In fact I have a bunch of interesting people that I want to interview for this site. Including, for example, Dr. Abraham Twerski, founder of internationally recognized Gateway Rehab and author of a gabillion bestselling books. He has recovery stories out the wazoo. Catching up with this rabbi and addictions-specialist later today. … I have more books to review than I know what to do with. But most of the reviews, interviews, and feature stories now go into other publications that have a wider readership than this blog (plus, they pay).

For example my interview with Marianne Warnes, the mother of Carrie John, a University of Maryland Ph.D. addictions researcher whose boyfriend and lab partner helped her shoot some drugs he’d bought from an online pharmacy—and who subsequently died of anaphylactic shock, because the drugs weren’t actually drugs but a contaminant. New York Times writer David Carr (author of a memoir of addiction/recovery, The Night of the Gun) liked that story:

Being smart about addiction doesn’t mean it won’t take you down.bit.ly/IY1W4V @_TheFix reports

— david carr (@carr2n) May 11, 2012

Also my review of Kaylie Jones’s helpful and eloquent book about her recovery from alcoholism, Lies My Mother Never Told Me, which appeared last week in Renew Magazine. My Q&A with Kaylie is online, but to read the review you have to buy the print edition (which rocks, by the way. Please subscribe. Next issue: Bill Clegg).

I get lots of mail from readers these days, too. An interventionist recently wrote me asking what I thought about this idea:

I am passionate about my intervention work, and I stumbled upon the following recently re: “eIntervention.”

He provided a bunch of links to studies about getting sober online that I haven’t yet looked at, but this is an interesting phenomenon—the fact that more and more people are getting sober, or at least beginning their journeys toward sobriety, via the Internet. I did the same, which is how I became Guinevere.

More stories: I’m in the process of putting faces to the avatars/usernames I’ve known for four years. I met up with one woman last month in New York; in a few days I’m meeting up with another guy who’s moving from the Rocky Mountains back to the East Coast. This summer I hope to connect with one or two more of these amazing, open, dedicated, sober people with whom I’ve been “eRecovering” for four years. It’s interesting to feel so close to people you’ve never met. Until this year I’d never met any of them, but I’d trust each one of these folks with the keys to my house.

Plus I have non-addiction stories coming out my ears. I have ideas for paintings (as well as commissions) lined up like a row of beans to be picked. I just gotta get in there and pick them. I also have to get used to planting seeds in the next bed over while the current bed is bearing.

As always, trying to take life and its opportunities and challenges one day at a time. Until last week I’d spent five weeks losing blood. Seriously anemic. Hard to do much without enough hemoglobin, you know? Tough to get oxygen. But yesterday I went running for the first time in maybe three weeks. Can I tell you how good that felt?—I could feel my lungs expanding, I could feel my muscles stretching and powering me over the hills, I felt the medicine. Drugs always worked for me (until, as they say, they didn’t anymore). And exercise works for me, too. I sometimes wonder when or if it might stop working.

If you have thoughts about beginning your journey to sobriety online, or if you have an interesting addiction/recovery story of your own, please comment below or email me at guinevere (at) guineveregetssober (dot) com.

The new puppy with my friend P, who's helping me train her.

This is the new puppy I adopted two weeks ago. Her name is Flo. She’s 10 weeks old. You want to talk about unconditional love—there’s nothing like curling up and having a nap with a puppy. I’d never experienced it before. It’s different somehow from napping with a cat.

So last week I had an emergency D&C because I was basically bleeding to death. I had been scheduled to have one this week, tomorrow in fact, but my GYN called last Thursday morning and scheduled it immediately: my hemoglobin was so low that I was on the verge of needing a transfusion.

Question: How could an intelligent woman with two degrees and an IQ north of 130 possibly let her health descend to that state? How could I allow myself to bleed to death and not take care of myself?

Answer: Self-care has nothing to do with intelligence. Neither does addiction.

Here’s a story for you. My mother had a hysterectomy at my very age: 47. I remember being on the phone with her from my office at my first reporting job: she had been having horrible long periods, basically bleeding to death, and she hadn’t had a pelvic exam in seven years. SEVEN YEARS.

In the Al-Anon books it asks us: are we taking care of ourselves? Are we going to the doctor, the dentist, are we getting haircuts?

I go to the doctor. I sometimes put off the dentist. I get haircuts every other month. But do I really pay attention to my body? Is it a place where I actually live?

A lot of the time, it isn’t. A lot of the time, I’m living in some alternative reality I’ve created in my mind. I was, after all, raised by a woman who ignored her body so effectively that she made it seven middle-aged years without a pelvic exam and had to have a hysterectomy because of the grapefruit-sized fibroid tumors that grew inside her in the interim. All the while, the rhetoric that came out of her mouth was this Catholic stuff about the body being “the temple of the Holy Spirit.” Some temple: the curtain in hers was rent, the cornerstone broken, by the time she was 58.

This was my model for being a grown-up woman.

And my dad: I won’t even get into how well my dad ignored his body.

Physical exercise helps me pay attention to my body. But still: I was bleeding for three weeks! I just told myself it’ll stop sometime it has to stop sometime just be patient just wait it out i don’t have time to deal with this so IT MUST NOT BE HAPPENING, and in the interim my hemoglobin dropped to 8.5 (the low-normal level is 11.5; the standard level for transfusion is 8.0) and I was feeling “a little bit tired.” Yeah. I believe this is called something like psychosis: refusal to acknowledge reality.

So I go in for the operation and they tell me it’ll be conscious sedation and I know what conscious sedation is, because G is a person who knows her drugs: conscious sedation (also known as “twilight sleep”) is Versed (the drug that makes you forget what’s going on) and Propofol (strong sedative: Michael Jackson’s favorite candy) and fentanyl (the drug I was on—on? I was as tall as the fucking Empire State Building on fentanyl in August 2008). I had to have these drugs because it’s surgery and they were going to open the hood and scrape me out, and I didn’t want to have these drugs because I hadn’t taken drugs in more than two years.

My sponsor said, “Sometimes we have to do things we don’t want to do.” If the alternative is bleeding to death, I guess she’s right.

