At some point in my 20s - I just hadn’t really thought about it before - I became aware of a schism running through the society and often cutting within families and friend groups. There were the drinkers, of which I was a part; and then there was AA, the ‘sober,’ those in ‘recovery,’ who often seemed to be hiding in plain sight, were no different really from everybody else except for when a server came around to take a drinks order or for the hour or so a week when they slipped away to a meeting in a church basement.
My initial understanding of this, influenced by some alcoholic comedians, was that the AA crowd were basically failed drinkers. My conception, which had taken me through a hard-drinking college crowd and then through an equally alcohol-inflected 20s, was that everybody in Western cultures basically had a dance with the devil when it came to booze. Everybody ran the risk of becoming an alcoholic, everybody ran the risk of some alcohol-related tragedy, but that it was so embedded in the culture that there was basically nothing to do about it except to hang on tight, try to be a moderate drinker, ideally reach a ripe old age in which one could be one of these gloriously alcohol-sodden old people, and for those who misstepped, overdid it early on, had a genetic predisposition to alcoholism, etc, then it was like a bad die roll in Monopoly or Chutes and Ladders or something and it was off to the AA meetings and a grimmer, thinner kind of life.
But by my late twenties, when drinking no longer seemed quite as fun as it had been and I was becoming more attuned to the nuances of adult alcohol consumption, AA developed a mystique of a different kind. It was in various shows and movies. In High Maintenance a character stuck in ‘retail hell,’ in a co-dependent friendship/relationship mess, sneaks into AA meetings just because it’s better than anything else going in his life: there’s camaraderie, good times, a sense of dignity and purpose. In Fight Club, AA and the groups were understood to be the X-ray of society-at-large, much more truthful, much more addictive, actually, than anything in the world of offices and of catalog-ordered home furnishings. In The Leftovers, the AA sensibility was truncated to stern, shadowy figures in white smoking their cigarettes in quiet rebuke of the vapid rest of society. And then I almost couldn’t keep it together in the scene in The Wire in which Bubbles visits NA for the first time and, on an impulse, vaults forward at the moment when the person leading the meeting asks “And now for the most important person in this room - does anyone have 24 hours or a sincere desire to live?” and is embraced and has a room applaud for him and a smile like his life really is about to change.
I’d search myself and, in a drinking culture, felt that I still was successfully navigating the treacherous road towards my gloriously tipsy old age, wasn’t dependent on booze, wasn’t getting blackout, wasn’t ruining relationships from alcohol, etc. But AA itself had more and more of a lure. “AA is like the most moving thing on the planet,” I would say when I’d make other people watch the Bubbles scene from The Wire.
And into my 30s, still holding tight to the reins of moderate drinking, I started spending more time actually in AA meetings and around the recovery community. Friends invited me to their meetings. I’d visit meetings, both AA and NA, as part of work projects. I’d choke up at the Serenity Prayer, at various of the AA affirmations the same way as in the movies and shows I saw. Like a real novitiate, I actually started reading some of the literature - read a biography of Bill Wilson, read any article I happened across that discussed the history of dealing with alcoholism.
The aspect of it that bothered the secular people I knew - that it was really a religion disguised as a sobriety program - was actually the part that most intrigued me. What I’d started to feel - The Leftovers tapped into this, the Nick Nolte character in The Wrestler - was that the society was sort of split in two and the suture occurred almost perfectly along the lines of alcohol. There were those who were, essentially, market capitalists; who felt that things were working well; that there was a reasonable tradeoff between the daytime activity of putting in labor for monetary reward; and the nighttime ‘leisure’ activity of spending that money on alcohol (that alcohol was the sole means of relaxation for adults was almost self-evident - and all the other adult pleasures, parties, clubbing, dining-out, sexual affairs, etc, seemed attendant on alcohol consumption). And then there were those who seemed no different, who may not have been overtly religious in other ways, but had, in a very public setting, turned themselves over to ‘a higher power’; had opted out of the whole work-reward matrix embedded in the relationship between capital and alcohol; had developed a much sterner, harsher ethical compass for themselves that involved what was, really, an extreme level of accountability for ostensibly personal acts of consumption and that called for an unremitting, lifelong struggle to abide by a set of stringent moral standards. This division had of course flared into the public sphere in the half-century-long battle leading to Prohibition. The consensus was that the market, the easygoing drinkers, had won - just as the secularists had overcome the religious in the much larger struggle for the human soul - but the more time I spent in the vicinity of AA, and feeling the strength of that community, the more I became convinced that the issue was far from settled, and that AA really represented a very different impulse from the rest of society, wasn’t primarily about drinking but was closer to the Faith Militant in Game of Thrones or the Iconoclasts in the Byzantine Empire.
