Books for Low People
Vol. 3, Issue 43
Our readers list some meaningful books that helped more than hurt.
If you purchase any of these books, please buy them from Greenlight Bookstore.
*****
“The first stop on my sobriety journey was a week in a psychiatric hospital after I decided I was going to kill myself and my therapist was like, nope, you get to go here instead. After I was admitted and realized there was no getting out immediately I asked my husband to bring me some books, whatever was on my bedside table. One of those books was Black Wave by Michelle Tea, a recovering addict who writes pretty amazing memoirs about her early life in San Francisco as an alcoholic/drug using/punk/dyke. This book, though, was a fictionalized account of a woman getting sober set against a subtly looming apocalypse. I didn't see it quite so clearly at the time--my brain being a jumble of sadness hormones and trazodone and self-pity--but this idea that getting sober is a kind of world-ending event really started to sink in.
Our worlds do have to end in some way if we want to change our lives. The other miracle of this book was that another young woman in the ward saw me reading it and exclaimed "I love Michelle Tea!" and I got to say "Here, it's all yours when I'm done" and I hope it helped her eventually get sober too. (Full admission: I did stop drinking for several months after I was discharged, but wasn't ready to admit I was an alcoholic and had a couple more good years of self-sabotage left in me. But I still think about this book and how it nudged me toward recovery.) – ANONYMOUS
*****
“So it's not a book, but Edith Zimmerman's "My First Year Sober" comic from 2018 pretty much changed my life and did lead me to several other books that became meaningful to me in the trying-to-stop, then early-not-drinking days: Julia Wertz's Drinking at the Movies (another comic--I didn't even think I liked comics); the Allen Carr classic; Caroline Knapp's Drinking: A Love Story.
I'd long been a fan of Edith's writing, but I hadn't realized until I stumbled across that comic that she'd gotten sober, and it felt like the thing I'd been searching for to explain my drinking finally made sense. Everyone close to me drank, and everyone I talked to about my own drinking tried to convince me mine wasn't problematic. But in Edith's comic, I got the profound sense of familiarity and understanding I'd been so desperate for--that things would be better on the other side of it--and the kernel of hope that maybe it was true and that if it was true for her, maybe I could do it, too.”– L.V.
*****
“Allen Carr, Stop Drinking Now is the book that led me to quit, allowed me to quit. I joke sometimes that it hypnotized me, and I'm not sure that's a joke actually. I'd tried really hard to drink less and to moderate for a full year before I read the book, and at that point I was exhausted from the mind games. My best friend had read the Carr book and quit drinking after reading it, so I went into it thinking, this is it. Five days before my birthday I ordered it on Kindle and read it, then sat with it a few days. Then on my birthday I had a glass of wine alone before I met my friend at the theatre and then that was it, that was the end of my drinking. My Amazon order history shows me that I read a lot of books in the months after, books I'd been meaning to read but never got around to: Hollinghurst, Elena Ferrante, Rachel Cusk. I also see that I read two books about the AIDS crisis — And The Band Played On and The Greatest Show On Earth — but I can only speculate why a newly sober person for whom the world had just started to open up would want to delve down that particular rabbit hole.” – L.S.
*****
“The Complete Book of Kong by William Trowbridge. It's a poetry collection from the perspective of King Kong trying to assimilate into civilized society. It's almost too absurd. But I felt like Kong, a total asshole, stomping around, breaking things, ruining entire cities. I still do feel that way sometimes. Yet there he was, in those poems, trying out for the Chicago Bears, recording a video for a dating service, talking about the weather. He failed slightly at everything, but never catastrophically, and I knew I needed to get over myself.” – H.B.
*****
“Silently Seduced by Dr. Ken Adams. I always felt a strong allegiance to my parents over my spouse. I hated it, knew I didn't like it, and yet I couldn't explain it, understand it, or figure it out. And then I read this book, and it was as if I was looking in a mirror. And I understood why I was doing what I was doing in my addiction - it was the only place where I felt I had agency and freedom to do what I wanted, even though it hurt the people I loved the most. They call sex addiction eroticized rage, and this explained how I'd been feeling for so long. I broke down and cried, and then I started my recovery.” – ANONYMOUS
*****
“I have to say Drinking: A Love Story. Because I read that really early, maybe around my first attempt at stopping drinking, and I knew, in the way she talked about the shame, in the way she talked about taking the empties to the recycling at like 5 in the morning, that that was me. I knew my relationship was unhealthy so long before I quit and she helped me frame it and see it and start that process long before I took those steps.” – F.M.
*****
“When I was still actively drinking, I always sought out recovery memoirs. I like to tell myself that a lot of it was looking for the stories of other’s rock bottoms and being like, “well, at least I’m not doing x or y.” When I decided to sober up I picked up and re-read Leslie Jamison’s “The Recovering,” and marked it up, took notes, and sobbed all my way through it. The line “Of course my pain was real, just like everyone’s. Of course it wasn’t quite like anyone’s, just like everyone’s” sticks to me to this day.“ – E.S.
*****
“Out of the Wreck I Rise by Neil Steinbeck and Sara Bader. Excerpts from great literature - fiction, nonfiction, poetry - arranged in order of common stages of recovery.
(Am I supposed to write a book report about this or just send the title?)
– S.R.