I was scared because I’d had two surgeries while I was un-sober. The first was an appendectomy that was torture because they couldn’t control the pain, they wouldn’t give me the shitload of drugs I’d have needed to control abdominal laparascopic post-surgical pain, so I just put up with it. It was horrible. And then I broke and dislocated my elbow in a bike-fall in 2006, and during the conscious sedation to put the bones back into the socket the ortho guy told my husband he’d never shot so much fentanyl into one person in his life. So I was afraid I’d be in pain.

But of course I was in no pain, because I’m now what physicians and pharmacists call “opioid-naïve.” I woke up in post-op feeling as though God’s own sunlight was shining on my face, feeling sheer gratitude to all the nurses, telling all the staff how thankful I was for their willingness to take care of me. The surgery had gone well and I had no pain. And I was sent home with a couple doses of Vicodin, which I took because later when the fentanyl wore off, I had shooting needly pains below my navel.

And for a day after, I had a headache. My body getting rid of the drug metabolites.

And then on Monday it occurred to me: I had felt so good, so grateful, because I was high. I was high. Why do the drugs have to make me feel so goddam good?

“Every feeling passes,” my sponsor says. “All the ‘good’ feelings, all the ‘bad’ ones—they all pass.”

And this morning my husband goes to the dentist because he has pain in his tooth and the dentist X-rays his jaw and discovers an abscess, he prescribes Vicodin, my very favorite beloved awesomest drug on the face of the planet, especially since I’m “opioid-naive.” I just had drugs in my body last week, I can remember in my body how niiiice they made me feel.

David Foster Wallace once said, You think you’re an atheist, you think you don’t worship anything?—let me tell you, everyone worships something. Listen to the way I talk about Vicodin.

So I call my sponsor and tell her: I don’t want to use the Vicodin that is now living in my house. She says, You know what you have to do. I say, Yes, I know.

Part of that is writing it here. The truth.

The truth is, if I listen to my body, what it really wants is not drugs.

What it wants is love.

Her name is Florence. Flo for short.

Flow.

My son bringing our new puppy home.

She’s mine. She’s everyone else’s too, but she knows I’m the Alpha-Dog, I’m the one whose voice and face she hews to most closely, and I’m the one who has slept next to her crate most often.

She jumps on my son.

She retrieves. Took her on a walk to the end of the block the other day (a meandering experience) and I brought back a stick about an inch-and-a-half in diameter, two feet long. She played fetch with it this morning, even though the stick itself is about twice the length of her own body.

She’s smart. Six days in the house, and she’s already mostly house-trained. A feat that I put down to my personal Dog Guru, P. This is P’s Yellow Lab, Ginger:

P's "Ginny-bin."

I fell in love with Ginger over the course of the past 18 months. Ginger was the first dog ever to recognize my voice and come trotting to me with kisses and a smile. (Labs smile.) Ginger was the first dog I’d ever met who didn’t smell like Wet Dog. (My dog doesn’t smell like Wet Dog either. “Yet.”)

In spending the past week training the new dog, I’ve had a lot of memories. One has to do with my family’s dogs. Or rather, my dad’s family’s dogs. None of which were friendly. Sheba was a skittish red Irish setter who snapped at my face when I was 3 and put me off dogs for life. (Or so I thought, before I met P’s Ginger.) Stoney was an angry German shepherd that belonged to my cousin Danny. As a Marine in Vietnam Danny had trained scout-dogs and had seen several of them blown to pieces in front of his face. He came back traumatized with an IV drug-habit. He was very fond of dogs, and still nurtured an abiding desire to have a dog at home, but his addiction got in the way of taking care of it, and Stoney was always chained in the lonely dirty back alley, barking and screaming to be released.

There were other dogs on that (alcoholic) side of the family that were kept in basements all day, or tied to trees. This is how I came to think of dogs: as mean beasts that had to be restrained. This is the way my mother spoke about dogs. Her own alcoholic family never had any pets. “Dogs are a pain in the ass,” my mother always said. “You have to give them baths, you have to walk them every day, they slobber all over you, they stink.” At least we were allowed to have cats. And this is why: they wash themselves; they exercise alone; if you forget to feed them, they simply eat mice and birds. You don’t have to Take Care Of Them.

Another memory that dog-training has brought back is the early days of being a mother.

Eight-week-old puppies are helpless beings. “They’re like babies,” P says. “They ARE babies.”

Taking care of this canine baby I remembered taking care of my son, who is now 14-and-a-half. I remembered all over again, with new perspective, how difficult and draining the work was. My labor was 31 hours long, and it was “natural”: I had no hospital admission, no anesthesia, no epidural, and only a couple shots of painkiller (and boy, as an addict, let me tell you, those helped a hell of a lot: they managed my fear of the pain as well as the pain itself). I went home the same day with an entire human being in my trust. No certification required: Go Forth And Raise Thy Boy. And no extra help once I got home.

Fear crashed in on me.

I had no guru. A woman’s natural child-raising guru is her own mother, and she had taught me to do everything in life on my own. Asking for help betrayed weaknesses: lack of ingenuity, intelligence, persistence, self-reliance. Besides, anyone who gave you help was likely to be mistaken or misguided. And they might Want Something In Return. Safer to do things they way they’ve always been done.

So I tried to do it by myself. We moved to London when he was 3 months old. And I fell down the rabbit hole of addiction.

Sitting on the kitchen floor with this puppy sleeping in my lap, I remembered the overwhelming guilt I had when, while spending days alone in a London flat with a 5-month-old baby—no friends, no family nearby, no community, almost totally isolated, and physically drained but for the few hours a day after I took my codeine—I hired one of my husband’s undergraduates to babysit my son for two hours maybe two or three times a week. Enormous guilt: who should be taking care of this baby?—his mother. Selfish to hire “help” and spend that time either writing or, frankly, sleeping, because I was tired after a 31-hour labor and an overseas move.

Eventually, after my mother died and I began to see how ineffective her model was, I learned to ask for help raising my son. Eventually, after my father died of his alcoholism, I learned to ask for help with my addiction.

