“I don’t fucking know,” the cranky editor-in-chief said when I stopped him in the hallway. “The blond one, with the nice smile.”
About nine months after coming to the paper, I got my first big assignment. I went undercover to high school prom. The mass shooting at Columbine had taken place a few months prior, leading to a glut of paranoid articles about “teens today,” and my story was the kind of goofy, first-person escapade almost guaranteed to wind up on the cover.
There was one problem. I was so freaked out by the pressure I couldn’t write a word. I spent hours staring at a blinking cursor, typing words only to erase them again. The night before the piece was due, desperate for any fix, I opened a bottle of wine. Fuck it. Maybe this will help.
Before then, I never drank while I was writing. I might have downed a few beers while I waited on page edits. But writing and drinking were two fundamentally opposing activities—like eating and swimming. Writing required hush and sharpness of vision. Drinking was roar and blur.
The wine turned down the volume on my own self-doubt, which is what a blocked writer is battling: the bullying voices in her head telling her each thought is unoriginal, each word too ordinary. Drug users talk about accessing a higher consciousness, a doorway to another dimension—but I just needed a giant fishhook to drag my inner critic out of the room.
That night, I drank myself into the writing zone. Words tumbled from my fingers like they’d been waiting to get shaken loose. I couldn’t believe how well it worked. After the story came out, staff members stopped me in the hall to quote their favorite lines.
So, of course, this became a common practice. A couple glasses to prime the pump. Sometimes, in the privacy of my funky little garage apartment, I would drink myself blind. I purposefully did this—drank myself to the place where I was clattering all over the keyboard with my eyes drooped to half-moons, free as Ray Charles over his piano, and you’d think this would result in reams of nonsense, and sometimes it did. Other times, I’d find myself reading over the words later and thinking: Wow, this is pretty good. I didn’t even know I thought that. Those pages were full of typos and run-ons, but they had the hypnotic clickety-clak of a train barreling across the high plains. They had the last-call honesty of someone pulling the listener close. We only have a few more minutes. Let me tell you everything.
People sometimes ask me how someone can drink so much and still keep her job. But drinkers find the right job.
After drawing my name for Secret Santa, the editor-in-chief gave me a hat with beer holders on either side. “So you can drink more at work,” he said.
ON MY TWENTY-FIFTH birthday, I drove out to visit Anna. She had moved to San Francisco, where she wrote me long letters from a café near Golden Gate Park, and her voice had the lightness of a girl in constant hop-skip.
But I don’t think I’ve ever felt as bitter and depressed about a birthday as I did at 25. This may sound strange, given how young that is, and given how great my job was, but 25-year-olds are experts at identifying what the world has not given them, and that birthday was like a monument to everything I hadn’t achieved. No boyfriend. No book deal. Only the flimsiest kind of fame. “I saw your name in the paper,” people said to me. Why did they think this was a compliment? I saw your name. Oh, thanks. Did you bother to read the next 2,000 words?
My friends had escaped to grown-up jobs in coastal cities, and I chided myself for lacking the gumption to follow. Anna was out in California seeking social justice through a series of impressive nonprofit law gigs. My old roommate Tara was a reporter in Washington, DC. My friend Lisa, hired at the Chronicle alongside me, had ventured to Manhattan and gotten a gig at the New York Times.
“You should move out here,” she would tell me, on our phone dates, and I told her I couldn’t afford it. The more accurate reason: I was scared.