BDSM and sobriety article at The Fix

I wrote about BDSM and recovery for The Fix in "Kinky, Sober and Free: BDSM and Recovery." Thank you to everyone who spoke to me for the piece, and Google for coming through with some fascinating resources (linked in the piece). If you like the piece, I'd love it if you'd pass it on. I have a few more pieces in the works for The Fix, including one on the DSM and sex/addiction, and love writing for them.

I interviewed Benoit Denizet-Lewis about America Anonymous

I keep forgetting to post this. So, for one, I loved America Anonymous: Eight Addicts in Search of a Life - click there to go to Amazon and read my review. It has all these insights into various types of addiction, from alcohol to crack to sex to food to shoplifting, and he just has a great journalistic eye and gets deep into his subjects' lives in a way that made this a real pageturner and also surveyed much of modern teaching on addiction.

Also, I interviewed Benoit Denizet-Lewis for the Huffington Post.

And he wrote about his sex addiction (which is really only touched on in the book) in the Modern Love column in The New York Times.

Do check out his America Anonymous blog.

I've heard of all sorts of ideas I've never considered before, like talk of a Million Addict March and, last night at his book party, sober high schools. The party was held at a sober living facility in Wiliamsburg, ironically less than a block from the bar formerly known as Kokee's, which, if you missed it, back in the day you could get coke there (I've never done coke, but I used to go there with friends). Now it's some other bar.

And Kristen Johnston was there, and basically said that her mom was horrified that she came out as sober in People magazine. Someone asked if her parents knew, and she said, of course, but her mom didn't want other people to know. So that's part of the point of America Anonymous too, I think, to challenge the idea that anonymity is best in terms of a political movement around funding for treatment.

"I was in a long distance relationship with myself" - Wendy Merrill

On Sunday, I got to meet the wonderful Wendy Merrill, author of Falling Into Manholes: The Memoir of a Bad/Good Girl. I'll have more here from her soon, cause she has lots of fascinating things to say, but for now, here's a little snippet of her reading, which I grabbed a quote from for my subject line. And if you judge a book by its blurbs (which, yes, I tend to do - I stumbled across a $5 copy of her book at Artists and Fleas, where we met up yesterday, and those helped me know I need to read it) you could do a lot worse than the likes of Anne Lamott, Hollis Gillespie, and Kim Addonizio, among others.



You can read a sample chapter from her book too:

Brad was like an abbreviated version of my love affair with drinking. At first it was fun, then it was fun with problems, and finally just problems. I stopped drinking years ago, but I still fall into the occasional manhole. At least I usually don’t set up house and furnish them anymore. I was never a serial dater, but I was a serial mater, so after hooking up with the wrong person, I would either marry them or spend years trying to make it work. Now I can usually fall into and climb out of a manhole in about six weeks, tops, Once in a while, I can even walk around one. I call this expiration dating—relationships that last about as long as a carton of refrigerated soymilk.

My married-with-children, mental-health-professional sister Robin describes my dating history as “Wendy’s catch-and-release program,” a term used in sport fishing where the sole objective is to catch the fish, and then return it to the water, relatively unharmed. I used to think this was funny, until I realized that I was guilty of the very thing that I accuse men of doing. The possibility of a man is more interesting to me than the man himself. If I settle on someone, then the possibility is lost. When I drank, I chose men that drank more than I did so that they could be identified as the ones in need of help and I didn’t have to look at my own behavior. This “thinking” has clearly followed me into sobriety. So who’s really on the hook here? What is it that I am really fishing for?