The Power of Memoirs

by John de Miranda

Early in my recovery from an alcohol use disorder I discovered that memoirs and first-person accounts of people struggling with addiction were a useful method to help me deal with the challenges of a life without alcohol. Many of these accounts were uplifting. Some were scary.

I remember one in particular A Sensitive Passionate Man published in 1974 by Barbara Mahoney. Her account chronicles life with her husband Sean who died at the age of 45 from cirrhosis of the liver. Despite a life of material and personal success Sean rebutted all attempts from family and friends to intervene in his alcoholism and literally drank himself to death. In my pink cloud naivete I was taken by surprise that not all stories of addiction had a happy ending.

I am an instructor in the University of California, San Diego Substance Use Disorder Counseling Certificate program. During the pandemic I was tasked with converting my six courses to online, asynchronous format. My students are a mixture of people in recovery, people with family histories of addiction, and some simply looking to start a career as a professional addiction counselor.

To balance the courses, I decided to include some first-person accounts to the technical, clinical and research elements that I had chosen to curate the learning experience. Today, after ten years of teaching hundreds of students, the feedback from students about the memoirs has been overwhelmingly positive.

In addition to my students and others entering the addiction counseling field I also believe that carefully chosen first person memoirs and  accounts can be a form of continuing education for those already in the profession, and more importantly a method to build our capacity for empathy. Similarly, our understanding of the constantly changing landscape of drug use and addiction can be deepened by reading timely memoirs.

Dry: A Memoir by Augusten Burroughs

Burroughs published Dry in 2003 a year after his very successful adolescent memoir Running with Scissors. It recounts his experience as a successful New York City advertising executive. When his employer forces him to do something about his drug problem, he flies to a specialized lesbian, gay, bi-sexual and transgender treatment program in Minnesota. Waiting for a pickup at the Minneapolis airport with typical sarcasm he ponders,

I wonder how they’ll find me. Do alcoholics emit some sort of daiquiri-scented pheromone that only other alcoholics can detect? I visualize an older man, a father figure with a Freudian beard and knowing, recovered-alcoholic eyes made kinder through years of inner growth and abstinence. Perhaps in the car he will quote from the I Ching.

Upon return to New York, he continues his recovery journey and learns about the healing power of Alcoholics Anonymous, the sudden unpredictability of relapse, as well as the challenges of negotiating love, loss and grief as a newly sober person.

The Taste of Cigarettes: A Memoir of a Heroin Addict by Jon Vreeland

While Dry is positive about sobriety and humorous, Vreeland’s story is dark and without a happy ending. A devotee of Ernest Hemingway and Charles Bukowski, Jon reveled in the gritty.

He was a talented poet, writer and musician, raised in Huntington Beach, California in a middle-class family. The Taste of Cigarettes is an account of his heroin addiction and provides a vivid, sometimes wrenching picture of his frenetic search for the next fix. Living in a van is challenging. We learn that when you vomit after slamming H, do it in a plastic bag, then tie it off and throw it in the corner to dispose of the next morning.

Reading about Jon, homeless, living on the streets, all the while longing for connection to his daughters is not for the faint of heart. The 2018 memoir ends on an ambiguous, positive note, but an on-line search reveals that years later his body was found in a ditch in an area frequented by drug users in Santa Barbara.

My students often jump to the conclusion that Jon died of an overdose, and as a teachable moment I have advised that we don’t know the cause of his death based on the facts at hand. However, in a recent conversation with Jon’s wife Alycia Vreeland I was surprised to learn that an extensive police investigation indicated that he was likely murdered.

In 2024 Alycia published a book of Jon’s poetry (Laughing in Her Sleep) which she also illustrated. The poems were discovered after his death. Besides her efforts to continue promoting Jon’s legacy, Alycia is an accomplished memoirist herself.

Baby Darlin’ by Alycia Vreeland

Published in 2024, Alycia’s memoir Baby Darlin’ recounts her early life in Cajun-country Louisiana. In the opening pages, several photos of her and her family are presented with the following:

“Dedicated to the survivors of childhood trauma. May you find your voice,

speak your truth, and squash the shame.

