7. Drinking about Writing.

Jean Rhys in 1975 by Bill Brandt

I took my first drink in 8th grade, behind Vicky Sharp’s house after the high school football game. We left the game early and snuck to her house by the shortcut through the woods behind the school; I waited on the trampoline while she raided her dad’s liquor cabinet. She returned to the backyard with a bottle of gin in one hand and a bottle of “tonic” (club soda) in the other. We didn’t know what gin and tonics were, so we took turns taking disgusted sips from the gin followed by confused sips from the soda until we fell on our backs in the October night, giggling, the Milky Way wheeling in rings above our heads.

Growing up, everyone I knew drank. My Granddaddy’s Pabst Blue Ribbon can was as ubiquitous as his pink zinnias, his blue coveralls, his pickup truck. My Papa, at the end of his life, sat in front of the television and smoked cigars and drank sweet tea with bourbon and ate frosted flakes with half and half, all day long. My aunt sat next to him with a bottle of Kahlúa beside her ashtray and her pack of Virginia Slims. My father ordered a “CC and 7” at every dinner out; my mother a chardonnay. At Christmas parties, we served hot mulled cider with whiskey, hot buttered rum, brandy milk punch, Irish coffee. Coolers of beer while watching the game after Thanksgiving dinner. Jack Daniels while camping. Mimosas at brunch. Drinking was what successful adults did, and being good at drinking was a way of being good at life: sloshed but not sloppy, slaying the crowd, in your cups, free and easy, feeling no pain. Being good at drinking was a carefully cultivated shortcut to charm, joviality, generosity, conviviality.

I was good at drinking.

After my son was born, I started a business, and like my father before me and his father before him, I sat in my business after hours, into the night, paying bills and processing payroll and prepping orders, drinking from a bottle of Maker’s Mark (or it’s cheaper twin Rebel Yell), packs of cigarettes and an ashtray on the desk. The whiskey warmed me from the inside, quieted my thoughts and quickened my pulse and made the world seem magical. This was my reward, this was my rest. This was satisfaction. May as well hit the bar on the way home. Work hard, play hard. Back at it in the morning.

When I got the opportunity to write my book, I tucked writing into the existing schedule: work hard, play hard, back at it in the morning. By this time, I was separated from Duncan and had Thursday through Sunday do to exactly as I pleased, which mostly involved working and drinking, preferably both at the same time. I worked, I wrote, I traveled, I drank. By all accounts I was a successful adult: my business was a success, my book was a success, I even succeeded in getting my family back together. But breaking up with Duncan shattered me, it shattered my heart. When we got back together I was a different person, and the center of who I had been could not hold. I tried. I tried to be convivial, generous, charming. I tried to write, and work, and travel, and drink, but instead I just kept wrecking my car.

Because I was a Successful Adult and a Cool Boss, every summer I closed the shop for a week and took my staff to my parents’ river cabin in the north Georgia mountains to party and rest. One night, the summer after Matt died¹, after everybody had left, I slept alone, high in the loft above the river and the hemlocks while a tropical storm lashed at the vaulted windows. I dreamt all night of being in a barren, post-apocalyptic cityscape, an acupuncture needle the size of a nail driven deep into my sternum. I knew that I had to pull out that plug to heal, and I knew that when I did, my heart would bleed lavishly. I woke up from that dream and I had to change my life, but I didn’t know how.

I also needed to write, but writing and drinking were inexorably intertwined, just like working and drinking. When I wrote, when I drank, I became disembodied, elsewhere, transcended: I could see the tilted twilight world beneath the mundane world, a secret window into the truth of things. I needed to change my life but I couldn’t stop drinking because that would mean I would have to quit writing, quit tapping into that peculiar beautiful slant on life. Even still, even as the window between inspiration and “too-drunk-to write” became more and more narrow, I just kept trying harder to make it all work, years of pulling whatever was lacking from my own skin, flesh, teeth, bones.

I first learned about Jean Rhys by reading an unfavorable review of a novel about her life by Elizabeth Lowry in Harper’s Magazine. I was less concerned about the fictionalized writer in the novel in question and more fascinated by the descriptions of Jean Rhys herself:

While writing… she routinely downed two bottles of wine a day. She relished the “debauch” of whiskey. She didn’t minimize her addiction: when she wrote about her binges, it was always with gluttonous frankness. Like Marya, she needed “a glass of wine on an empty stomach” in order to make life “significant, coherent and understandable”; on the rare occasions when she managed to dry out, she looked forward to “the kick I’ll get out of my first drink” once she’d relapsed, as she knew she would.

