Recovery and Transformation

Elizabeth Zelvin

I’ve been planning my book tour, an essential activity for an emerging writer. I’m finding some of the venues myself, but my publicist is working on the midwestern leg of the trip. When she first proposed the itinerary, I thought the biggest challenge would be breaking the news to my husband that he’s going to Indianapolis. He’s coming with me for that segment of the tour because he has family, my in-laws, in Ohio, but he’s the kind of New Yorker who gets very, very antsy when he has to cross the Hudson. But when I allowed myself to imagine what it would be like to stand by a table piled with my books near the door of a Borders in a mall in Illinois, I began to wonder how on earth I could persuade those ordinary folks out there in the heartland to plunk down their money on the premise that they might enjoy a book called Death Will Get You Sober and come to care about a a guy they’ll first meet on the Bowery coming off a bender.

I enjoy public speaking, and I’ve never doubted I’ll have plenty to say at bookstore discussions. There’s all that backstory about my characters that I took out over the course of many revisions. And I have lots of stories about the Bowery in the old days when I ran an alcohol treatment program there that didn’t make it into the book. But it’s occurred to me that maybe I shouldn’t start there. Maybe I’d better begin with why I wanted—want—to write about recovery. It’s simple: recovery is transformational.

I once knew a nursery school teacher who had her class do a butterfly project every year. They’d watch the caterpillar form its chrysalis and wait for the brightly colored butterfly with its glorious wings to emerge. At the end of the term, she’d take them to the park so they could release the butterflies and see them fly free. Sometimes it’s kind of like that when an alcoholic finds recovery.

Before two guys named Bill W. and Dr. Bob came up with the idea for Alcoholics Anonymous in 1935, alcoholism was truly a hopeless illness—though it was seen as a moral weakness, not an illness—whose outcomes were inevitably “madness” (depression, delirium tremens, irreversible dementia) and death. AA offered another choice: stop drinking for just one day, admit you need help, find some kind of spiritual path, get rigorously honest about your own shortcomings, make amends for the harm you’ve done others, and help another alcoholic. In other words, all you have to do is stop drinking and change your whole life. As they say, the program works.

The real-life agency where I worked for more than six years was greatly appreciated by the surrounding community. It had cleaned up the notorious Third Street Shelter and turned the kind of guys you’d be scared to pass on the street at night into citizens with pride and dignity, ambitions and dreams. Not all of them, but some. The agency used to invite the whole neighborhood to a holiday party. At one of these, a woman asked me what the success rate was. I answered honestly: 15 or 20 percent. It’s hard to kick drugs and alcohol and turn your life around, especially since America doesn’t exactly lift its lamp beside the golden door any more. Some people are never satisfied, and this woman was one of them. “That’s not very much,” she said. I said, “We consider every one a miracle.”

What's shocking? entertaining? political? art?

Elizabeth Zelvin

When I started sending out my mystery about recovery from alcoholism to agents and editors several years ago, I quickly discovered that the topic of alcoholism served as a kind of litmus test, sometimes telling me more about the reader’s psyche than about the quality of my writing. Some said outright that they found the subject depressing—though my protagonist succeeds in turning his life around, the story ends in a burst of hope, and I hope I don’t sound too humorless if I say I think the book is funny. One editor, I remember, said that readers are looking for escape, and my irreverent but affectionate depiction of life in the 12-step programs was too much of a dose of reality. I find this puzzling in the current state of our culture, which embraces reality TV shows on the one hand, and on the other, mysteries and thrillers that focus on gory forensics and/or the psyches of serial killers. How come we find sociopaths and torture entertaining but people giving up their cynicism and despair along with the booze depressing?

This paradox occurred to me a few weeks ago when my husband, who surfs the online news daily, called my attention to an article about the resignation of the president of the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, VA. We were interested because we’ve been to Williamsburg and have an ongoing general interest in history. I’ll be visiting Virginia on my book tour later this spring. And I happened to have had a lunch date the day before with a friend who lives in the state.

What had caused the furor in America’s oldest institution of higher learning? Two issues, it seems, had offended the powers that be: a controversial art exhibit on campus—the Sex Workers Art Show—and the president’s decision to take down a monument known as the Wren Cross—designed by the great architect Sir Christopher Wren and, according to one’s perspective, a symbol of sectarian religion or a work of art.