Alycia’s emotional abuse and sexual molestation as a child were the passport to her drug and out-of-control sexual behavior. Her book and the accompanying illustrations cause the reader whiplash as she oscillates between sexual relationships, drunken catastrophes and longing for some normalcy in her life.

I get up and fill my glass to the brim with Patron tequila. No lime. No salt. Just when I think that there is not enough booze to make me feel comfortable here, I wander into a library room with a fireplace and am greeted by stacks of coffee table modern art books for my viewing pleasure. Cozy, comfy, Prussian blue velvet couches and a stunning rolling cart filled with sparkling crystal decanters filled with all the booze I need to keep my head quiet.

Ultimately, Alycia is able to travel a path to recovery that is as complicated as her earlier years in chaos and addiction. Professional therapy, mutual aid such as a 12-step fellowship and loving friends and family help her to understand and have compassion for those complicit in her childhood abuse and trauma.

The Recovering: Intoxication and its Aftermath by Leslie Jamison

My first inclination was to not use The Recovering in my course Addiction Science. I wondered if the 500+ page volume would be too much for my students entering the addiction counseling field. Despite these misgivings include it I did, and the response has been as enthusiastic as my own initial reaction to Jamison’s work.

The Recovering builds on her academic work illuminating the link between literary accomplishment and addiction. Where her personal story of addiction and recovery lays the foundation she moves on to build a narrative scaffold comprised of other tales, relevant literature, public policy, treatment history and the emergence of a recovery culture.

However, it is always her finely etched writing that drives the book.

The first time I ever felt it­—the buzz—I was almost thirteen. I didn’t vomit or black out or even embarrass myself. I just loved it. I loved the crackle of champagne, its hot pine needles down my throat. We were celebrating my brother’s college graduation, and I wore a long muslin dress that made me feel like a child, until I felt something else: initiated, aglow. The whole world stood accused: You never told me it felt this good.

Junky by William Burroughs

Along with Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsburg, Burroughs embodied the free expression and artistic genius of the Beat Movement. Junky, his first novel has become a cult classic along with Naked Lunch, which followed the storyteller from his exile in Mexico to Tangier. In both he recounts his experiences in the postwar drug underground from his perspective as an openly gay man. His 1985 book Queer was recently made into a feature film starring Daniel Craig.

Describing his first experience shooting an opiate.

Morphine hits the back of the legs first, then the back of the neck, a spreading wave of relaxation slackening the muscles away from the bones so that you seem to float without outlines, like living in warm salt water. I experienced a strong feeling of fear. I had the feeling that some horrible image was just beyond the field of vision, moving as I turned my head, so that I never quite saw it. I felt nauseous; I lay down and closed my eyes. A series of pictures passed like watching a movie.

Those interested in the prehistory of drugs in America will find Junky to be a fascinating peek into the underground culture that preceded Nixon’s declaration of a war on drugs in 1972.

There are a great many memoirs of addiction recovery on the market. Bookstores today also have whole sections for addiction/recovery pop-psychology and self-help. These five memoirs have been enthusiastically vetted by my students and are worth your attention.

If you would like more information about these titles before committing to acquiring and reading, try these links:

Augusten Burroughs

https://www.bookreporter.com/reviews/dry-a-memoir

Jon Vreeland

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UMjLLzFvH8g

Alycia Vreeland

https://litnuts.com/blogs/news/baby-darlin

Leslie Jamison

https://www.vulture.com/2018/03/leslie-jamison-the-recovering-addiction-memoir.html

Entertainment Weekly’s #1 Nonfiction Book of 2018

Literary Hub’s #1 Best-Reviewed Memoir of 2018

William Burroughs

https://www.biography.com/authors-writers/william-s-burroughs

John de Miranda is an independent consultant who can be contacted at solanda@sbcglobal.net; 650-218-6181.

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