Interview with a 57-Year-Old Sober Person: Claire Dederer

I don’t how shame came to be part of the equation of who I am—but it ran pretty deep. I think that sense of inner shame is pretty common among us alcoholics and addicts; it’s true that drinking and using let us escape other people and external obligations—but it was mostly me that I was running from.

The idea that I would be ridiculed and teased if I were to reveal bits of myself, the things I liked, the things I thought, the things I was afraid of. I came to believe that the only version of me that was palatable and sale-able to the world at large was the one I was painstakingly constructing and that required the prodigious consumption of alco... See more