Day 74, Thursday May 16, 2024: Sanborn, Iowa to Ortonville, Minnesota

Carnegie libraries visited: Sibly, Iowa; Madison, Ortonville, Glenwood, and Sauk Center, Minnesota

Do you know how it is when you don’t notice something until you do, and then you notice it everywhere? On family vacations when I was a child, one way my parents kept we kids occupied (our Ford Falcon station wagon had neither radio nor air-conditioning) was to create a “how many did you see?” games. For a couple of years, each child guessed how many different state license plates we would see on the trip, and the child who guessed most accurately won some prize. (I remember the game; I have no memory of the prize, so I doubt I ever won.) For a license plate sighting to count, the sighting had to be verified by two of us. Pretty smart game theorizing by my parents; the game required each of us to be on the lookout, and it required at least some teamwork. 

In the mid-1960s, after the Ford Mustangs came out, the contest was to guess how many blue mustangs we would see. This rule change heightened the suspense. When predicting the number of different state licenses we would see, the only decent guesses (for a week-long vacation) would be in the upper 40s: 45, 46, 47, 48. (I don’t think we ever saw a license from all 50 states.) None of us had any idea how many blue mustangs we would see, however. Twenty? Two hundred? DuckDuckGo tells me that about 600,000 Mustangs were sold in 1965 and again in 1966. We didn’t know this at the time. Without evidence, I’m going to just assert that the child who guessed the highest number won the prize because, once you start looking for blue mustangs, you’ll see them everywhere.

So it is with me and alcohol. When the New York Times ran the headline “Locks of Beethoven’s Hair Offer New Clues to the Mystery of His Deafness.” I couldn’t help but click on it. A mystery! New clues! Spoiler alert: the next few sentences disclose the clues. Using sophisticated new technologies, an analysis of a few locks of Beethoven’s hair revealed massively high levels of lead (as well as arsenic and mercury). Deafness is “entirely consistent” with lead poisoning. The likely source of Beethoven’s exposure? Cheap wine. Beethoven drank copious amounts, believing that it was good for his health and, well, he was addicted to it. Back in the day, lead acetate (“lead sugar”) was often added to the equivalent of Two Buck Chuck to enhance its flavor. Wine was fermented in kettles soldered with lead, which would leach into the glogg. Even the corks were soaked in lead salt to improve their seal. As the Times reports:

[Beethoven’s] secretary and biographer, Anton Schindler, described the deathbed scene: “This death struggle was terrible to behold, for his general constitution, especially his chest, was gigantic. He still drank some of your Rüdesheimer wine in spoonfuls until he passed away.”

As he lay on his deathbed, his publisher gave him a gift of 12 bottles of wine. By then Beethoven knew he could never drink them. He whispered his last recorded words: “Pity, pity — too late!”

In Leslie Jamison’s (not Jameson, as in the scotch) book The Recovering, she explores the relationship between alcohol and art. She is a writer, and she wonders if she’ll still be able to write if she sobers up. A central question that she poses is whether the artists were great because they were alcoholics, or in spite of it. It’s hard to know, as we can’t design a test to compare the output of the sober Hemmingway and the drunk one. We could compare an artist’s work before addiction and compare it to the work after it kicks in, or vice versa, yet that is not a perfect test. Artists change as they grow older, whether they drink or not, and for some the genius manifests itself when they are younger or older. Like most things in life, I’ll leave it as a mystery.

I’ve been listening to memoirs of addiction and recovery, as I’m interested in both the stories and how the stories are told. I’m working from this list from Entertainment, with those in bold being the ones I’ve read thus far:

The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath, Leslie Jamison

Wishful Drinking, Carrie Fisher

How to Murder Your Life, Cat Marnell

We All Fall Down: Living with Addiction, Nic Sheff

Smashed: A Story of a Drunken Girlhood, Koren Zailckas

More, Now, Again: A Memoir of Addiction, Elizabeth Wurtzell

Drinking: A Love Story, Caroline Knapp

Parched: A Memoir, Heather King

Lit: A Memoir, Mary Karr

Junky, William S. Burroughs

Permanent Midnight: A Memoir, Jerry Stahl

Drunk Mom: A Memoir, Jowita Bydlowska

The Night of the Gun: A Reporter Investigates the Darkest Story of His Life. His Own, David Carr

Dry: A Memoir, Augusten Burroughs (no relation to William S.)

Beautiful Boy: A Father’s Journey Through His Son’s Addiction, David Sheff (Nic’s father)

I can’t help myself: let’s do some math. Nine of the authors are women – and all involve alcohol abuse – while the men are addicted to meth (Sheff), heroin (Burroughs), heroin (Stahl), cocaine (Carr), meth (Sheff’s Beautiful Boy is about his son, Nic); only Burrough’s Dry is about alcoholism. Hey, where are all the alcoholic memoirs by men? They do exist, surely. I just haven’t yet found them. Or is it that men are less likely to write, or to publish their writings, regarding alcoholism?

