Drink: The Deadly Relationship Between Women and Alcohol

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Maybe you switch from red to white (less staining on the teeth).

Or maybe it’s no wine; only beer.

No brown liquids, only clear. (Vodka doesn’t smell, does it?)

Only on weekends.

Never on Sundays.

Never, ever alone.

The problem is: The rules continue to change. Your drinking doesn’t.

You take up running or swimming. (In my case, it was power-walking. People who power-walk can’t be alcoholics, can they?)

You start to wake at four in the morning. (Doesn’t everyone wake at four in the morning?)

You promise to do better tonight, to drink less.

Only you don’t.

In fact, the only commitment you seem able to keep is the diary. It tells a story, and the story is starting to look scary.

Worse still? This is only the beginning of the end.

Like many a drinking diary, mine started off well. For a few days, the monkey stickers began to accumulate: I had kept to my limits. Of course, I kept the diary hidden. (What vice principal pastes monkey stickers into a journal?) But it wasn’t long before those stickers petered out. Alcohol is a formidable enemy: once you name it, it digs in hard.

I said this to the addiction doctor in March. He nodded. “How do you feel about alcohol now?” he asked. “I love it.” He frowned. “And I hate it.” “Be careful,” he warned. “Alcohol is a trickster. And using alcohol to cope is maladaptive behavior.”

One spring evening, I had dinner with the eloquent dean of medicine, Rich Levin. He was newish to McGill, having moved with his wife from New York, and he had had a difficult day.

Rich was a martini drinker, and he ordered one, then another.

“Why did you come to Montreal, Rich?”

“I came here for the waters.”

I fell for it. “The waters?”

“Turns out I was misinformed.”

I looked puzzled.

“Casablanca.”

“Another drink, Rich?”

“Never, my dear. You know what Dorothy Parker says.”

The next time I saw him, Rich pulled a gently used cocktail napkin from his pocket and handed it to me. There were Parker’s words, emblazoned beside a martini glass: “I love a martini—but two at the most. Three I’m under the table, four, I’m under the host.”

That night, I pasted the napkin into my diary. Beside it I wrote: “I am bullied by alcohol. I am hiding behind it.” I knew the jig was up.

Days later, on Father’s Day morning, I learn that my cousin Doug—childhood confidant and best friend—had been killed by a drunk driver, on his way home from his mother’s eightieth-birthday celebration. His young daughter, the youngest of four, was in the front seat. She survived but was severely injured.

It was a sunny Sunday morning, and I remember thinking: “What else do you have to lose to alcohol before you give up?” I had already lost a big part of my childhood, now my cousin—and I was losing myself.

I pulled out a bulletin board and tacked a piece of paper with four handwritten words at the top: “The Wall of Why.” As in, why I needed to give up drinking. Or: why I needed to avoid dying. The diary was no longer working. In fact, it had never worked. For the first time, I was terrified this habit might kill me.

I spent an hour filling the board with images and words I loved. In that condo, I had very few photographs—one of Nicholas with his arm around me, after winning bronze at a rowing regatta; one of Jake casting a line off the houseboat deck; one of my dog Bo. There were so many faces missing. I took out my fountain pen and wrote the names of others on pieces of white paper, pinning them carefully to the board. Then, I added several pieces of prose—Annie Dillard, Simone Weil—and some poetry: “Love after Love,” by Derek Walcott.

Then I got down on my knees and said the only prayer I believed in, words from T. S. Eliot’s “East Coker”:

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope

For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love,

For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith.

But the faith, and the love, and the hope are all in the waiting.

Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:

So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.

Within weeks, Jake and I would find our way to a recovery meeting in a church basement. He held my hand while tears rivered down my cheeks. For an hour I listened to a roomful of seemingly happy people share their stories, their faith, their gratitude. As they started to stack the chairs, a tall black stranger in a funky hat came up to comfort me. “Darlin’,” he drawled, “believe me, whatever you did wrong, I did way, way worse.”

Every season has its own soundtrack: that summer, it was Keith Jarrett’s introspective Köln Concert wafting over pink-streaked granite, keeping us company as we drank cranberry juice and soda with our meals. Jake’s precious mother had just died a difficult death. When Jarrett felt too haunting, Jake would toss in a little Frank or Van to keep the tone romantic. “I’m making love to you with my playlist,” he’d call out from his computer, and I’d be enveloped, newly sober, in a fresh cocoon of sound.

But for the rest of the world, the summer of 2007 belonged to the defiant Amy Winehouse: “They tried to make me go to rehab. I said No, no, no!” An earworm if ever there was one. The point wasn’t lost on me as I headed back to McGill, having tallied my first seventeen days of sobriety in the north woods of Ontario. Checking my BlackBerry as I cabbed in from the airport, I found myself humming along. “No, no, no!”

Little did I understand that it would be more than a year before I was able to secure any meaningful sobriety, to put alcohol somewhat solidly in my rearview mirror. It would be three years after that before I regained what could be called a true sense of equilibrium. And it would take all my journalistic skills to put what was killing me—and as it turns out, a growing number of women—into some profound and meaningful context.

In the meantime, I was about to lose many things I cared about: my livelihood, my heart, my gusto. And before things got better, they were going to get as tough as tough could be.