If indeed I understood the facts correctly—not always easy in the online news—I had mixed feelings about the package as presented. Censorship of art? Thumbs down! As in the Mapplethorpe brouhaha a few years back, I don’t believe that work conceived as creative art should be judged by conservative moral standards. Sex work as the politically correct conceptualization of prostitution? I don’t buy it, and I’ve been concerned for quite some time by the increasing tyranny of “political correctness”—a term handed down to us from Stalinism, as many people nowadays never knew or don’t remember. I’m not sure I don’t smell thought police on both sides of this particular controversy.

As for the Wren Cross, hmm. As an American Jew, I am horrified that some of our leaders seem to think America is “a Christian country.” I’ve always assumed it was a secular state all of whose citizens were free to choose our beliefs. On the other hand, Christianity has been the major inspiration for art in Western civilization for many centuries. Forbidding the display of art using its symbols is yet another kind of artistic censorship. How different is it from banning, say, the Easter bunny? Or should we ban the Easter bunny? How many people know it’s a pagan symbol, not a Christian one? The rabbit goddess Estre, an avatar of Ishtar, was said to lay multicolored eggs.

I don’t have answers. And I hope nobody gets too mad at me for asking questions. But let me offer one more anecdote to meditate on. A university that I’ve promised not to name has forbidden its theater department to produce and perform Eve Ensler’s feminist masterwork, The Vagina Monologues—the play that put the V word into our everyday vocabulary, and high time, in my opinion. The ongoing ban is moot, because every year, a new group of students organizes the play and one feminist department head or another helps enough with funding to make it happen. This pleases me, as a member of the half of the human race that’s got them. How about you?

Bill W. and Dr. Bob

Elizabeth Zelvin

I saw a terrific play the other day, Bill W. and Dr. Bob, about the founders of Alcoholics Anonymous. This is tricky material for a general audience, as I know, since my own first mystery has a recovering alcoholic protagonist. In the course of selling it, I found the theme of alcoholism acted as a kind of litmus test for agents and editors who read it. And I’m still waiting with some apprehension to see how mystery lovers receive it when it comes out next year. So I was heartened by the enthusiastic reception the play got from a mixed audience. The New York Times called it “an insightful new play,” and the New Yorker said it “paints an endearing portrait of friendship and human weakness with warm humor.” I know the audience was mixed because when Robert Krakovski as Bill Wilson spoke the opening line, “My name is Bill, and I’m an alcoholic,” about half the audience chorused, “Hi, Bill,” immediately getting it that we were in an AA meeting.

For those who don’t know the story, Bill Wilson was a stockbroker with a big ego and a bigger alcohol problem whose last-ditch attempt to stop drinking before it killed him led to a meeting with Bob Smith, a surgeon and equally hopeless drunk, in Akron, Ohio in 1935. After having tried everything, including religion, the two men found that talking to another alcoholic—someone who’d been there too—made it possible to stay sober for just one day, and then another and another.

They made every mistake in the book, taking drunks into their homes, lending them money, and overselling their method instead of listening, while their long-suffering wives wondered if the remedy didn’t leave them as lonely and overburdened as the alcoholism had. But it worked. Two men in Akron in 1935 have become a fellowship of more than two million worldwide.

What was then deeply stigmatized as an incurable moral weakness has become understood as a chronic but treatable disease. The success of AA has led not only to additional self-help programs for those suffering from a variety of addictive disorders and those who love them but also to effective professional treatment: counseling, therapy, and addiction medicine.

It’s a small world. I know of playwright Janet Surrey as a fellow addiction professional and feminist psychologist. (Her coauthor and husband, Stephen Bergman, is a highly regarded novelist and playwright under the pseudonym Samuel Shem.) And I once shook Lois Wilson’s hand, when she was a frail but still feisty little old lady of 93. Dr. Bob, the older of the two men, went to medical school in 1898, to give an idea of the time span involved. I could have chosen a lot less risky theme for my mysteries, but I write about recovery from alcoholism because it’s a life-changing experience. I have seen this transformation many times, and it is always inspiring—awesome in the true sense of the word. At some point in the play, Bill and Dr. Bob are accused of calling everything a miracle. I don’t blame them. I’d say recovery is a miracle every time.