A Priest Walks Into a Bar
I READ A LOT about junkies. I read a lot about drunks and tweakers and stoners and cokeheads. It’s part of my job because I teach creative writing in jails, prisons, and drug treatment centers. The writers I work with often want to document their lives, and it’s my job to help shape their stories. My own work also explores addiction, so between my students’ work and my own, I’m basically addicted to reading about addiction. I can’t get enough.
On the first night of my most recent class, a writing workshop for women in recovery from substance abuse disorders, we took a few moments to discuss the clichés we hoped to avoid when telling our stories. I’m so sick of being called brave for telling my story, one woman said. The room erupted in familiar laughter. For real, someone else said. Why do we always have to be brave or broken in order to be seen as writers? I took the opportunity to ask what they might rather be, if not brave or broken. What about funny? someone offered. I want people to know that I’m funny.
THE ADDICTION MEMOIR is a long-standing literary tradition, a subgenre of memoir dating at least as far back as the 1820s, when Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater laid the foundation for literary representations of addiction. De Quincey was an upper-crust Brit born to a troubled but successful family, and his memoir established norms for the genre that we still see today. He describes the pleasurable sensations of opium in great detail, followed by the devastation of addiction in even more painstaking detail. It’s a Very Serious Book, told by a writer with all the social capital to be taken very seriously.
Fast forward to the 1920s and ’30s, with their boozy excess and moral judgment. There’s probably no book that celebrates and critiques the era more famously Of course, it’s not a memoir, but it captured the dichotomous cultural beliefs about intoxication: on one hand, the mark of high times, independence, and the American success story; on the other, a weakness of will and the demonstration of personal failure.
