Your book is so vivid and confronting. Given so much of the book happened in times of addiction and stress, how did you find accessing those memories? Did it feel like researching your past self?
I was grateful to my past self for having kept good notes—I journaled and kept all my emails. They brought back old feelings—some funny and entertaining, some gut-wrenching, mortifying, and sad. I didn’t expect to feel so moved by the record of the person that I was in my 20s and 30s. It was a nice reminder of how far I’ve come, as an adult who had a lot of growing up to do in those years.
You describe yourself in the book as an “addict-in-training.” Do you feel a tenderness for yourself?
I had a lot of self-doubt, and a huge feeling that I would never reach my potential, or whether my “potential” was even real. I had wanted to write something successful, meaningful, and substantial, and I was my own worst enemy by not giving myself time, space, and energy. I would be drunk, high, and socializing in the restaurant-industry heyday. I wanted something more, but I couldn’t get out of my own way. I was so hard on myself. I look at the naiveté of jumping into relationships or even one-night stands or flirtations with people who didn’t have my best interests in mind and were just probably young and dumb, and figuring it out like me. I didn’t understand why the same things kept happening when I kept making the same bad decisions. I feel more protective of that version of myself now.
It still feels fresh, too, to have more narratives by women about addiction.
Leslie Jamison writes so clearly and beautifully about addiction. I’m happy to join the company. As a woman, I think people reserve an extra level of judgment: You’re a mother. You have a primary responsibility and choose to behave this way. I mean, it was not great for my son. His wellbeing was top of mind when I decided that I had to make a change in my life.
Was honesty ever difficult when getting your story on the page?
For sure. I was very dishonest at points in my life—in my marriage and as a pretty good casual liar just to cover my tracks day to day. Honesty is one of the cornerstones of the 12-step approach to getting and staying sober. And it’s a good guideline for writing. It’s a good guideline for interacting with people in the world, making decisions about how to behave. But, yeah, I think my writing when I was younger, and when I was using, might not have been openly dishonest, but it was obscuring things by trying to be funny or entertaining at the expense of being real.
