The Daily Rumpus
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From Stephen Elliott
In an interview with addiction website The Fix, reprinted at Salon, memoirist and poet Mary Karr discusses getting clean, flouting rules, and how sobriety shaped her relationship with David Foster Wallace.
...moreYou’re present when you’re not drinking a fifth of Jack Daniel’s every day.
Smoking again sounds like a good idea. I quit one November – twelve dry months following five years of intense puffing. The break was insightful, curative even, which was why I thought it might be time to resume the habit.
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Al-Anon sucked. If I hadn’t been too broke for therapy, I’d never have taken a friend’s advice to attend those awful meetings. They were worse than the AA meetings I’d been to over the years in support of my string of alcoholic boyfriends—three, if you’re keeping count.
...more“But somewhere in that transition from a social site meant to deepen interpersonal relationships to a self promotional, commercial tool, Facebook lost its appeal.
“The various facets of my life merged into a web of connectivity where I could no longer clearly create distinct relationships with friends, foes, and fast food — either because I can’t figure out how or because Facebook is preventing me outright.
...moreA couple weeks back, I was in a bad way. I’d recently joined Twitter, was always on Facebook, and checked my email (and I don’t exaggerate) about 75 times a day. I couldn’t stand it, but I also couldn’t stop. I spent more than half my waking hours on a screen.
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The protagonist of this novel about addiction, therapy, and recovery, confronts many of the same issues as its author.Kaye Gibbons, author of the 1987 debut best-seller Ellen Foster and several subsequent novels, is the subject of an Associated Press profile published in several newspapers and Sunday book sections over the weekend. The article traces her downfall from “vivacious” best-selling author to her 2008 arrest for forging hydrocodone prescriptions to her disappearance into mental illness.
...moreWhen I started reading as a child, it was an immoderate, late-night indulgence of sweaty palmed, pupil-dilating gluttony. Books were a drug, and civilized society was the pusher. And I got really really high.
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