It’s impossible to live without asking for help. Asking for help doesn’t make us weak, it makes us human. “The thing we most need to forgive ourselves for,” my sponsor told me this week, “is our humanness.”

I’ve called P every day since adopting this dog, and she has guided me through the basics. Plus, my sister-in-law C, who has raised two big black dogs. Plus other dog-owners I know.

So I adopted the puppy a week ago, and two days ago my beloved mother-in-law had a stroke, and she’s paralyzed on one side and can’t swallow, and news is coming from England every day about her state. And then this afternoon I find out that I have to have surgery tomorrow. I didn’t even recognize how much I need help. I almost didn’t even go to the doctor. I’m still putting out on all cylinders, still pushing through and taking care of the dog and trying to meet deadlines and organizing my son’s life, and meanwhile the bloodwork says I’m anemic and on the verge of needing a transfusion.

Sometimes I lapse into being my mother. One way to counter that is to ask for help with what I can’t do for myself.

I may need to do that this week.

Someone wrote in a couple weeks ago asking whether Bill Clegg is “for real.” “Is he sober?” they asked. They were thinking of ordering his book 90 Days for their adult child, who is a recovering crack and heroin addict.

Interesting question. Are we the judges of some kind of reality show?—Detoxing With The Stars.

Well anyway, if we’re given a “daily reprieve,” he seemed like he hadn’t drunk or used the day I met him. Bill Clegg showed up for our talk clear-eyed. He ordered a chicken salad or something and wolfed it down. He often eats at this particular restaurant. They knew his name. He was wearing a button-down shirt with a blue V-neck sweater and brown cords. Altogether he looked to me like a Northeastern preppy college student chowing down between classes. In other words, he was healthy.

All the press around Bill Clegg talks about how “handsome” he is, and, in fact, he is—the Cosmos loaned him a finely hewn bone structure, a high forehead and straight teeth and cleft chin, and clear skin and a mellow voice, and good for him. But also, he’s ordinary. He’s got a Gucci suit and god knows what other awesome clothes hanging in his closet and he goes to black-tie parties in Midtown, but he’s not exempt from getting mayo on his lips when he eats his chicken salad, and I could imagine him trying to hide the scorch-marks on his fingers from the stems. I could imagine him freaking out when the lighter exploded. He’s a plain old for-real sweet guy but if he managed to fall for crack he has some kind of dark side, and he writes about it in 90 Days.

He’s also “a real program guy,” in the words of one of my editors at The Fix. Clegg showed up late for our lunch because he takes time out of his weekdays to go to meetings and take care of his sobriety, and part of going to meetings is arriving early and staying late to talk to your posse afterward. We talked about the people he’s come to know over the past seven years who have helped him stay sober—such as Polly, a woman who makes her living walking dogs and who also relapsed over and over. We talked about how, when he got offered his job as a literary agent at William Morris Endeavor, he told his boss that he’d do the work, but he’d have to have time during workdays to take care of his sobriety.

We talked about a lot of stuff that never made it into his books. He describes the moment in early sobriety when he discovered what he was put here to do. The story makes me realize (once again) that not all we do while we’re in active addiction is for naught. For example I spent 10 years raising a kid while in active addiction. And he’s a good kid.

Also, I enjoyed Clegg’s insights about self-acceptance. My ultimate long-term project.

Continued from Part 1.

Bill doesn't like looking into the camera. "Say Polly," I said, and he laughed and finally looked into the lens.

Guinevere: How did they know it was crack, for chrissake?

Bill Clegg: I was missing for two months. It’s a very small community, the publishing community. This friend of mine at the time said it was like the Space Shuttle had blown up—like everybody saw, and there was nothing left.

G: Tell me how you started representing people again.

BC: So I said I’d read these manuscripts that these three writers I used to represent had sent me, and at one point, I had a manuscript in my lap, I forget which one it was, and I was typing up notes on my computer, on this little table in my kitchen in my studio at 15th and Seventh. And I was typing up the notes and I had this really powerful feeling. It was like, This is what you do. It was the first time in like eight months I had been sitting with double-spaced typed-up pages, which—I’m ALWAYS sitting with double-spaced typed pages in my lap and taking notes. And suddenly there I was, doing what I always did. And I had, literally, this physical, spiritual acceptance of, This is what you do. This is it. And it didn’t matter if I did it out of a garage upstate, or if I did it at a big shiny agency. It didn’t matter.

Six or eight weeks passed after that. I told the people closest to me after a few days, and I had decided I was going to start my own agency. Somebody I knew was going to offer me office space, and I would owe the rent until the money came in. That was a great gift. I was absolutely going to give it my best shot, but I didn’t know if it would work.

And I then got an email from Jennifer Rudolph Walsh at the William Morris Agency, which is now WME, and she invited me to lunch. I had met her once, many years before. A lot of people in and out of publishing had reached out to me. I thought she was approaching me because some sibling or child or colleague had a problem with addiction and needed some advice. A lot of people had reached out to me like that. And so I went to lunch and she said, “I think you should work with us.” And I was absolutely flabbergasted. At first I said, “I don’t think so.” I didn’t think that was for me. Because—the William Morris Agency? Midtown? I just felt like that was a sort of metaphor for a kind of life that was not sustainable, not healthy for me. Super-competitive; I had never worked for a big company so I had no idea what that agency was like. She said, “I understand why you would think that. Let me introduce you to some people in the department, and don’t make a decision right away.”

So I just took the next right action, and I met with people, and I really had a strong feeling from her that she somehow understood recovery.

G: She said in one press report that she believes everyone deserves a second chance.

BC: I think she does. And she certainly believed that of me. She gave me a job. But I didn’t want to start right away—I took three or four months.

G: I thought it was interesting that you made it a condition of your coming to work being given the leeway to go to a meeting in the middle of every day. If alcoholism and addiction are illnesses, shouldn’t we be able to use time during the workday to take care of ourselves?

BC: Absolutely. My boss didn’t blink. She was like, “You do whatever you have to do to stay sober.”

