“I’m supposed to be in it and I never read it.” Wurtzel made it clear that she had read all of Infinite Jest.Īt the end of the evening, as Housing Works employees hastily removed chairs and replaced coffee tables, the writers milled about. Wurtzel mentioned Speak, Memory, and then Carr talked about reading Infinite Jest, but said he’d not read the footnotes. Shapiro finally called time on the Q&A session and asked a final question of her own, about the authors’ influences. People may offer their own stories in response, but there probably shouldn’t be any questions. The addiction narrative is a monologue it’s a story you tell to an audience-readers, or a room of alcoholics clutching styrofoam cups of coffee. Karr congratulated Kaufman on his 21 years sober, and then crowed: “I’ve been sober 22 years! I beat you!” And that dynamic perhaps explains why the Q&A session, near the end of the evening, was so flat, and then, suddenly, when it seemed that an audience member might be implying that all writers were on drugs, fraught. There were moments when the panel took on aspects of an AA meeting. “I like having written.” For Carr, writing is “something that happens alone in a room and it’s fucking hard.” In general, he urged people to “shut up about the books they’re working on, and actually work on them.” All agreed that writing isn’t done-or at least not done well at all-while high or drunk. “I would rather take an ass whipping than write,” was Karr’s formulation. If the authors were united by something besides the cycle of addiction and recovery, it was by their love-hate relationship with the writing process. The title Prozac Nation: Young and Depressed in America was chosen by her publisher to paper over the fact that the book was a memoir Wurtzel would have preferred to call it, a la Nirvana, “I Hate Myself and I Want to Die.” Finally, after a thirty-six-hour shopping binge in the duty-free area at the Copenhagen airport, during which she completely missed the event she had flown to Sweden for in the first place, people stopped having sympathy for her “Everyone hated me,” she said. She was walking around New York barefoot in December she had basically moved into her publisher’s office, where she was blowing endless lines of coke off an editor’s desk because she’d “mistaken not for a writer but for a rock star.” A stint in rehab didn’t break the cycle. Wurtzel’s story of hitting bottom didn’t involve children, though it did involve childish behavior. He told her “Your daddy loves you,” put her to sleep, and went to Billy’s Topless anyway. Kaufman described staring into the eyes of his daughter as she clung to his leg and begged him not to go. Realizing how much she resented her child every time he cried for taking her away from her whiskey and her Marlboros and her Walkman, was what made her understand that she had to get sober.Īlan Kaufman’s description of hitting bottom began with him waking up in a New York establishment called the Hotel California next to a woman with a British accent who turned out to be his new wife it ended in the kitchen of a house he had once been proud to live in and now only returned to occasionally, taking a break from a bender to drop off some money. Mary Karr spoke of going home to her impossibly attractive husband-he “looked like something you win at a raffle"-having sex with him “so he would go to sleep,” putting their baby down to sleep, and going out on the porch with the baby monitor where she could, at last, “drink like wanted to drink.” It was, she said, the highlight of her day. On a raised stage in front of a packed house-it was sitting-on-the-floor-room only-sat New York Times media columnist and former crack addict David Carr Mary Karr, author of a number of memoirs, including Lit Elizabeth Wurtzel, of Prozac Nation fame and Alan Kaufman, whose Drunken Angel chronicles his struggles with alcoholism.Ĭhildren were key in most of the recovery narratives discussed endangering them was one very clear way to tell you’d hit bottom. Shapiro, who has written several books on addiction-both tell-alls about her own vices, and how-tos for readers looking to kick-was moderating a panel of illustrious ex-users: people who had experienced many dark nights of the soul and lived to tell their tales. And so it was appropriate that the first thing professor and journalist Susan Shapiro asked the four authors at last night’s Housing Works event-which centered on memoirs of addiction and recovery and was, perhaps cheekily, titled “New Year New You"-to describe, was his or her own personal bottom. What an addict means when they talk about hitting bottom is indicative it’s the worst part standing in for a lousy whole.
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