Men historically have a higher rate of alcoholism than women and women appear eager to catch up. Drinking has worse health outcomes for women than men, even if the woman drinks less and over a shorter period of time. As the National Institutes of Health puts it, 

Comparing people with alcohol use disorders, women have death rates 50 to 100 percent higher than do men, including deaths from suicides, alcohol-related accidents, heart disease, stroke, and liver disease….In addition, women may be more susceptible to craving and relapse, which are key phases of the addiction cycle.

I’m just now finishing Smashed. It’s just about a perfect memoir of alcohol abuse, and I deeply disliked it. Zailckas is a trained writer, yet she writes as if she was newly enrolled in her first writers’ workshop, like her poet-muse was guiding the pen in her hand. Her stories are like the endless waves of a stormy sea, and it's as if she is working the line of a simile factory. She uses “as if” and “like’ like I use the word ‘but’: often. 

Its perfection, and the reason it annoys me, is in the story it tells about alcohol abuse. Here is the story arc of the first ninety-five percent of the book, which is boring in its repetition, just like alcoholism is. Zailckas writes I drank (specific liquors by brand name) until I blacked out. I puked (in the bathroom, on my hair, on my boyfriend’s shirt) my guts out. I had a ferocious hangover that was like a hammer, a bomb, as if I were walking on pins and needles or shattered glass, etc. Again and again, it’s “I drank until I blacked out, I vomited, I had a hangover.” And from all this, I learned nothing. Repeat, and repeat. This narrative seems spot on for the alcoholic. It's much less a glorious experience than it is just more of the same. 

Then, in the last few pages, she simply decides to stop drinking and she does so. She doesn’t say much about what this was like, especially given that on multiple occasions she had pledged to go on the wagon and had been unable to do so for more than a short time. The story thus goes blackout, blackout, blackout, abstinence. 

Zailckas rejects the term alcoholic for herself, although she readily admits to her alcohol abuse. Toward the end of the book she says that she took one of those online “Am I an Alcoholic?” quizzes and diagnosed herself as having “warning signs.” She doesn’t provide any details about the test so I’ll fill them in for her myself.

The quiz asks “In the past 12 months, have you…(my answers, based on Zailckas’ account of her life, in italics)

1. Drank more or longer than you intended? Yes, unless the answer is ‘no’ because I intended to drink until I blacked out.

2. More than once tried to reduce your drinking but were unable to? Yes

3. Spent a lot of time drinking, being sick from drinking, or hungover? Yes

4. Felt cravings so strong that you couldn’t think of anything else but drinking? Yes

5. Realized that drinking or being hungover interfered with work, school or family responsibilities? Yes

6. Kept drinking despite problems with friends or family? Yes

7. Stopped participating in activities you used to enjoy so you could drink? Yes

8. More than once participated in dangerous or reckless behavior after drinking, such as driving or having unprotected sex? Yes

9. Kept drinking after feeling depressed or anxious, after blacking out or after knowing it would worsen another health problem? Yes

10. Had to consume more drinks than usual to feel the same effects? Yes

11. Experienced hallucinations or withdrawal symptoms (shakiness, trouble sleeping, nausea, depression, sweating, elevated heart rate, anxiety, irritability or seizure) when the effects of alcohol started to wear off? Yes

Looks like a perfect 11 for 11 to me, and I know a perfect score when I see one. Still, who am I to judge?

AA’s Big Book contains many stories written by alcoholics that “disclose in a general way what we used to be like, what happened, and what we are like now.” Our stories are our own and, as we tell them at a meeting, they are never challenged. Each person gets to tell their story in their own way, and we are encouraged to take what is useful to us and to discard the rest. Zailckas’ story clearly has an audience, and it made the New York Times bestseller list. In 2022, the United States had about twelve million females between the ages of 15-24. In this age group, females are slightly more likely than males to binge drink or otherwise abuse alcohol, so even if only 20 percent of these females binge drink then over two million young women will have stories that overlap, in some way, Zailckas’ own.

No novelist wrote the history of the Sibley Carnegie, as it appears on the library’s website. It’s frustratingly vague and passive: “In 1874, a Library Association was formed….In 1895 a meeting was held to discuss plans to start a library with a reading room. It was decided to purchase as many good books and periodicals as possible as well as hire a caretaker…In 1908, it was proposed…a basket supper was held…In 1915, a new library was assured. Sibley: be active and specific!

Sorry I didn't write more about libraries today. My mind was elsewhere.