G: So getting sober wasn’t about money, it wasn’t about saving your reputation—

BC: —No. There was no way to save that reputation. It was destroyed. There was no way to clean it up because there was nothing to scrub.

G: New York is almost a character in itself in both your books. Some of your opening pages in 90 Days reminded me of Didion’s essay, “Goodbye to All That,” where she talks about the culture, the landscape, the feeling of New York. Was part of your recovery an effort to prove that you’re Really A New Yorker?

BC: No.

G: I don’t know if you still live in this section of town—

BC: —I do.

G: Then you live in “Old New York”—the New York of Edith Wharton.

BC: The church she went to is just a few blocks from here.

G: Grace Church.

BC: Yeah. I think my recovery is concerned with proving to myself that I’m not reconciling myself with a place, but rather reconciling myself with myself in any place. And so much of my problem before was looking to circumstance—whether that be professional or financial or geographic—and measuring myself against the outsides of whatever those circumstances were, and feeling like I came up short. And now I feel like I need to accept myself, whether I’m in a small town in the middle of nowhere, or at a black-tie party in the middle of Manhattan. And the exteriors of those, while they may be shiny and bright, or difficult and sorrowful, or whatever—they can’t be the thing that’s defining how I feel about myself.

It’s a daily struggle. I don’t think any of it is achievable in any kind of complete way. I think that our sober-tank empties every night, and when we wake up in the morning we have to do the same amount of things to keep ourselves sober—returning the phone calls of people who have reached out to me, showing up for the people in my life, staying healthy in all manner of ways: physically, emotionally, spiritually. I have to do the exact same things I did in early sobriety to stay sober now, and to stay sane. Because if I don’t, then I’m left to my own devices and I will go back to the place that leaves me vulnerable to picking up. And then all of it is out the window.

G: So your sobriety doesn’t depend on having a job at a high-powered agency or living in an upscale apartment, or even living in this city.

BC: Not at all. I had to come to the acceptance when I was getting sober that I may not live in New York, that I may live in Maine with my sister—that I may live anywhere. But I had a strong instinct that if I didn’t go back to New York right after rehab, that I never would.

G: Why did you want to?

BC: Because all the people who supported my recovery were here. Frankly, Jack, my first sponsor, was here, and he was my tether to sobriety and hope. And I felt like if I went to Maine, I didn’t have any support except my family. The only people I could get sober and healthy with were the other alcoholics and addicts, and Jack at that time was the only one that I knew. So I clung to him, like I clung to Asa, like I clung to everybody else. Anyone who was nearby, they had claw-marks on their shoulders because I was clinging so fucking hard.

G: Is 90 Days written for New Yorkers? The narrative is so deeply a New York narrative—you’re constantly mentioning street names and your sponsor draws a “Trigger Zone” circle around One Fifth Avenue [his old apartment] where you’re not allowed to go to avoid using, and nobody apart from New Yorkers is likely to understand those location names.

BC: It’s primarily written for people who are trying to get sober. I hope [the references to New York locations] don’t get in the way of people relating to what was unfolding for me.

G: By the way, how far away are we from the Trigger Zone?

BC: [laughs] Two blocks north. I know it as much as I know anything in my life. Like when I go to the Angelica Theater in New York, which was like a total no-no, because it’s on Houston between Sixth and Varick, and because I used to get high at Sixth and Houston.

G: So you had to avoid these places because they were triggers. I know some people who say, “I don’t believe in triggers, triggers are bullshit, I drank and used over everything in my life and you can’t avoid life.”

BC: Look, I went to sell my mother’s silver to get rent money, but I went into a trigger zone without telling Jack, and I relapsed. Like, I TOTALLY believe in triggers.

I think at a certain point, once the obsession is lifted, and once somebody’s connected—that’s the answer. Our whole problem is trying to solve this on our own. And I think sobriety is somehow making that journey from the first-person singular to the first-person plural. And that’s a very hard journey, it was the hardest journey for me to make. I didn’t tell anybody about what was really going on in my life for all my life, until I got sober. Nobody knew what was going on, even Noah [his ex-boyfriend].

To dismantle a whole lifetime of trying to figure things out on your own, hiding the problems because they’re shameful, because nobody will understand them you think—to suddenly go from that way of life to one where, something goes wrong, and you don’t see a solution, and you’re admitting you don’t have a solution. You’re telling the people closest to you, especially in sobriety, that you need help. And that becomes a way of life.

G: Are you able to sponsor people like Polly and Annie?

BC: In my sober community, nobody cares that I’m a literary agent. You know, like, Polly’s still a dog-walker. And Polly’s my first phone call, usually, when things are going to hell.

G: Does she still call you “crackhead”? And Annie, calling you “lamb chop.”

BC: Every day. I mean, every day. I got an email from Annie today calling me “lamby.” These are the people who saved my life.

If you want to hear this guy who beat crack talk about why he obsessed over James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces while he was in rehab (Clegg never mentions Frey’s name in his book, but it’s pretty clear he’s talking about Frey), how he stopped relapsing over and over, what makes his memoir different from the Million Little Addiction Memoirs out there, and lots of other stuff, go to Renew’s site and subscribe. It’s an awesome magazine.

Meanwhile here’s some more from our long conversation over salad and coffee in the Village. In two parts.

Bill Clegg being shy, as always, in front of the camera.

Guinevere: When you wrote how you were qualified for absolutely nothing when you got sober, not even restaurant work, I thought to myself, “This is the first book that has articulated my experience.” When I detoxed I was out of work. Mary Karr’s Lit articulated some of that desperation, but she was always teaching and working. She always had a job. On the other hand, your narrative sets it up as if, when we recover, everything will be restored to us. Do you really think that happens? For somebody like my friend Bridget, who’s coming up on 90 days—I’m thinking in concrete terms, here, actual people out there who are reading your books—she’s hoping that something good will happen for her.

Bill: I think the advice I would give anybody is the advice that was given me. That was just to let go of an expectation of what that future is or what “right” is. To let go of an expectation of what success is.

