Quitter: A Memoir of Drinking, Relapse, and Recovery - Softcover

Barnett, Erica C.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0525522344 ISBN 13: 9780525522348

Verlag: Penguin Publishing Group, 2021

Inhaltsangabe

"Barnett's prose style is brassy and cleareyed, with echoes of Anne Lamott." --Beth Macy, The New York Times Book Review

"Emotionally devastating and self-aware, this cautionary tale about substance abuse is a worthy heir to Cat Marnell's How to Murder Your Life." --Publishers Weekly (starred review)

A startlingly frank memoir of one woman's struggles with alcoholism and recovery, with essential new insights into addiction and treatment

Erica C. Barnett had her first sip of alcohol when she was thirteen, and she quickly developed a taste for drinking to oblivion with her friends. In her late twenties, her addiction became inescapable. Volatile relationships, blackouts, and unsuccessful stints in detox defined her life, with the bottles she hid throughout her apartment and offices acting as both her tormentors and closest friends. By the time she was in her late thirties, Barnett had quit and relapsed again and again, but found herself far from rehabilitated.

"Rock bottom," Erica Barnett writes, "is a lie."

It is always possible, she learned, to go lower than your lowest point. She found that the terms other alcoholics used to describe the trajectory of their addiction--"rock bottom" and "moment of clarity"--and the mottos touted by Alcoholics Anonymous, such as "let go and let God"--didn't correspond to her experience and could actually be detrimental.

With remarkably brave and vulnerable writing, Barnett expands on her personal story to confront the dire state of addiction in America, the rise of alcoholism in American women in the last century, and the lack of rehabilitation options available to addicts. At a time when opioid addiction is a national epidemic and one in twelve Americans suffers from alcohol abuse disorder, Quitter is indispensable reading for our age and an ultimately hopeful story of Barnett's own hard-fought path to sobriety.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Erica C. Barnett is an award-winning political reporter. She started her career at The Texas Observer and went on to work as a reporter and news editor for The Austin Chronicle, Seattle Weekly, and The Stranger. She now covers addiction, housing, poverty, and drug policy at her blog, The C Is for Crank. She has written for a variety of local and national publications, including The Huffington Post, Seattle Magazine, and Grist.

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One

Up in the Air

I'm sitting at the airport in Seattle, but it's hard to explain exactly how I ended up here, in this black vinyl seat, on this particular afternoon in the fall of 2014. If you walked up and asked me, I'd probably tell you, "I didn't know where else to go," but that isn't the half of it. I didn't know how to be.

The plan, if you can call it that, was to move in with my grandparents in Mississippi for a while, long enough to get the booze out of my system and decide what to do next. But when I got to the United Airlines counter, I found out that the ticket I thought was waiting for me wasn't there, and plan A went into the trash along with the big white binder containing my relapse prevention plan from treatment, which I'd tossed in an airport Dumpster on the way to the terminal.

More than a ticket, or money, or a plan, I needed a drink. So I wheeled my suitcase into the nearest bathroom, sat down in a stall, and unzipped the cover. Tucked between the layers of sweaters and dirty T-shirts were two bottles of Svedka vodka. I cracked open the half-empty one and chugged the burning liquid straight from the bottle, thanked God for this small mercy (AA had taught me how to pray), wiped my sweaty face, and depressed the handle.

Flush.

No one was supposed to know I still drank. For the past five years, I had been telling everyone I'd quit, although who knows how many of them still believed me. (In my defense, I had quit, again and again and again. The problem wasn't quitting; it was staying quit.) I did my drinking in private, at home or-when I had to go out, which, since I lost my job about a month before, had been less and less-in parks, bus shelters, or public restrooms, gulping as quietly as possible, as quietly as a junkie takes off his belt and twists it around his arm.

Once, I almost got caught in the act. I was sitting in my usual spot near the back of the bus, gulping from a bright-yellow carton of lukewarm Bandit Chardonnay, when a guy across the aisle caught my eye to let me know the driver was coming my way. "Hey, lady, you gotta watch yourself!" he grinned after the danger had passed, pulling a brown-bagged tallboy from his puffy black jacket. "They're checking for that shit now!"

Speak for yourself, I thought. I'm invisible. And compared to him, as a still vaguely professional-looking woman in my thirties with a MacBook in her lap, I was.

At the airport, I shoved the bottle, now several fluid ounces lighter, back in my suitcase, rolling it carefully in a sweater to make sure it didn't clank around.

I wandered back into the terminal, thinking, I can handle this.

