I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Tuesday Book Club, I share an idea from a book.
I’m in the middle of Elizabeth Gilbert’s memoir of love, death, and addiction All the Way to the River. I knew beforehand that I was getting into yet another twelve-step addiction memoir, in the vein of Glennon Doyle’s Love Warrior and too many others. But it grates on me all the same.
The story always goes like this: “I was a successful X [author, journalist, tech executive, etc.] but underneath my lack of self esteem/incredible anxiety/past trauma led me to [drink, do drugs, love too much, gamble, etc]. That became the center of my life, then I hit rock bottom. I found a twelve-step program which led me to surrender to a higher power, admit I could never [drink, do drugs, love too much, gamble, etc] again, and clean up my life. Now I want to share my wisdom with you.”
Narrative achieves its power not through simplified narratives and cardboard characters, which are what the twelve-step memoir relies upon. To help us understand how to live better, we need narratives that give fresh insight, subtle wisdom, and an acknowledgement that stories have many shapes, not just one. The twelve-step memoir with its linear chronology, crude outlines of the addicted person, and repetitive clichéd ideas doesn’t advance human understanding about how to live well.
In Memoirs as Mirrors: Counterstories in Contemporary Memoir, Abigail Gosselin writes of the addiction memoir (and other memoirs featuring psychological disorders):
In simplifying experience, this narrative structure does not reflect the lived reality of most people and is consequently problematic. By narrowly circumscribing how a story about psychological disorder can be told, the dominant paradigm limits the ways that people can understand such experiences, both their own and those of others. This limitation reduces the potentially transformative power of narratives, which can often aid in understanding and can contribute to public discourse. Alternative narrative structures—or counterstories—are necessary to avoid these pitfalls. When memoirs accurately reflect complications of experience, they act as mirrors of lived experience rather than as fairy tales, moral lessons, or means of escape.
In addition to simplifying the narrative structure, most twelve-step memoirs also reduce people to the cardboard character of addict, someone who cannot control themselves, cares only about their drug of choice, and acts exactly like all addicts everywhere.
Kate Macbride writes of this phenomenon, both generally and in Gilbert’s memoir:
Many people who get sober through twelve-step recovery—myself included—go through a period where they identify so strongly with the archetype of an addict as portrayed in the Big Book, that it becomes the explanation for every behavior, relationship, personality trait, not only in themselves, but in anyone else who claims the same label.
All the Way to the River is riddled with such characterizations; it strains under the weight of the reductive and often inaccurate statements about “addicts” (her word, not mine) and addiction.
Macbride offers up a number of examples from Gilbert’s book including these:
“[A]ddicts cannot use any intoxicating substances without running the risk of relapse… full sobriety is a necessity for recovery.” …
“You can love an active addict, sure—but they can’t love you back.” …
“Image management is something addicts care a lot about.” …
“Addicts don’t do well when they lose contact with a higher power—because then they start believing their own demented thinking is the most supreme intelligence in the universe and that’s never a good idea.”
And she concludes, “Once you dig into the issue a bit more, you start to realize that ‘addicts’ are not a discrete class of egotists universally in need of a spiritual practice.”
Gosselin’s paper analyzes two memoirs that “serve as counterstories” to the standard addiction memoir: Stop Time: Heroin from A to Z, a phenomenological approach to sharing what it’s like to use heroin, and Beautiful Boy: A Father’s Journey Through His Son’s Addiction, in which a father seeks to understand his son’s addiction to meth.
Gosselin writes of these two memoirs:
The formats that the authors use to tell their stories mirror the particular complications they depict. Through their alternative narrative structures, the authors represent aspects of lived experience more realistically than they could otherwise, as they are unconstrained by the limitations of the dominant paradigm and thus able to achieve more sophisticated purposes.
One of my good friends became involved in CoDA, Co-Dependents Anonymous, a twelve-step fellowship for people who identify as codependent. Gilbert definitely identifies as one, as she talks about her codependency more than 40 times explicitly in All the Way to the River, starting on page 10. She doesn’t even define the term, which I suppose is reasonable given it is such an entrenched idea in American culture, that some people (especially women) excessively sacrifice their own needs in order to care for someone else, often in the context of the second person’s addiction to something.
I find this taking on of identities and interpreting actions always through them to be limiting. My friend began speaking in twelve-step platitudes, labeling people in her life as “addicts” and writing them off entirely, and refusing to entertain ideas that didn’t conform with the twelve-step view of the world. That’s what Elizabeth Gilbert does in All the Way to the River.
I would have hoped that Gilbert, with her writing talent and demonstrated ability to present a fresh story, would avoid such a standard cultural trope as the twelve-step memoir.
Sadly, she did not.
how narrative should work
The best narratives don’t tell us explicitly what to think. They give us example after human example of things that happened, linked together in a narrative where one event leads to another, and particular aspects of individual characters interact with the situation and in each other to produce something that is meaningful. The reader interprets what happened, and gleans insight or lessons or wisdom or feelings from it.
The problem with the twelve-step addiction memoir format is it tells you what to think. Gilbert tells you, “I am a codependent,” instead of narrating what happened and letting you make your own conclusions. She tells you, “I am an addict and so was Rayya [her partner who died],” and “here is everything that an addict does, and what an addict is like.” It becomes expository rather than narrative.
This is not life as literature. Gilbert gave us life as cliché.