In early October, my newest book, “Staying Sober One Story at a Time,” will be published by Scepter Publishers. It is the story of my recovery from alcoholism told through the characters in four novels: “The Lost Weekend” by Charles Jackson, “Under the Volcano” by Malcolm Lowry, “Brideshead Revisited” by Evelyn Waugh; and “The Edge of Sadness” by Edwin O’Connor.
“Staying Sober One Story at a Time” is not theoretical. Nor is it a “self-help” book. Rather, it is a book about stories and the way they may shape our lives. More specifically, it is about the various claims that stories make upon our lives, as well as our attempts to tell stories about them.
Our lives are structured by stories, in two interrelated ways. First, stories shape our perceptions in ways that we are not even aware of. We are “claimed” by stories, sometimes in competition with one another, and those claims move us to embrace this virtue and reject that vice.
Second, because our lives are narratively constituted, we have an innate impulse to impose stories on them. This is so that we can try to make sense of our lives in a coherent and comprehensive way. We are formed by stories. And we form stories to make sense of our lives.
The reason I approach my recovery through the telling of stories is that I am not interested in the debate about whether my inability to drink moderately is a function of a lack of will, a physiological disease or of involuntary synapses of the brain.
My approach is agnostic as to the cause of my alcoholism and pragmatic as to its treatment. I know from painful experience that I cannot control the amount of alcohol that I drink. So, today, I choose to drink none.
The words and phrases that bounce around an Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) meeting (for example: “One is too many, a hundred is not enough”) are the words that keep me from drinking. And, thus, they are the words and phrases that keep me alive. “There’s no bargaining with alcohol … once you have to have” it, Martha Woodruff once wrote in The New York Times. “You either stop drinking … or you die.”
But as the story of every addict is unique, so is the story of every addict’s recovery. Mine has been rooted in the moral and spiritual traditions of my Catholic faith rather than the vague “Higher Power” of AA.
I am moved by the moral courage of St. Monica, for example, who overcame her addiction to alcohol to become one of the great saints of the Church, as reported by St. Augustine. After being told by a rival that she was “a drunkard,” St. Monica, “pierced by this rebuke, … looked upon her own uncleanness and immediately condemned it and cast it off.”
St. Augustine notes, “Just as the praises of friends lead us astray, so too the rebukes of our enemies often set us back on the right path.” And I seek the intercession of St. Martin of Tours, another patron of recovering alcoholics.
Additionally — and more to the point of my new book — I have found salient resources in literature. Our lives are constituted by narratives. We are, to paraphrase Aristotle, “narrative animals.” We tell stories to try to account for our moral, spiritual and political lives, for example.
These stories may be expressions of our experiences. Or they may be attempts to impose a sense of order or continuity to experiences that we have difficulty comprehending. Stories are our attempt to interpret our lives in a coherent way. In both cases, we use stories to make our lives intelligible.
The paradigmatic example of this two-fold use of narrative is St. Augustine’s magisterial “Confessions.” The work is perhaps the first literary example of storytelling as a way to make sense of a person’s history. Sometimes we find ourselves in the stories of others, even if those others are fictitious characters in novels and stories.
In some senses, the importance of literature is not what a text says, but rather what it does. I am hopeful that my new book, like the novels I discuss in it, will help someone who struggles with alcohol to begin to find deliverance. And I hope it will help those who love an alcoholic to begin to understand how difficult it is for an alcoholic to quit. And in all things, it is my hope that God will deliver the addict from the throes of his addiction through the grace that is everywhere.
Kenneth Craycraft is a professor of moral theology at Mount St. Mary’s Seminary and School of Theology in Cincinnati and author of “Citizens Yet Strangers: Living Authentically Catholic in a Divided America” (OSV Books).
