Voices on Addiction: Duet
I trust, nowadays. I have to keep at it
...more
Voices on Addiction
Voices on Addiction: Flight Patterns
There was no map, no compass. Just me, the needle, and heroin.
...more
Voices on Addiction: A Conversation with Kristi Coulter
This world doesn’t have to like me. But it does have to reckon with me, with my humanity.
...more
Voices on Addiction: The Five Cs
The truth is different. The truth is always different.
...more
Voices on Addiction: Four Poems by Nick Flynn
Behind DOOR NUMBER ONE / is a hammer, to break the wings off angels.
...more
Voices on Addiction: A Review of The Recovering
As recovering addicts, we must love ourselves back to the source, love our shameful bits and decimations and not just our reconciliations and resurrections.
...more
Voices on Addiction: Spontaneous Combustion
I remember hunger the way other children remember love.
...more
Voices on Addiction: A Conversation with Andrea Jarrell
I didn’t want to be edited in that way. I needed to tell my story.
...more
Voices on Addiction: Need and Smoke
Need had carved out specific contours in my personality, and then it returned like a curse to fit in those spaces.
...more
Voices on Addiction: What We Forget, What We Remember
I don’t remember when [my brother] ran away; I just remember him being gone more often than not.
...more
Voices on Addiction: Dead Eyes and Bob Barker Crocs
Broken people are drawn to other broken people. Comparing scars. Laying belly to belly. Two similar pieces of different puzzles.
...more
Voices on Addiction: The Taste Inside My Mouth
It’s never the words I remember. It’s their taste: bitter, dense, like biting into a radish. It’s how my body feels: sore.
...more
Voices on Addiction: Self-Portrait
Mother should have told me that booze made a kind of heaven in my body, I thought the first time I felt it.
...more
Voices on Addiction: Travels with My Daughter
I imagine the box of obsidian flakes and chunks at home—gathered from explorations in the desert. Their edges cut through skin, draw blood.
...more
Voices on Addiction: Zombie Nation
Sometimes life is so big and so loud and being a human being in the world is so much I feel overwhelmed and need a cocoon.
...more
Voices on Addiction: Keys
He wasn’t an alcoholic! He was just British. I was starting to think that this bullet was long past being dodged.
...more
Voices on Addiction: The Honeybee
She never stopped, a bee buzzing from flower to flower to flower, collecting all the sweetness she could.
...more
Voices on Addiction: Shame Is a Treble Hook
Shame is a treble hook that tells me that 1) I not only fail but am a failure, that 2) I not only damage people but I am damaged, and that 3) I not only lie but I am a lie.
...more
Voices on Addiction: Twenty-Five
I know that there are those who would argue that alcoholism is a singularly extreme condition, and I get that, but I’ve always felt clear that there’s a lot of overlap between alcoholism and plain old ordinary humanity.
...more
Voices on Addiction: Dynamite
The world is a merry-go-round, a sawed-off shotgun, a ticker tape. There’s no struggle now. There’s only darkness, breathlessness, exit—
...more
Voices on Addiction: A Bad Night
Trying to protect him from himself is like trying to protect atmosphere from weather.
...more
Voices on Addiction: The Only Thing That Has to Change Is Everything
The word rehab is short for rehabilitate, which means to restore to a former capacity. Like houses, I remember thinking. Demo the kitchen. Tear down the walls.
...more
Voices on Addiction: 365 Days without You
The men in my family don’t live long, you foretold. Damn you. Drunks and rock stars don’t grow up.
...more
Voices on Addiction: Surrender
Somewhere along the way, the salty fresh sea breezes of the beach are replaced by the drier, more metallic air of my mother’s neighborhood. It might as well be a different continent.
...more
Voices on Addiction: The Ghost Inside
But was I an alcoholic? The idea had never crossed my mind. The more I reflected on it, the less I understood.
...more
Voices on Addiction: Mother’s Day
I will always feel a little broken. Intellectually, I know her disease is “not my fault.” But I’m her mother. I will always partially feel the blame.
...more
Voices on Addiction: Too Much Hope
I wanted more time with him, but I didn’t want to hope. Too much hope will mess you up.
...more
Voices on Addiction: Baby’s Home
I got to thinking about home. What the fuck is home anyway?
...more