I had spent months and months and months complaining to everybody, “What am I going to do? How am I going to live? I’m not qualified to do anything.” And Jack [his sponsor] and others said, “Just get sober, and the rest of it will sort itself out. If you’re meant to be an agent, if you’re meant to be a teacher or book editor or whatever”—a psychiatrist, I thought I might go back to school for that—“whatever it is, just get sober and that will reveal itself, but let go of the worrying and trying to figure it out.” And I did, I finally did.

G: You were completely obsessed with your grief. Just sheer grief over what you’d lost. I hadn’t read early sobriety expressed in terms of “grief” before.

B: Oh yeah—I’d walk around these streets with so much self-pity and so much grief. Self-pity and grief—they hold hands. There was genuine grief; there was also a lot of self-pity. And the truth is that the only way I was ever going to move past it into a healthy, useful life was to let go of my attachment to those things I had lost and embrace what was right in front of me. And embrace the gift of life.

I had six months, and I started to feel physically healthy, and I was really connected to other people, and so much of that woe and worry had lifted, and I was just so present. Something happened that was kind of amazing: three of the writers I had represented before—individually, and not in concert with each other—within a three-week period each of them contacted me to say they had written something new, and that I had always been their first reader. And even though I wasn’t an agent anymore and I wasn’t in their lives, they wanted to know, Did I want to read their material? And in each case I said yes without even thinking about it. I was like, Sure—I have nothing else to do—

G: Except go to the gym and your home group.

B: Exactly!

G: Did they know what had happened to you?

B: Everybody knew what happened to me.

G: Your writers?

B: Everybody knew. Because they had an agent, and then they suddenly didn’t have an agent.

G: All the press around that time said, “He has personal problems.”

B: They all knew it was crack. Everybody in the publishing community—that got around very swiftly.

G: That must have been demoralizing for you.

B: [A gasping laugh] You think? I’d spent my whole entire life hiding the truth of what was going on, like scheming and putting on such a polished front—my worst nightmare was of that coming out.

G: How did they know it was crack, for chrissake?

[For the answer, and to hear what Bill Clegg is like in person, click here for Part 2.]

I’m told this is one of two programs in the country that educate future doctors about addiction and recovery. The other is at Betty Ford.

The program coordinator wanted to know what I’d like to talk about. I said: 30 million Americans have a drug or alcohol addiction; only 1 in 9 people with addiction get treatment. Fifty percent of young people between the ages of 12 and 20 admit to using drugs and alcohol. Untreated addiction costs the country $450 billion in lost productivity and medical costs each year. (I personally bet it’s more if you add in nicotine addiction, which still kills almost half a million people every year.)

And lo: it’s also estimated that 76 million Americans suffer from pain.

I told her about how I got addicted to painkillers while seeking treatment for two neurological problems. How, for my work, I’d been interviewing the people who crafted the Joint Commission standards that called for assessing pain as the fifth vital sign; how I’d interviewed people like Russ Portenoy at Beth Israel and Kathy Foley at Sloan Kettering and Dave Joranson, the smart and exceedingly compassionate guy who helped found the Pain and Policy Studies Group at U. Wisconsin-Madison, the organization that calls for state policy that balances the need for substance-control with the need to treat pain. I remember the day in 2001 or 2002 that I explained my pain problems to Dave and he said, “You need to get treatment.” I wasn’t sleeping; I wasn’t able to work to the levels I wanted to work; I couldn’t concentrate because of pain all over my body, and then there were the pervasive migraines. So I went to the university pain clinic.

I told the IRETA coordinator how the neurologists and anesthesiologists there knew all about how to get me on drugs and nothing about how to get me off. How they don’t know anything at all about how to assess for risk of addiction before initiating treatment—no one ever asked me whether my father was an alcoholic; no one took my mother’s nicotine addiction seriously; no one asked how far back into my family alcoholism ran; no one explained why this might be important information and might save my life. Because no one understood.

And doctors, even pain specialists, know next to nothing about how to assess for the emergence of addiction during pain treatment. And when they catch a patient deceiving them about their drug use, rather than responding with the compassion they’d show a dying person, they respond with anger and disgust to the deceit, kicking the patient out of their practice and into a psychiatric hospital, forcing the patient to detox either in a psych ward or alone at home, dealing with both addiction and untreated pain.

And the threat of this kind of treatment makes how many patients every year reluctant to confess their problems to their practitioners? How many times did I want to tell my doctors, “Look, I have a problem here—I can’t control my drug-use, but I’m afraid if I quit the drugs, the pain will come back. Can you help me?” They wouldn’t have helped me, they would have kicked me out. Don’t let the door hit you in the ass, baby.

I told her about interviewing Russ Portenoy back in the early 2000s, how he’d told me with the conviction of certainty in his voice that the risk of becoming addicted to painkillers during treatment for chronic non-malignant pain was less than one-tenth of one-percent, and how those numbers had come from studies of opioid use in dying cancer patients, how they shouldn’t have been translated to chronic non-malignant pain patients. In my own developing addiction, my own self-deceit and my own desperation to have my pain controlled, I didn’t consider these facts carefully enough.

I remember how Dave Joranson told me that just because somebody is an addict doesn’t mean they shouldn’t receive pain treatment. That we have to figure out ways to treat both problems.

I got on a roll.

“Jeez, I wish we could have you for more than an hour per session,” the coordinator said.

“You should do a TEDMED talk,” a friend said.

I’m ready to talk to doctors. I’m ready to talk to TEDMED. I’m sick of hearing that people don’t get addicted to drugs after seeking pain treatment. It’s bullshit, and someone has to show her face and explain that, while a lot of people do become addicted by nicking drugs from their grannies’ medicine cabinets, a lot of others become addicted because they pull their backs or break their ankles or have dental surgery and are prescribed Vicodin, and they like it so much—it “works” so well for them and helps them get so much done—that they begin chewing it, and when their scripts are cut off they begin buying it on the street or stealing it from other people. Or else they turn to heroin, which is cheaper, if less reliable in quality. Or else they just suffer, they white-knuckle between hits, not knowing what the hell is wrong with them and afraid to talk to anyone about it because of the stigma. And a lot of them never go to treatment, they either stay addicted or they kick in other ways, like I did.

