Last Drink to LA by John Sutherland

Author:John Sutherland [John Sutherland]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781780722290
Publisher: Short Books
Published: 2014-03-17T04:00:00+00:00

My Story

Like The Thousand and One Nights, AA is an organisation founded on never-ending narrative. You recover by telling your story, and hearing the stories of fellow-alcoholics. It is not a ‘talking’ but a ‘tale-telling’ cure. The alcoholic’s tale is distinctively different from other verbal therapies: the Catholic’s confession, the Puritan’s cleansing ‘spiritual autobiography’, or the Freudian analysand’s grudging revelations on the solitary couch.

The AA story has a distinct poetics. It is, in essence, a narrative of inexorable loss, sudden epiphany and gradual recovery. Typically, it starts with a well-ordered life, progressively disordered by drink. At the critical moment – it is conventionally a brief and irrecoverable interval – the drunkard ‘touches bottom’; he/she experiences a fleeting ‘moment of clarity’. Ideally, this is the moment of introduction to AA. One comes in. Thereafter, if it has a happy ending; the story becomes one of successful (and never-ending) struggle. ‘Recovering’. One never again goes out.

AA is unusual in being a therapeutic organisation built on ritualised oral storytelling to an initiated audience. They do it very well (as Sylvia Plath said of her own desperate remedy, suicide). Telling tales (most of them tall, many of them self-serving) is one of the few things that booze makes you good at. Drunks are practised fictioneers; they live the creative lie and use a tissue of fibs to hold their rickety lives together. Drunks become fluent over the years at coming up with cover stories for such ticklish questions as: ‘Just how much did you have to drink last night?… Where were you until four in the morning?… How did that scrape get on the car?… Is that lipstick on your collar?’

Two things have dominated my adult life: booze and prose fiction. I have been lucky to live in a time when both are in ample supply. With a PhD on the English novel, a fiction reviewer’s slot on various London papers and an alcoholic’s insatiable thirst, I was multiply qualified for entry to AA – when I finally got round to it.

One of the things that first attracted me into the fellowship was its stories. For someone like me it was as magnetic as a campfire in the woods at night. One of the reasons I stopped going to meetings regularly was that, in the last analysis, I didn’t really have a good enough story myself. I couldn’t match, let alone top, the tales I heard at AA. Not, that is, if I were ‘uncompromisingly honest’, as the Program requires. In my heart, I knew I had never been a truly heroic drinker. Nor was I, in sobriety, an epic storyteller. But being in the company of those who were was, while it lasted, a thrill. When (nowadays rarely), I go to meetings it is often to hear someone I particularly admire – as, for example, I admire and seek out the latest novels of A.S. Byatt, or Julian Barnes, or Martin Amis.

This, however, is to advance things. I touched bottom, as alcoholics like to say, on 12 February 1983 (the date is slightly fuzzy).

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