And then, suddenly, I couldn't. That's how I found myself glued to this chair by the United ticket counter, watching the blur of travelers rushing past me to their Very Important Destinations. Things felt unreal. I started to wonder if I was hallucinating, or actually imperceptible. Or maybe I was still stuck in a dream from the night before-the one where security officers had to carry me, flailing and screaming, from the building after I was fired. I should get a taxi home, I thought. Instead, I flagged down two TSA agents and asked them to call me an ambulance.

"What's wrong with you?" one asked. "Acute intoxication," I responded, surprised at my own lucidity. Even when I couldn't force my body to stand, I still wanted people to know that I knew what I was talking about.

The aborted flight was an attempt to trace a familiar path-back home to Meridian, Mississippi, the small town where my family lived until I was seven. I had just been fired from my job at the online news site I cofounded with my best friend, Josh, and I thought that if I could retrace my steps-dry out for a few weeks in a place where I had always been welcomed without judgment, then figure out how to rebuild my life-I would be okay.

Instead, I was en route to the Highline Medical Center in Burien, Washington, twelve miles south of my apartment in Seattle. And if a hospital in the suburbs seems like a weird detour to take at this moment, you don't know what the past five years had been like. You don't know how bad I needed a rest.

Thirty years earlier, I had taken a trip in the opposite direction-the first of many efforts to get away from my Deep South roots. Of course, I was only seven at the time-too young to know that the world wasn't bounded by Louisiana, Alabama, and Tennessee-and I didn't have much say in the matter. Did I take my first trip to Texas by myself, or with Dad and my new stepmother, Jonee, who hadnÕt yet asked me to call her Mom? Did the Southwest Airlines flight attendant whisk me to my seat, harried but smiling in her orange-and-blue uniform, or did I sit between the two of them, staring out the window in awe as we rose up above the tops of the clouds? I donÕt remember. But from then on, I would always love the feeling of being between one place and another.

Before I moved away from Mississippi, my family was simple. My dad lived an hour away, in Hattiesburg, where he was finishing school at the University of Southern Mississippi and living in a run-down single-wide trailer with a ratty couch and sloshy brown king-size waterbed. I lived with my grandparents in Meridian-Mama Opal (short for Opaldean), a surgery nurse at Riley Hospital, and Papa Jesse, who managed a Goodyear tire store downtown. On the weekends, we'd drive sixty miles down a two-lane highway to visit my great-grandparents, Grandmother and Granddaddy, in a dot-on-the-map town called Macon (Mississippi, not Georgia), where they lived in a little white house with a backyard and a metal porch swing that always squeaked after it rained. Occasionally, a younger family member would bring their grandkids around (younger being relative-the average age in Macon was probably sixty-five), but the people I remember most vividly were all at least seventy years my senior-"aints" with old-fashioned names like Vernice and Jewel and uncles who could fix a bee sting with spit and a wad of chewing tobacco. In Macon, where Grandmother's backyard garden seemed to stretch for acres, Mama Opal and Papa Jesse let me run around more freely than they did at home, picking beans and shelling them on the screened-in porch, collecting pecans from under the huge tree that shaded the cluttered back patio, and pawing through the boxes of letters and piles of scarves and purses in the guest-room closet, where everything was suffused with the old-lady smell of roses, peppermint, and moldy cardboard.

What my family lacked, I eventually realized, was a mom-mine had taken off to pursue other interests when I was too young to form memories. Growing up, I never thought of being motherless as a deficiency, although I knew it made me a little different. Some kids had two parents and lived in fancy houses with fenced-in yards, some kids were raised by single moms and lived in the trailer park where we visited my uncle Mike and aunt Marilyn, and some kids had long-haired dads who studied biology and were really into MAD Magazine, Alice Cooper, and Tron.

Years later, I would develop questions about this woman, Cindy, whom I had glimpsed in photos that my dad kept hidden in a box in our spare bedroom, underneath the ancient copies of Playboy and Oui. Still later, therapists and boyfriends would inform me that I had been traumatized by this loss, which had led me to seek approval from everyone and fear abandonment like love was something I could earn by memorizing the right combination of words. Later still, I would meet her and look for myself in her eyes, her facial structure, her way of looking at the world.

But back then, I learned that there was no point in asking about Cindy....

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Penguin Publishing Group
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2021
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0525522344
• ISBN 13: 9780525522348
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 336
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Terminal Video; n.pederzini@terminaldistribuzione.com; ; Via Bruno Buozzi, 24/26,; Granarolo dell'Emilia BO,; Italien