Our Drinking Problem: Recovery and Bad Aesthetics

To the extent that it is remembered now, James Frey's 2003 addiction-and-recovery memoir A Million Little Pieces is noted chiefly as a succe`s de scandale. Young badass-drunkard-crackhead Frey refused to toe the twelve-step recovery line while a patient at the renowned Hazelden clinic. Instead of admitting he was powerless over alcohol like a good boy, he alternated between clenching his teeth against demon rum and breathing deeply while listening to jazz. Then he put the whole brutal experience on paper. Little Pieces was selected by the Oprah Book Club and sold a bazillion copies; it seemed a breath of fresh air disrupting what had become, by the end of the 1990s, a stale parade of midlist recovery narratives.

Then it was revealed—oops—that things didn't quite go down like that. Frey never did jail time for drunk and disorderly, as he alleged; he never got a root canal without Novocaine; and if he ever had a junkie girlfriend, she never committed suicide as he said. He drank and drugged too much, stole money from his parents, spent a few hours in jail before they bailed him out, and went to rehab. The part about not liking it, though, that was true. But "between the idea / And the reality," as the poet said, "Falls the shadow" (Eliot 80). And this shadow happened to be so dark that both Frey and his publisher, power broker Nan Talese, were hauled back on Oprah to be dressed down by her in front of the cameras.

In retrospect, the incident stands out as an early highlight of the so-called truthiness era within which we now helplessly reside. But just because Frey's book is more interesting as a cultural rather than a literary artifact doesn't make it valueless to the student of literature. While at Hazelden, the narrator of Little Pieces astutely critiques the literature of recovery, working off the texts supplied by the treatment center. He excoriates the Alcoholics Anonymous "Big Book" (the term AA folks use for the eponymous handbook of their fellowship) and a shelf of Hazelden-published workbooks intended to help readers cultivate their lives of sobriety, and in doing so offers a concise and powerful statement of why many intellectuals, progressives, and other high-culture modernist types are suspicious of twelve-step recovery. Recovery literature is "weak, hollow, and empty," in Frey's words, nothing but "simple words and . . . pictures . . . of empty outlines of figures and places" (78, 199). Put simply: its aesthetics suck.

Frey is not the only person to have found twelve-step recovery's earnest, sentimental, and repetitive style offensive. It grates on most folks for whom irony, complexity, and innovation are not merely aesthetic choices, or even aspects of personal style, but ways of making sense of the world. Yet recovery is a long, lonely, and perilous journey, made safer and more bearable by the presence of companions in struggle—hence the importance twelve-step culture has historically placed on reading.¹ What, then, to read, if you are too sophisticated for the Big Book but in need of bibliotherapy?

Neil Steinberg and Sara Bader propose that you turn to their volume Out of the Wreck I Rise: A Literary Companion to Recovery (2016), a compendium of inspirational quotations arranged in sections that speak to the various stages of recovery—denying you have a problem, acknowledging you have a problem, being appalled to find yourself at your first twelve-step meeting, getting a sponsor, and so on. Each opens with a short introduction, presumably by Steinberg, a journalist and recovering alcoholic whose memoir Drunkard: A Hard-Drinking Life appeared in 2008. (We can assume that Bader, a researcher and, per Wreck's back jacket, "quote collector," with no public ties to recovery, did much of the legwork on the pages that follow.) The brief excerpts run the gamut from Samuel...