Thinking in those terms - and the fact that AA was so strenuously apolitical changed nothing - AA became an alternative path to follow and, actually, deeply subversive. I felt that in a religious sense: if the culture-at-large was morally lax, profit-driven, corruption-prone, AA emphasized personal integrity, a sense that individual actions even if-not-directly-consequent were weighted in some much greater ledger, advocated for distinctly retrograde practices like confession and atonement - and I felt it as well in an aesthetic dimension. There was some sense about five years ago of falling asleep in chill, secular Brooklyn and waking up one day to find everybody huddled over The Artist’s Way - everybody waking up early to do their pages, everybody dedicating themselves to creating discipline.
The Artist’s Way developed out of AA and seemed (at least this is how I thought of it) like its aesthetic wing - very much like the sort of workbook that recovery programs loved to hand out. Its underlying principle was that there was something off in the way that the culture-at-large thought about art - the focus was on the product, and on success, which created undue stress and often paralysis for the ‘aspiring artist.’ The trick, instead, was to forget all about external expectations, to focus entirely on oneself, which meant being both modest about one’s goals - the work ethic for The Artist’s Way, which closely mirrored AA, was to concentrate on the daily cycle, to do only what was in one’s power, to do everything a step at a time - and simultaneously to develop an ironclad discipline, to do the work every day and to pick right back up if a day was missed. I’ve had my doubts about The Artist’s Way - there’s room to criticize the inflexibility of it just as it’s possible to make an intelligent critique of AA - but I’d consider myself a fellow traveler to it. The basic idea struck me as being exactly right - the emphasis on discipline, on personal accountability, the relative lack of interest in the market, the belief also that if one did manage to free oneself from the anxieties of the market and of social pressure then there was a vast internal world one could tap into that would bring about real personal fulfillment.
I was a little surprised, the more I thought about it, that The Artist’s Way was treated, or at least marketed, as a training tool for artists, much in the way that AA itself was perceived as the medical treatment for alcoholism. That wasn’t really how people deeply invested in The Artist’s Way or in AA thought about it, but they tended to keep a little quiet when in the society-at-large about just what the program meant to them. The kind of signature moment for AA - the ‘nativity scene’ for the whole movement - was the visit of Ebby Thacher to Bill Wilson in 1934 when Wilson, in a genial mood, happy to see an old drinking buddy, pushed “a lusty glass of gin flavored with pineapple juice” to Thacher and was “crestfallen” when Thacher told him that he had “got religion” and had a program in place for getting sober. What was so important, in Wilson’s recollection of the scene, wasn’t so much the content of what Thacher said as the change in Thacher’s deportment. “There was a subtle something or other instantly apparent even to my befuddled perception,” Wilson recalled. “Yes - there was certainly something more - he was inexplicably different - what had happened to him?” Both Wilson and Thacher would relapse after that; there would be various turns of the wheel before the formation of AA as we know it. But, for Wilson, it was the ‘kitchen scene’ that really created the movement - the sense that Wilson’s bonhomie was a false pose; the sense that there was another, tougher, better way to be.
Well done! “Having no opinion on outside issues” is a key tenet in my sober writing life.
Just came across this. My first Substack comment. Moving to read. We usually don't hear about AA from the 'sober' perspective. As somebody who's very much on the other side of it that's appreciated. There's a lot to be said for the moral sensibility of AA, the sense of personal discipline. It has nothing to do with booze really and has nothing to do with religion in the usual sense. There's a lot in there that people not in the alcohol 'matrix' can take to heart.