This week we published an extract from Meghan O’Gieblyn’s searing memoir about secret drinking, recovery and addiction. We asked Meghan how hard it was to go public with her private struggle.
You describe how you experience alcohol as “religious rapture” and the “one luminous thing” – did drinking replace religion for you in a way?
I didn’t think about it that way at the time, but yes, I can see now that drinking was serving the same role in my life that religion once had. Both require surrender – and it can be very liberating to give up control, especially if you’re the kind of person who suffers from the tyranny of their own will. There’s also the fact that addiction, much like God, demands absolute devotion. It’s something that orients your life, the sun around which everything else orbits, which can have the effect of simplifying everything. During the worst of my drinking, I was living like an ascetic: I didn’t care where I was living (I lived out of my car for several weeks), whether I ate, whether I had friends. There’s a parable in the New Testament about a man who sells all his worldly belongings in order to obtain a single pearl. The pearl is supposed to represent the Kingdom of God, but the parable also captures very well the mindset of an addict.
What was it like to write honestly about your drinking – and especially your relapse? Was there anyone who didn’t know you had started drinking again?
Most people in my life knew that I’d relapsed, but they only knew the vague outline of that story, not the particulars. I did feel some anxiety about telling that story for a larger audience. People have called the book “brave,” but I wasn’t thinking about it in terms of courage. I’m not a brave person. I was just trying my best to serve the ideas of the book, and it became clear at some point that in order to demonstrate the limits of willpower, I was going to have to dramatise what that looked like in my own life, which meant recalling all the mental tricks and self-deceptions that hijacked my mind during that time. I worried a lot, actually, about self-deception in the writing process itself. Once you become aware of how slippery your mind is, it’s hard to avoid regarding your own insights and conclusions as suspect.
Of the writers who write about addiction, are there any you admire or found helpful (or not)?
I tried to steer clear of addiction memoirs because I wanted to avoid the tropes of that genre. But I was reading a lot of spiritual writers who struggled with temptation or chronic sin. Augustine wrote in his Confessions about his inability to free himself from lust, and his inner conflict is so recognisable. He once prayed to God, “make me chaste, but please not yet!” That experience of being divided against oneself – of having two desires that are in conflict with each other – has a long lineage in spiritual autobiography and religious texts. I think of the apostle Paul, who complained that instead of doing what he loved, he continually chose “what I hate”. And Duryodhana, who says in the Pandava Gita: “I know what is Dharma but I am not able to practise it. I know what is not Dharma but am not able to keep away from it.” These are from sources that are centuries, in some cases millennia, old. I find it comforting, in a way, to know that human nature hasn’t changed very much.
Composite: Guardian Design
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