to make the bad joke about needing an “Intervention” intervention. I wrapped this year’s Christmas presents while watching three back-to-back episodes. I don’t know why. I’d like to think it’s because I care so deeply about the people on the screen, that it’s good for me to see how far the disease of addiction can go if it isn’t treated, that somehow witnessing these most dramatic and cinematic stages of alcoholism is some kind of workout for my compassion muscles. And it’s true—sometimes the show makes me cry; sometimes I ache for those suffering people. And maybe it’s even pure empathy in those moments; maybe it is selfless caring for another person.

But I’m not kidding myself. I’m not a saint. The truth is, the show is entertaining. And admitting that makes me feel dirty. Despite my very real compassion, I don’t think I’m alone when I say that the thought going through my head most of the time is, “Holy crap, these people are crazy.”  As evolved and sensitive as I like to think I am, I’m a voyeur like everyone else. There’s nothing more compelling than watching someone’s life fall apart, then making bets on if they can pull it back together again.  It’s the stuff great stories are made out of. The higher the stakes, the better the show.

It’s the whole train wreck thing, I suppose; the rubbernecker phenomenon. We love tragedy. We love wreckage. And maybe the show is extra compelling for people who are struggling with their own demons. For some, maybe it’s like watching people you know self-destruct, people you understand at a very deep level, people who resemble yourself. Even if you never got as bad as the girl huffing computer duster or the lady drinking mouthwash, you still know exactly how they’re feeling when they reach for that bottle—even after they’ve puked their guts out, even after they’ve OD’ed, even after going to jail, even after they’ve lost their partner and their kids and their job and their house, even though they promised for the millionth time that they’d stop.

That being said, I’ve never met anyone who said “Intervention” helped them get sober. I know many recovering alcoholics who have fond memories of curling up on the couch to watch the show while polishing off the night’s second bottle of wine. Never, in all those seasons of episodes, did anyone I know ever look at that stumbling drunk on the TV screen, then look at that drink in her hand, and make what seems like the obvious connection. If anything, the thought that ran through her mind as she watched the star’s life unravel was, “At least I’m not as bad as her.”

Is the show meant to save the alcoholic viewers suffering at home? Probably not. First and foremost, it’s a reality show. It wants advertising dollars and it wants ratings. It wants everyone—not just addicts and alcoholics—to share the same morbid fascination with downward spirals.

Most people probably have no idea how it feels to be a slave to substances, yet they still find “Intervention” compelling. There’s something that connects with everyone, or else the show wouldn’t still be on the air after so many years. Maybe most viewers don’t have the same disease as the sick people on TV, but part of them understands their obsession. Maybe we all know what it feels like to keep doing something even though we know it’s a bad idea; we know what it’s like to keep chasing something we know we’ll never get. We’ve all tasted that insanity, some of us more than others, and maybe there’s something cathartic about watching it inflated to epic proportions, something sublime about watching it pushed as far as it can go.

And maybe that’s what our obsession with train wrecks is really about; maybe the fascination is in the imagining that the mangled person could be us. We watch as their lives unravel, and we try to connect the dots—What if my parents got divorced like hers? What if I was molested like she was? What if I was bullied that badly as a kid? What if I had gotten into that accident like she did? Is it so impossible that it could be me on that TV, talking into the camera, spelling out my name for the viewers at home? Maybe when we slow down to look at the car crash on the side of the freeway, what we’re really looking for is if the victim has our face.

Amy Reed lives in Oakland, California. She is the author of the Young Adult novel Beautiful. Her next book, Clean, comes out in August 2011 and is about five teens’ experience in rehab for drug and alcohol addiction.