Blackout: Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget

Tilting the wide brim of a martini glass toward the sky to catch whatever plunked into it.

That was the worst sin of all: trying too hard.

the person who wanted to play but could not bear to play. To want the microphone but to stand in the back. To know there is a book in you but to never find the nerve to wrestle it out. I was so screwed up on the issue of performance. It’s like I didn’t want anyone to hear me, but I couldn’t shut up. Or rather, I wanted everyone to hear me, but only

Cramming food into my mouth brought a rush of rebellion, but I was never sure who I was fighting.

I did not. My writing was a kind of literary karaoke. I aped the formulas and phrasings of older critics whose work I admired.

Sometimes people drift in and out of your life, and the real agony is fighting it. You can gulp down an awful lot of seawater, trying to change the tides.

But I kept longing for a secret conversation, away from the pitchforks of the Internet, about how hard it was to match the clarity of political talking points to the complexity of life lived at last call.

Tilting the wide brim of a martini glass toward the sky to catch whatever plunked into it.

I liked to curl up inside my own suffering and stay for a while.

I knew AA worked miracles. What nobody ever tells you is that miracles can be very, very uncomfortable.