My review of Unwasted: My Lush Sobriety by Sacha Z. Scoblic

One of my favorite books I read in 2011 was Unwasted: My Lush Sobriety! Also one of the first I purchased for my Nook. I read it in pieces, and finally finished it last night. I cried. In a good/moving way.



My review:

It would be almost impossible to tell her story of the first year without alcohol without sharing what alcohol meant in her life, and Scoblic manages to weave the two together beautifully in this moving, sometimes funny, sometimes sobering (pun intended) memoir. She writes about how she relied on alcohol in multiple ways, and that when she took that crutch away, she was left with a lot of assumptions, about 12-step programs, about faith, about relapsing, that she had to reexamine. One of the most crucial parts, one that I related to, was the idea that faith and prayer are not just for believers. She writes about praying even though she doesn’t actual believe, or isn’t sure that she does, and that is a concept that was utterly new for me. From Unwasted: “I have found moments of prayer, as I snuggle into my white bed in my deep blue bedroom—like a woman floating on her own moon—when I get grateful about the man next to me, my little pooch, my groovy neighborhood, and our good health and lives, in which I can rediscover a sense of adventure about life and I can touch a small and wonder-filled current inside of me.” This concept permeates the book.

She includes extended fantasies about alternate worlds, from aliens to celebrities, where she might be “required” to drink, and these relapse fantasies, while fantastical, lend an important reality to the book. Scoblic did not simply hop, skip and jump into sobriety. She does not make it sound simple or easy, and doesn’t gloss over the challenges of being at a heavy-drinking company retreat or at a party where her old ways can no longer guide her. Toward the end of the book, Scoblic writes, “Until sobriety, the idea that I was someone worthwhile and unique a priori had not occurred to me. And, as I looked toward the blank sober slate before me in the mirror, a thousand discarded personas on the floor, I began to sense that this one last transformation—that is, become myself, which is what everyone tells you to be from the start—was going to be an awful lot of fun. I was going to reinvent myself as me.” By the actual end, as she writes about training for a marathon, a lifelong goal, I will admit that I cried. Scoblic does not pretend to have all the answers, but her vision of community, of strength and support, for running and sobriety, is an antidote to the loneliness she explores in the rest of the book, the loneliness and fear that alcohol momentarily removed from her. Her journey in exploring those dark spaces and discovering how to fill the gaps left by alcohol is touching, and should help give insight into alcoholism from a very poignant, personal perspective.

My essay "Recovery Envy" up at The Fix

I wrote my first essay for The Fix, called "Recovery Envy," which may sound facetious in a soundbite but if you read the essay, I hope it’s clear that I don’t mean it facetiously at all. I have the utmost respect for those in recovery, and anyone striving to improve their lives, by whatever means. If you like it, I’d really, really appreciate it if you passed it on in some way. And if you’ve never been to The Fix, it’s a website “about alcoholism, addiction, recovery and the drug war.” Thank you.

The beginning:

I'm not an addict, and I'm not an alcoholic. But as offensive as this may sound, I sometimes I wish I were, if only so I could have a language and a community to help me deal with what often seem like out of control urges—a structure surrounding me to help me cope with, well, life. But there are no 12-step meetings for people who simply have trouble getting up every day, who feel hollow and weak and unworthy, but who don't gloss over those feelings with a single, predictable vice. Over the course of my life, I've certainly used alcohol, sex, shopping and food to help quell those feelings, and they've each worked, in limited doses, but eventually their effects wore off.

The thing is, though, my rock bottom moments don't revolve around alcohol, though I've consumed my share, or drugs (I've attempted to smoke pot twice, and basically failed each time); sometimes it's food, sometimes it's sex, sometimes it's shopping, but I fundamentally believe that the core part of me that hates myself in those moments when I'm eating an entire box of cereal, screwing someone I'm not that into, or buying a pair of shoes I don't need and can't afford, is the same impulse that drove, say, my father or grandfather to drink (both are recovering alcoholics).

Keep reading

How to insert sex-negativity into your New York Times blog post about sobriety

I am working on a response to this for the Huffington Post, but wanted to share the way sex-negativity, and a view of sex that acts like we all think the same, can so easily weave its way into what was an otherwise interesting piece. Oh, and this? Is why we need more women and men writing about sex!

"Acts of Faith," Jim Atkinson, New York Times Proof blog

But our condition continues to be almost pointedly misunderstood by many in what I call the “social drinking majority.” I have pondered the reasons for this pretty much every day for the 16 years that I have been sober, and am still mystified by it. As a rule, Americans tend to be very indulgent of overindulgence. We give a lot of lip service to “eating right,” but that hasn’t stopped two thirds of us from becoming overweight. We still make a lot of noise about being a sexually responsible and moral people, but we continue to have a 50 percent divorce rate and support a multi-billion dollar pornography industry.

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.