What would you have me say to these future doctors about addiction? Tell me in the comments, or email me.

Bill Clegg in the West Village, April 3, 2012.

Getting messages from readers who may have seen the Newsweek excerpt, asking what I think about the book, and whether Clegg is “for real.” “Is he sober?” one reader asked.

Check back to find out. I’m splitting the goods between this site and Renew Magazine, for which I review books. Check your bookstore or better yet subscribe—May’s issue will have a review of Kaylie Jones’s LIES MY MOTHER NEVER TOLD ME and a Q&A with the author.

I like going to New York. I’ve decided to go as often as I can. I used to think I had to have a special reason for going anywhere: a meeting, a conference, a bunch of appointments with important people, Something To Do. My new special reason for going to New York:

Because I want to.

This time, when I wasn’t working, I went to a couple of Al-Anon meetings. One was a Step 11 meeting at Blessed Sacrament church on the Upper West Side. I got there half an hour late because of subway delays; when I opened the door to the meeting place in the rectory at 11:30, there were about 20 people sitting in chairs around the edge of the room. The blinds were drawn, the lights of the huge crystal chandelier were off, and they were meditating. I sat down and joined them.

Afterward I sat in the church to be quiet and look at the candles. It was Wednesday of Holy Week; a homeless guy was lying in a back pew, sleeping; I expected half an hour of quiet time, but suddenly everyone else in the nave stood up and I saw that the priest had walked in and was getting ready to say Mass. So I stayed. I hadn’t been to Mass in—gosh, 25 years? but just like the good Catholic girl I was (and somehow, somewhere inside of me, still am), I knew all the responses; I listened to myself saying them as though it were another person standing inside my skin, talking through my mouth.

Later that day I went to another meeting at Caron in midtown. The weekly topic of this meeting is “intimacy.” It was one of the best meetings I’ve ever been to in my life. They talked frankly about all kinds of ways of being intimate, including sex. I wrote a piece about this experience for another publication and will let you know if and when it’s out… I’m thinking of starting a similar group in my town.

In New York, I stay way downtown. This is my subway stop:

It’s a challenge to maintain my patience in New York because the subway system drives me crazy. Most of the stations are invisible above ground. In London, where I learned to ride subways, the Underground stops are all marked by the ubiquitous and brilliantly designed Tube logo:

In New York you have to morph into a rat to know where the subway stops are. You have to have a nose for holes in the ground. You have to sniff out which stops are uptown-only and which are downtown, and you have to memorize the information in order not to waste time. But once you get inside the stations, you’re likely to see some good art while you’re waiting for the trains.

Just pausing to look at the mosaics is part of recovery for me. It requires me to slow down, be present in my body, be aware. I can appreciate the handiwork of a dedicated artist.

Then just before I left I went to St. Patrick’s and lit a candle for my parents.

The rose window and organ, St. Patrick's Cathedral, New York.

When do you pause to look around you at beauty you take for granted? How do you manage to do it during a busy day?

So I’ve been busy. Had to finish the taxes a month before the normal due date so the school could review the income and finalize the financial aid application. Which meant organizing all the documentation and delivering it to the accountant and answering all the accountant’s questions and then collecting the paperwork from the accountant so the school could review it.

All the while, the voices—what Anne Lamott calls “jungle drums”—were playing in my head. Who the hell do you think you are, letting your kid think he can apply to this fancy school? Do you know where you come from? The expensive, private school has what the English call a “double-barreled” name. Double-barreled names ring of the rich, the fancy, the upper-class. Famous double-barreled names: Helena Bonham Carter; Daniel Day-Lewis; Camilla Parker-Bowles; Ralph Twisleton-Wykeham Fiennes. Sir Oliver Harrington-Ponsonby. (That last one is fictional.) The more names you have, the fancier you are, and the name of this school sounds like Harry Tiffany Winston.

And lo and behold, the higher power that has since preschool always watched over my kid’s education intervened, and the fancy upper-class school decided to give my kid a bit more money. Making the decision somehow even harder, because we could possibly afford to send him to either school.

On one level I felt enormous relief. I was standing in the street outside the main university building, a gothic skyscraper, when I found out about the extra money, and I broke down in tears. I called my friend P, who was helping his wife hang a show in South Florida, and told him the good news. His kid is in ninth grade this year at the double-barreled school, he’s very good friends with my kid, and by all accounts he’s having a wonderful freshman year. P and his wife say things like He loves all his teachers and They’re creating individualized classes for his interests and He looks forward to going to school.

On another level I felt as though I were being ripped in half, lengthwise. I come from a seriously working-class family. All the boys in my family, except for my dad, worked in steel mills. And my dad would have “gone into the mill,” as they used to say around here, except his brother loaned him the money to go to school. To the university outside whose main building I was standing in the street, crying and talking to P in Florida on my fancy iPhone.

I went to school in that building. Now I sometimes teach in that building.

My family knows how to Work For What They Want. The work ethic was articulated in anatomical language: Moving Your Ass, Busting Your Ass, Getting Your Ass In Gear. A serious preoccupation with breaking the part of your body that was built to allow you to rest.

It was a given in our family that school was Work, period, end of story. It was our job to get straight As, and nobody gave a shit whether you “liked” your teachers—you goddam well did what you were told, no matter who the teacher was, and nobody was looking at the quality of the teaching, except in extreme cases of poor instruction. School was not about “liking” your teachers or having “Fun.” If you were having fun in school, something had gone awry. School was about learning to follow rules, meet expectations, and obey authority.

So I’ve usually worked like this. I’ve busted my ass, gotten my ass in gear, pushed myself to meet unreasonable expectations for whatever unreasonable asshole-bosses and supervisors, and I’ve paid for this attitude because you can’t live all your life with an internal slave-driver without turning to drink or drugs or thoughts of topping yourself.

Or else I’ve opted out through compulsive procrastination. Refusing to do the work is like going on strike, and the result is failure to live up to one’s potential and saying “fuck you” to higher power.

