Recommended: “Drinking Story” by Elissa Washuta

I’ve been teaching essays from The Best American Essays 2022, edited by Alexander Chee, and one of my favorites is “Drinking Story” by Elissa Washuta (originally published as “How Do I Tell My Story of Getting Sober?” in Harper’s), a tightly written piece that tells a story but also has elements of poetry in it (ha – maybe I’m just lazy and like to read shorter stuff). My class discussed how Washuta does what Mary Karr calls “expurgating the false self” in The Art of Memoir. This is when an author holds themselves up to the light, finds what’s wanting or false, and tosses out the superficial self for a truer one. When we tell stories, Karr says, we naturally tend to not only put ourselves in the best light, but also to believe our own obfuscations, to hide behind them to fool ourselves and others. The best writers, Karry says, poke holes in them.

From the start of this piece about recovery from alcohol addiction, Washuta’s voice is seeking truth. “They say the insomnia will end when the withdrawals end, but that’s just a lie they tell you so you won’t pick up, something to hold on to if ‘Don’t quit before the miracle happens’ doesn’t persuade you to hold on for one more day,” she writes. “Early on, I tried late-night meetings at the strip mall clubhouse with low lights and syrup-smelling vape clouds hanging near the ceiling like weather, but all those men and their court orders made me want to drink worse. My home was no place for a soul’s convalescence – the Crow Royal bottle was still in its velvet bag, sleeping while I couldn’t.”

The opening introduces the conflicts – she can’t sleep, she’s recovering, she doesn’t like the male-dominated AA meetings or being home by herself. As she tries to stay sober, her mind keeps casting backwards to bars she used to hang out in. Without alcohol to numb her mind and memory, she finds she’s painfully awake and aware all the time, averaging just five and half hours of sleep a night. “Once you get sober,” she writes, “you become fully aware in every waking moment, and without the generous erasure of the blackout, you meet a million details demanding to be sorted.”

This “backlog … nags that I’ve missed something.” Here’s where the expurgation of her false self comes in. “Maybe I drank because I wanted to sleep – this is one of those things I tell myself when I’m trying to make a story out of it,” she writes, bravely examining false stories she’s telling herself. “In truth, I remember why I drank. It never stays out of my head long. I remember the first red Solo cup and the self-breaking power of Everclear and Kool-Aid washing through me, back when my liver was still new enough to meet the liquor like a date with a man you don’t yet know you’ll fear.”

The last line gives us a hint of what’s going to be revealed. We’re driven to keep reading to hear Washuta’s painful, powerful truth – to watch her root out what’s really bothering her. In the AA meetings full of men, she tells the kind of neat, easy story they expect to hear. Yet her urge to drink is no simple narrative. It has a thousand plot points and stops and starts. It is in fact a powerful kind of denial of the narrative urge to move forward, to reckon with the conflict at the center of her life. “My years there are one long night inside of me … I have some anecdotes, some illustrations with plots, but no meaning,” she writes. “Strung together, they show the chaos I was cataloguing long before I was ready to tell its story.”

Washuta says AA saved her but acknowledges its limitations: an emphasis on a God she doesn’t believe in, its formulaic narrative about addiction. AA “saved my life by offering me a narrative form to hold my shapeless despair," she writes, but "once I let the plot sprawl, I couldn’t bring it back there.” The real reason for the sickness that led to her drinking, she reveals to us, is “knowing that men want to hurt me.” She recounts incidents of sexual violence she repressed through drinking because “alcohol was the only tool I had to shutter the memory palace in my head, where all the hallways led to rooms where I was on my back, pressed against a bed or a couch or a floor, suffering.” It’s storytelling, the complicated kind, the kind in which she throws out her false self, that allows her to live again. 

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