Quiterature Literature

This flask in the shape of a book is kind of the opposite of quit lit.

One of the saddest things about addiction is how lonely it makes you, and one of the things that is constantly hammered home to people trying to find their way out of it is the importance of making connections with other human beings, and of seeking help.

But another thing about stopping drinking is how much you learn about yourself. And how people who had considered themselves extraverted party persons discover that in fact they are quiet, and shy, and once they have sloughed off their old carapace or skin, their old drunk persona, they are not actually that great socially. And that that is part of what them drinking in the first place, and that that is now something they have to face up to and even embrace. (What? No, I don't know if it rhymes with cowed or bluffed.)

Keener students among you will have detected a slight autobiographical flavour to the foregoing. I am a shy person with a great covering of articulacy and a need for approval. I'm not proud of this but I'm not ashamed of it either. It does mean, however, that even in my darkest hour, the idea of going to a meeting was something I was very resistent to. I know what I am like in groups of strangers - I either show off or clam up, and while I do understand the importance of approaching meetings humbly, and while I am not now entirely against the idea, in the early days I knew it wasn't for me.

I got an app, Daybreak, which is produced by the Australian organisation Hello Sunday Morning

and I found that very helpful. The other thing I did was start reading quit lit.

Quit lit is short for 'quiterature literature' and I have found some of it incredibly useful in my various efforts at sobriety. A lot of these books have the same sort of shape (rectangular, cuboid) and the stories they tell also follow a familiar patters: an account of how the author's drinking became a problem, a rock bottom or several different rocks bottoms, and a more or less successful effort or efforts to get sober.

The money parts of these books are the horror stories: the lies told, the damage done, the disgrace, shame, and humiliation; the sheer volume of booze consumed over days, months, and years. But when you read these accounts as an acknowledged drunk, the pleasure of reading them is not mere prurience. It's a painful sense of fellowship, a gratitude that the drunk you are reading about is not you at that one moment, a powerful sense of relief at being (at that moment) free.

But the other parts can be useful too. Here are a few drun memoirs or self-help guides or literary accounts of boozing that I have found helpful.

The Unexpected Joy of Being Sober by Catherine Gray. This was the first bit of quit lit and it helped me enormously. The author is a professional writer so it's easy and fun to read. She manages to be entertaining about real and serious distress, which is my favourite thing in quit lit. Thebiggest revelation is hinted at in the title: that stopping drinking is not a grim sacrifice, but something that makes your life immeasurably better. A few months after reading this I was throwing some quite impressive dance floor shapes at my cousin's wedding, completey sober.

Catherine Gray is a clever, funny, successful female journalist, and she is not the only one. Sarah Hepola's Blackout is painful and funny and very nutritious, and Erica C. Barnett's Quitter is in the same vein: all these women are unflinching in examining their drinking, but they make me the reader flinch quite a lot. Wince, even. Barnett is particularly focused on the dangers and near-inevitability of relapsing, which is of immediate interest to me.

Drunk Mom by Jowita Bydlowska is great: it has the literary ambition of a European novel; Drinking A Love Story by Caroline Knapp has a similar vibe but more American. Augusten Burroughs is a professional memoirist and his Dry is great. Most of these writers are very honest about how badly they have behaved, how much work they need to do to redeem themselves, how humbled they have been by the consequences of their addiction, and all of this is very useful to the smart-arsed drunk with literary pretensions who also wants to be a good person. Augesten Burroughs is different in that he seems genuinley not to give a fuck about whether he is nice or seems nice.

The Lost Weekend by Charles Jackson is a classic and very painful to read. It's like having your soul scoured with wire wool. It'll take a layer of skin off you.

The Lost Weekend in gif form, to save you the trouble of reading it.

What do you know about Jack London? Have you even read White Fang? I haven't but his alcoholic memoir John Barleycorn is an amazing story.

There are other drunk memoirs which I actively disliked but I won't name them. Two or three were writtten by minor celebrities and tended to go for the laffs over the pain, missing both. The lulz you get from a drunk memoir, if you are a drunk, is a very particular kind of pleasure, like hot curry, or sour candy (or 90% poteen, some might argue...) One in particular annoyed me. It was about a well-to-do housewife who gave up drink. Her rock bottom was being tempted to open a second bottle of wine and concealing this from her husband. After that she didn't drink again and her life is going great. I know it is not in the generous spirit that we in confraternity of the sober like to embrace - and Lord knows I wish I had had the sense to stop a lot earlier - but I got the impression that this book was not much more of a struggle to write than it was to read. Not enough disastrous sex or vomit: two stars.

William Porter's book Alcohol Explained, and its companion, the imaginatively titled Alcohol Expained 2, are also really useful, if not exactly literature. William Porter does not go into much detail about his own drinking life, but has one very convincing thing to say: a compelling simplified account of the processes by which we become alcoholics. He is very sane and good-humoured and reading him makes it easier to forgive yourself.

The value of quit lit for me is two-fold. The most basic function is that it keeps me thinking about sobriety, and valuing it, in a way that also gives aesthetic pleasure. The other is in connecting myself to the literate drunks that have been through an experience comparable to mine, and have attained pride through humiliation and sanity through its opposite, and a connection to people from the bottom of the loneliest hole you can crawl into.