So I haven’t enforced this way of life with my kid. He doesn’t work obsessively. He doesn’t compulsively get his ass in gear. And surprise!—he refuses to meet unreasonable expectations set by an authority he doesn’t respect. If a teacher requires him to do something he thinks is like totally stupid, he won’t do it, and he eats the C. This sometimes confuses me: by his age I’d accustomed myself to meeting bullshit expectations in order to be “perfect,” and it has been normal for me to agree to do busywork or work I hate, just because I’m “supposed” to do it. It’s the Way Life Is. It’s part of my working-class identity.

I’ve had to accept that my kid is not part of the working-class. His father comes from upper-middle-class England; his father was educated at private schools his whole life, from first grade to Oxford. He learned to obey authority, too, but he also learned other ways of life—the habits of privilege. He never worried about being able to pay bills, or make friends, or have opportunities come his way.

The five-by-five-foot stained glass window in the main staircase.

And in this house, we don’t live a working-class life. My house is a three-story four-square house built in 1898 by master craftspeople. I’ve got seven stained-glass windows, including one that measures five-by-five-feet in the main stairwell (see left), a front hall floor that’s inlaid with walnut parquet, and fireplaces and wood trim made from quarter-sawn oak. I have two kitchens and three-and-a-half bathrooms. I have enough room for my sister to bring her family of five and move in for a month if she wants. My son has a treehouse in the maple out back. I have a whole city lot for a garden. We have three or four or five computers floating around, three cell phones, and a new iPad.

But in my mind, and even in my body, I’m still working-class. I stripped, with my own hands, the oak woodwork in our house. I can’t keep up with the housecleaning, but I hate hiring cleaners, so I don’t.

When finally unity was reached that this (private, expensive) school was the one he should go to—he can record music there, play in the jazz band, try out for soccer and lacrosse and all those fancy sports, and integrate his interests in art and math and history, in ways he couldn’t do at the performing arts school—I cried again, because I felt as though my only child were moving further and further away from my family’s roots. Is he becoming a double-barreled kid?

It might be a good thing to move away from my roots—they held a good bit of canker, and he needs to live his own life.

And that’s what he’s doing. He’s taller than I am now. He gloats about it.

It’s a major life-passage to watch your son’s head finally rise above your own. I’ve felt the pain of letting him go ever since he was born. It’s a very good thing—it’s exercise—but like exercise, it hurts.

Here is a view from the lawn in front of Athena’s house:

Dropped my son off for soccer practice and hightailed it across town. The island is under a bridge, and I’m used to parking there and taking the trail on my bike across to the north shore and downriver toward the city, toward the confluence: two long rivers with their origins in neighboring states become one river that defines the entire southern border of another state before dumping into the Mississippi. Usually I ride to the end of the north shore trail, then cross some spans and ride back along the south shore.

That evening, though, I was going to run it. I’d never run this trail.

Also: I hadn’t run alongside another person since—well, since I was 16 and forced to run four laps around the football field in high-school gym class. And I could never finish even one lap without walking.

The memory of this is alive in my body. When I run out of breath, when a stitch needles it way up my right side; especially when my face floods with blood and I can feel it turn red, when the salt runs down my cheeks and onto my lips, I feel the memory of My Failure.

So in getting ready to run with Athena, worries buzzed in my brain like flies: It was 80 degrees. I’d never run my three miles in hot weather. And here’s the way I keep up my expectations for my speed when I run: I use a playlist with songs whose rhythm matches my pace, I pump it into my brain through my earphones, it’s like fuel; but I wouldn’t be able to use my earphones with Athena next to me. How would I keep up?

Athena would lose patience. She’s a tennis player

(so am i)

and runs pretty regularly

(hey wait, so do i)

and I was sure she’d be pulling back on her curb bit to slow down to my pace.

A text lit up my phone:

Call or text when you get on the island.

She was actually looking forward to this? At a red light I sighed and texted:

Meet u under the bridge?

I pulled onto the big blue bridge and zigzagged my way down to the trailhead. George Washington once landed a boat on this island. In the nineteenth century it was full of slaughterhouses. It used to be called Pig Island; now its name is Washington’s Landing and it’s lined with riverside condos. It’s home to the city’s rowing club. I’ve taken my kid and his buddies fishing off the rowing club docks.

The crews were out that night, working the water.

There was Athena, waiting for me under the bridge, looking like the experienced jock that she is. Neon green running shoes. Nervously I started in. “Look,” I said, “I never run with people. I might go too slow. I might not run long enough for you. You might just want to take off.” She regarded me curiously and mentioned she was still recovering from a foot injury from two years ago.

“I only run about three miles,” I said, walking alongside her.

Perfect, she said, walking.

Then she started to run.

We ran the path on the south side of the island and down the pedestrian bridge onto the north shore trail. Zigzagging down this bridge is fun on a bike but it dawned on me: In about 25 minutes I’d have to run back up.

I always forget to time myself. Which I think might be a fortunate mistake: Obviously I’ve piled up so many expectations for any performance, even a daily run, that timing myself would just add to my list of measuring sticks to Prove I Am Capable. But Athena was glancing at a bulky watch that included a heart monitor, and she was keeping easy time.

About five minutes in I said, “Are we going too slow?”

Relax, she said. This is perfect for me. I’m so glad we’re finally doing this.

Because we’d said for a couple of years that we were going to get together and work out. I’d see her at meetings at the church near my house. In 2009 she’d be slumped down, looking at no one, putting on a front of extreme unconcern, and me—on my way to a relapse—I’d be checking out her clothes, making her my style guru, her hipster glasses, the way she was always able to scrape her hair back into a rough ponytail, the way she’d wear pink and lime green together and manage not to look preppy, the way she’d wear butch jeans and boots with a starched shirt and a long string of pearls. She was my age and very fit, she was definitely from my neck of the woods, and I said, Let’s work out. She said, Yeah—let’s get together. But I relapsed and we never got together and two weeks before this run I wasn’t even sure I had her phone number anymore.