This fascinated and troubled me because I knew exactly what she meant. Drinking, while having ever more disastrous consequences, made my life sparkle and shine. I was fascinated and troubled and so I read her most famous work, Wide Sargasso Sea, which she published when she was 76 years old, the fact of which heartened me that it was never too late and I would never be too fucked up to write. The book’s quiet vengeance and dissolute decadence spoke to me, to the life underneath of me, and I read it over and over again. In an interview in the Paris Review in 1979, the year she died, I felt that she was laying out two paths before me:

When I was excited about life, I didn’t want to write at all. I’ve never written when I was happy. I didn’t want to. But I’ve never had a long period of being happy. Do you think anyone has? I think you can be peaceful for a long time. When I think about it, if I had to choose, I’d rather be happy than write.

My heart broke for her, and for her child: “it was partly in order to have the freedom to write [her books] that she gave up custody of her daughter, a constant source of anguish to Rhys,” writes Lowry. I was troubled also because I was afraid that if I healed, I wouldn’t have anything to offer the world. If I quit drinking, I wouldn’t be fun. I wouldn’t be generous. I wouldn’t be charming, jovial, a successful adult. At least if you were tragic and broken, you could offer the world something of you to consume.

But there was another path, another possibility: that in sobriety one could be creative, clear, a ringing bell. As the story goes, at the age of 40 the writer Raymond Carver was given 6 months to live if he continued drinking. Instead he quit, and lived 11 more years, producing some of his most celebrated work up until dying of cancer. Of his sobriety, he said, "I'm prouder of that, that I've quit drinking, than I am of anything in my life."

Writing is a practice, like sobriety is a practice, like love is a practice, like meditation is a practice. I began to want to write from inside my body, from inside my life, not to escape from it. I honor Jean Rhys, who didn’t have a wife like Raymond Carver did, like my my father and grandfather did, to help right the ship, tend the sails and ropes and tethers, make life a little more tenable. The road to redemption is that much more narrow for a woman. As Jane Bowles- herself a gifted writer who suffered and eventually died at age 56 from her own alcohol use disorder- said, "up until the 1970s women were discounted and despised” (Jane Bowles died in 1973, so mercifully no one had to break the news to her that misogyny was alive and well). I honor everyone who survived addiction, that doting wife of trauma, even and especially the ones who, eventually, didn’t.

I sold my business, in part, to focus on writing, and I worked at that in earnest for a good while. I wrote while working freelance, spreadsheets tracking the dozens of agents and publishers I pitched with my memoir idea, spreadsheets tracking the storyline, the word count. After two years, I had half the book written but no book deal, and I needed to earn more money. I quit. I had failed as a writer (does anything define the traditional archetypal experience of being a writer more than failure?).

Blessedly, the world made my choice for me. Having failed at writing, I set about trying to figure out how to be happy instead, how to tolerate the boredom and the beauty of everyday life, and in the same way that failing at my marriage set me free in my marriage, failing at writing set me free to write. When I quit drinking, I did quit writing, for a while. But then it started bubbling up inside of me again, spilling out. Like Annie Dillard says, “these things fill from behind, from beneath, like well water.” Maybe the well will run dry tomorrow. But just for today, I’m going to pour it out.

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Home + The World is an occasional newsletter from Jodi Rhoden featuring personal essay, recipes, links and recommendations exploring the ways we become exiled: through trauma, addiction, oppression, grief, loss, and family estrangement; and the ways we create belonging: through food and cooking, through community care and recovery and harm reduction, through therapy and witchcraft and making art and telling stories and taking pictures and houseplants and unconditional love and nervous system co-regulation and cake. I’ve included a paid subscription option, but for now, there will be no paywalled content. The paid subscription option is a tip jar. Thank you for being here and thank you for being you. ⚔️❤️

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A Poem

LATE FRAGMENT

by Raymond Carver

And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.

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The Lovers

While The Lovers card, of course, represents actual romantic love and partnership, I think it most represents the inner marriage, and the commitments we make to ourselves. If you are interested in a tiny ritual this Pisces New Moon, make a wish, an intention, a promise out of commitment to yourself, however small. Write it down and forget about it until the Full moon in Pisces, August 30th. Then see how this promise has bloomed.

My friends, this week I hope that you call yourself beloved, that you feel yourself beloved on the earth.

⚔️❤️ Jodi

PS: we’re OK after the Super Bowl, thanks for asking! Those of us in Philadelphia who are not pretending nothing happened are just grateful we made it so far. But that was really stressful so I don’t think I’ll start to get into sports after all.

PPS: No newsletter next week as I will be attending a writing retreat through a center run by Dominican nuns! I’ll explain later. Have a great couple of weeks!

1. (not haircut Matt)