I just finished this book, and man, y’all. I really liked it. “Really liked� didn’t always translate to “was riveted by� or even “consistently enjoyedI just finished this book, and man, y’all. I really liked it. “Really liked� didn’t always translate to “was riveted by� or even “consistently enjoyed reading,� but I have to say—as a queer woman, as a mystery aficionada, and as someone from a family of addicts, with her own complicated past and present history with substance use/abuse—that I feel tremendously grateful it exists.
And that continuing trainwreck quality is something I sincerely prized about this book. So many depictions of addiction flinch from the grinding tedium and constant rawness of recovery. Much like romance plots, the focus is on will-they-or-won’t-they: will they kiss? will they pick up that bottle? It’s a tragedy if they take that drink, or a happy, life-affirming ending if they don’t. While Maggie is still tempted on a near-nightly basis to go back to using, the focus of Schulman’s book is less on whether she’ll lapse, and more on the other parts of recovery: a “recovery� that’s really more like building from scratch a life and a personality that never fully developed in the first place. Spending a couple of decades making substance use the center of one’s priorities means that the rest of one’s development—the evolution of a personality, the cultivation of interests outside oneself, the ability to empathize with other people and sometimes put others ahead of one’s own interests—gets put on hold. Maggie spends the majority of this book trying (and often failing) to come to grips with who and what the “she� is who she’s supposed to be rehabilitating and recovering. She is 42 years old, but she has the self-involved crisis of personality, and the awkward inability to interact with other people, of a teenager.
As a reader, that self-involved quality is sometimes tedious and frustrating to read. Maggie’s self-pity and her lack of self-knowledge are often rough going. But they ring EXTREMELY true. And Schulman also does a great job of illustrating why they ring true: because what else is Maggie going to focus on? What else does she have? Without drugs, her life and her concept of self don’t just feel empty: they genuinely are empty. Her family of origin is toxic and also alcoholic; her previous professional connections are severed due to her disease; her ex-girlfriend and daughter are out of bounds to her; but more than any of this, the organizing principle of her life and her self-concept has been removed, and she has nothing to replace it with. She’s starting to rebuild from the very bottom, and it’s an exhaustingly destabilized and tedious process. I don’t think I’ve ever read something that confronts that reality in quite the way Schulman does here.
(As a side note: I also really appreciated the depiction of navigating AA/NA as an atheist. Maggie doesn’t believe in a higher power, which makes the 12-step program a rough fit for her; this is something with which I have intimate family experience, and Schulman’s depictions rang very true.)
In any case: not a light read, but a very good one. ...more
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