Now, in meetings, she sits up straight, she lets herself look like she’s paying attention, she’s into it, and I sit near her and no longer spend my time taking an inventory of her clothes. I listen, mostly, and I knit. And finally, we’re working out.

I’ve heard that faith isn’t a feeling. It’s a set of actions designed to develop certain attitudes.

About 13 minutes in she asks, How far do you want to go?

I’m breathing hard. She keeps asking me questions and I’m not even sure I can hold up my end of the conversation, because I never talk when I run, because I always run alone. I usually see this trail from the saddle of a bike. Everything feels unfamiliar and I’m sure I look stupid.

I say, “I usually go about half an hour.”

She says, Great—let’s turn around at the loop in the road, about two minutes up.

I say, casually, “Maybe we should run a little further than that. I’ll never be able run back up that fucking bridge.”

She turns her face toward me for the first time that day and says firmly, Hey—why don’t you just see how you feel when you get there? Why don’t you just take it slow, bit by bit, and see how you do? She is smiling and her voice is poking fun, but tough fun. A coach.

The coach makes me realize: I am freaking out and convincing myself that I can’t run back up that bridge—and all the while, I’m running AWAY from it. I’m not even headed in that direction. I don’t yet even have to think about it.

So: At 15 minutes we turn at the loop and head back, and in another 10 minutes we arrive at the foot of the bridge, and I take it slow, bit by bit, step by step, the way I got sober—five minutes by five minutes clean, sometimes—and I run back up the bridge and all the way to our meeting place.

“How much did we do?” I ask.

About 3.2 miles, she says. We wander over to the deck of a restaurant, perched over the river, and we stretch our legs together, watching the crews row by. Athena says she’ll text me a list of her favorite vitamins and supplements. We feel awesome and we hug tight and say we’ll definitely do it again.

My body feels strong, full of oxygen, maybe even helium, my legs feel supple, my body holds itself upright. Like a tree. Like something that’s growing naturally, its feet on the ground.

On the drive home my phone lights up again:

AWESOME!! Just AWESOME… Sharing & running with you. THANK YOU G!! Love you. Peace, Athena

Imagine, someone thanking me for running with her. Bloody hell.

My life is changing without my even trying.

Paul Carr.

Oh wait—he’s a techie! Former writer for TechCrunch, sometimes writes for The Guardian, based in San Francisco but likes to wander back to his homebase in London.

Smartypants.

He’s the type of guy who’d make public fun of me for (but secretly wither with super-insecurity about) my never having heard of him before today.

“Let me first say, I didn’t go to AA. You shouldn’t knock something before you’ve tried it,” he says, then proceeds to shit all over AA without ever having tried it. AA is all about “admitting powerlessness” and “abdicating responsibility,” he says, “and I’ve just never been an abdicating-responsibility-type person.”

Hm. For real, man?—all the drunks I knew, myself included, when we were “out there drinking and using,” as my sponsor likes to say, were indeed abdicating-responsibility people.

“I did some terrible things while I was drinking,” he admits, “but they were all ME,” he says, pointing to his skinny chest.

Me, me, me.

I guess humility doesn’t figure in Paul Carr’s steps. This is a guy who, on his Twitter feed, directs followers to “please ensure that in future all humblebrags mention my brilliant book.”

Twitterers: please ensure that in future all humblebrags mention my brilliant book.

— Paul Carr (@paulcarr) March 16, 2012

Just to unpack the meaning of this comment a bit further, Urban Dictionary on “humblebrag”: “When you try to get away with bragging about yourself by couching it in a phony show of humility.”

It’s weird, though: a lot of what he says is just like AA.

For example Paul Carr says one of his own personal 12 steps to sobriety is (wait for it): Honesty!

“Another step,” he says, “was to be as scrupulously honest as I could.”

He (thinks he) invented this himself. … Oops, just Googling “AA big book on honesty” and I get these cites: “Our solution … demands rigorous honesty”; “nothing counted but thoroughness and honesty”; “they are naturally incapable of grasping and developing a manner of living which demands rigorous honesty.” Oh yeah and the NA basic text:

Honest self-assessment is one of the keys to our new way of life. … Let’s face it: when we were using, we were not honest with ourselves.

Then, with no experience whatsoever in an “anonymous” program, he takes down the principle of anonymity. Or tries to.

I also didn’t like the anonymity aspect. I felt like, if I kept my problem with drinking a secret—was just going to meetings where nothing was outside those four walls—that wasn’t going to help me in a situation where I was at a party and someone offered me a drink. They didn’t know I was an alcoholic—they didn’t know that was possibly a bad thing. I needed as many people as possible to know that I had this problem. So that—for my ego, really, I didn’t ever want anyone to catch me with a drink.

For all his shortcomings, his pride and infidelities and acid trips, it’s hard to imagine Bill Wilson going on national television to publicize “his steps.” Tough to imagine him starting a Twitter feed and asking people to promote “his brilliant book.” I see now why Bill W. refused to put his headshot on the cover of Time magazine. The fellowship was larger than himself. It was the fellowship that got him sober.

I listen to Paul Carr talk and experience in a new way the reasons members of the 12 step fellowships emphasize the principle of anonymity as the spiritual foundation to all the steps. It’s not  just to save my own face from stigma, it’s to restrict my temptation to speak for others; and in a much larger project, it’s to cultivate humility by asking me to refuse to speak for whatever fellowship saved my life. No One Person can speak for a fellowship.

But I guess if you get sober all by your ownself, all bets are off and you can do whatever the hell you want.

(Come to think of it, sounds a lot like me when I was “out there drinking and using”—all by my ownself, doing whatever the hell I wanted.)

They say in the program, and elsewhere for that matter, that the things about other people that make you want to yark all over your keyboard bug you are the things that you most dislike in yourself. To get really honest and humble with you guys, I can admit that, yeah, I’ve fantasized about being the star of my own media blitz. Tempting (and easy) to wish upon a star for a segment on the Journal; instead I hope someday I can let go of enough of my persistent arrogance and pride to be able to “stumble upon” a crappy video like this and not feel even a slim shred of envy.