Perhaps I was using alcohol not to spark my creativity but to blunt my sensitivity. I needed someone to hold my hand.
After I quit drinking, I didn’t write for six months. I was too fragile. I spent that time editing personal essays for Salon. I loved reading stories of other people’s lives, extraordinary things happening to ordinary people. One woman met her dream guy only to watch him die of an aneurysm that very day. One woman was trapped under the rubble after the earthquake in Haiti. She was saved, but the other woman in the house wasn’t. It was mind-blowing what could unfold in the course of a life.
The stories got me out of myself, but they also stoked my writer’s envy, which isn’t necessarily bad. Envy can be an arrow that points to the things you want. The more I read those stories, the more I thought: I could do that. That might feel good. I should join them.
The first thing I wrote in sobriety was an essay about quitting drinking. It felt like insurance for a person prone to relapse. I wanted to be on record. I wanted to double down on public humiliation to keep me from backsliding. The story wasn’t easy to write, but it wasn’t that hard, either. When I was done, it sounded like me. The me I remembered.
After the piece published, writers I admired responded with kind words and strangers in the comments responded with a warm stream of urine down my leg. But I was starting to realize this online anger wasn’t about me. It was a by-product of garden-variety powerlessness. Usually when I reached out to one of those people, they would say similar things. Oh, I didn’t think anyone was listening—which suggests the true source of their rage.
I kept writing. I began waking up at 6:30 and writing for the first four hours. No procrastinating. No rearranging the furniture. Just wake up and stare down. The work was never easy, but it became easier. Less like a geyser I kept waiting to blow and more like a faucet I could turn on and off.
We ascribe such mystery and magic to the creative process, but its essence is quite basic. Moving a pile of bricks from one side of the room to the other requires strength. Time, discipline, patience.
Writers write. That’s what we do.
“The idea that creative endeavor and mind-altering substances are entwined is one of the great pop-intellectual myths of our time,” Stephen King wrote in his memoir and instruction manual about creativity, On Writing. King is one of the many heroes I’ve had who turned out to be an addict. He was a serious beer binger, who admits he could barely remember writing his novel Cujo.
When I read the stories I wrote during my heaviest drinking years, I don’t think they’re bad. I am a little appalled, though, at how frequently alcohol intrudes. Interviews take place in bars. Entire narratives revolve around drinking. Jokey asides are made about hangovers and blackouts. A beer or a glass of wine sits in the corner of nearly every piece, like some kind of creepy product placement.
A friend of mine is a music teacher, who says pot helped him truly hear music for the first time. “But if you smoke too much pot,” he said, “you get that Jamaican high. Everything turns to reggae.” Whatever creative growth alcohol and drugs might offer at first, it doesn’t last. You stop learning and noticing.
“Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost,” Henry James wrote. I first heard the quote in an interview with Pete Hamill, author of the 1994 memoir A Drinking Life. As an old-school newspaper reporter growing up among the free-clinking bottles of postwar America, Hamill built his identity on booze. But ultimately he quit, because it was bad for business.
It was bad for mine, too. So much was lost on me when I was drinking. What we did last night, what was said. I stopped being an observer and became way too much of a participant. I still introduce myself to people, only to receive the brittle rejoinder of “We’ve met, like, four times.” Memory erodes as we age. Did I really need to be accelerating my decline?
I’m not saying great writers don’t drink, because they certainly do, and some part of me will probably always wish I stayed one of them.
I sometimes read stories by women who are using, and they speak in a seductive purr. They have the intoxicating rhythm of a person writing without inhibitions. Those pieces can trigger a toxic envy in me. Maybe I should do drugs, I think. Maybe I should drink again. How come she gets to do that—and I can’t?
Mine are childish urges, the gimme-gimme for another kid’s toys. The real problem is that I still fear my own talent is deficient. This isn’t merely a problem for writers who drink; it’s a problem for drinkers and writers, period. We are cursed by a gnawing fear that whatever we are—it’s not good enough.