alcoholism
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Addiction, Alcohol, and Authors
You didn’t ask directly about gender, but I’ll answer anyway: I stuck with men for a more personal reason, which is that my experience as a child was with a female alcoholic and the subject was just too painful for…
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Albums of Our Lives: The Counting Crows’ August and Everything After
A few days before we left a life in New York, my then-husband drove home drunk from a bar in the Bronx
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The Rumpus Interview with Olivia Laing
Writer, journalist, and critic Olivia Laing discusses her newest book, The Trip to Echo Spring: On Writers and Drinking, and the challenges of looking into the mind of an alcoholic versus the mind of a writer.
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Life As We Know It
In her recent piece on Salon, “Am I an alcoholic?” writer Kathleen Volk Miller describes the way her mother and her sister lost themselves in drink, contrasting this with her own decision to be in control of her booze, not the…
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Under the Table
The headaches, my difficulty focusing, my specimen-daze, that floating island, my spastic, nervous heart—which are side effects from drinking, and which were inevitable?
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Writing and Drinking and Writing about Drinking
Alcohol and authors. It’s a subject so old and rich and fraught you could write a book on it—which is exactly what Olivia Laing did. That book is called The Trip to Echo Spring: Why Writers Drink, and Blake Morrison’s review…
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Twenty-Seven
For two days, I fight the story welling up in me, denying the itch of the burn, the angry redness biting at my skin. And then I wake up the third day and say to myself, “My mom was raped…
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“best of all, I remember it all”
At The Bold Italic, Bucky Sinister writes about living in San Francisco after getting sober, how he learned to do things without drinking, and his newfound ability to follow through on creative impulses. “Most importantly for me, I began creating again. In…
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The Sweet Smell of Excess
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…
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The Unveiled Animal
Joshua Mohr’s second novel returns to the seedy side of San Francisco, where the addicted and the lost search for redemption.
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But Not for Long
Michelle Wildgen’s second novel traces the residents of a sustainable-food co-op through crises, adjustments, and reinventions.
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A Sober Novelist? Be Serious.
Tom Shone has been studying writers who have quit drinking. He’s doing it, of course, for a novel he’s writing. How meta. Still, he gives us some interesting anecdotes.