The bottom right corner. Were adding new events and podcasts every day. Upcoming on tuesday, nicole anna jones discussing race in journalist, congresswoman Pramila Jayapal offering a blueprint to Political Action for next generation women and people of color and a live stream reporting of life on the margins, this week featuring [inaudible] also make sure to visit town halls Media Library for both the recent and precovid past which is, frankly, also pretty recent. Anyway, town hall is made possible through your support and the support of our sponsors, supported by the real Network Foundation can, the true Ground Foundation and the wincoast foundation northwest. As most of you know, town hall is is a minutesupported Organization First and foremost, and i want to thank all of our members tonight. On that note, like nonprofits generally, its been hit hard but the Economic Impacts of the pandemic. We hope youll consider making a donation but licking on clicking on the button at the bottom of crowd cast. One final point on the economy, i i promise, lets be honest, if we were all gathered together tonight, many of you would visit the book signing table, so we hope youll use the link to purchase your copy of ericas book you should say preorder through our terrific partners. Local author, local book shop, big, big launch book of the book night. Keep it local, and maybe some of the things we loved about this city preepidemic might make it to the other side. All right. Erica bar is an awardwinning political reporter beginning her career as the Texas Observer. She worked for the austin chronicle, Seattle Weekly and the stranger. Huffington post, seattle magazine and grist, and she was a cofounding editor of the beloved and feisty blog [inaudible] sorry for the air quotes. She now covers awe diction, housing policy, and virtually every topic. A seattle nailive and the author of two critically acclaimed memoirs and a forthcoming nonfiction book, her work has appeared in the new york times, the paris review, the atlantic and other publications. Shes also an ecker and has taught educator and has taught at the university of washington and other universities across the country. Erica barnetts first book is called quitter, a memoir of drinking, relapse and recovery, and its the subject of tonights talk. Please join me in welcoming them. Hello. Hello im so excited to be here with you. You too. Yeah. Ill jump in and say congratulations. The book is an incredibly impressive achievement. It reads like a house on fire, and as a reader, a longtime fan of your work and a sober person, i am so glad this book exists. Im honored to be here as part of your haunch. Of your launch. [audio difficulty] hello, everyone. This is josh with town hall. Were running into some tech issues right now. We will try and get the show back on track as soon as we can. Give us one sec. Claire, are you still there . I just rearrived. Okay. And erica . I think im here. Okay, great. Yep. Great. All righty, go ahead. All right. Erica, im going to kick it over to you for a reading. Great. Thanks, claire. Its really its such an honor that you agreed to do this and that youre going to be my interlocutor tonight. Im such a big fan of yours as well. This is a reading from my first book, quitter a memoir of drinking, relapse and recovery. Let me tell you what its like to be sober, really sober, for the first time in years. It feels like seeing color for the first time. It feels like youve been looking at the world through someone elses glasses and suddenly you can make out every individual blade of grass. It feels like you have a secret superpower that nobody can see, a claire few of mind that allows you to leech insights. Your body feels stronger than its the ever been. Food tastes better. Desire returns. At the same time, everything has an intensity that scares you a little. When you feel the feeling, oh, my god, how am i ever going to start paying back my debt, you just have to sit with it, figure it out, wait for it to pass. When youve dampened every experience with the white noise of alcohol for a decade or more, experiencing the world at full blast can be whenning. Who overwhelming. How am i ever going to make time for nine hour of outpatient treatment every week . Do i really are the go to an aa meeting every single day . The why is my boss looking at me like that . It has been less than a month since i graduated sober and hopeful and excited to get back to work. My stay at rest 12 felt like a wakeup call, an important pause in a life that had been hurtling forward with no steering. When i ran through that gauntlet of upraised arms, i felt the way i imagine christians feel when they merge from baptismal waters. My life was finally mine. Almost everyone had high hopes. Mom, who had been so worried when she showed up two weeks into my stay told me afterwards, im proud of you. I know you can do this. My coworkers melissa and emily initiated me into their secret lunchtime ritual of attending a new meeting once a week, and it felt almost as good as being invited to a secret afterparty. Friends sent cards telling me i was brave. When we talk about sobriety or even recovery, the words are often shorthand for not drinking or not using drugs, but the really overwhelming part of staying sober isnt saying no or learning to avoid the proverbial people, places and sungs that induce temptation, its figuring out how to live an unfiltered life. Its hard enough when things are going pretty much okay. How many times have you said i need a drink when what you really mean is this day was moderate9ly annoying. It can be damn near impossible when theres wreckage stretching out in every direction. So to recap, over the past few years of drinking, i had broken my moms heart, driven away by best friend, alienated my other friends, nearly lost my job and accumulateed tens of thousands of dollars in medical debt through Emergency Rooms and detoxes. I was ashamed to show few face at work, overwhelmed by the amends i felt i needed to make right away and scared to death that josh would continue to doubt my commitment to sobriety or that hed be watchingover my shoulder every minutement i had wasted so much time. I i had to fix everything right away, but i had absolutely no idea how to start. So i froze. I was true to my comfort zone. I workedded and went to the gym, lifted weights and worked the phones, and before long i was too exhausted to keep going to outpatient therapy, too exhausted to make it to ark a every day, too exhausted for anything. Aa meetings, which id attended sporadically for the past seven years, bummed me out. Everybody seemed to relentlessly happy all the time, and i found the threehour intensive outpatient systems that i had agreed to do repetitive and depressing. A fewed sad sack losers in a career true Downtown Office building watching videos about relapse prevention and bitching about how much sobriety sucks before driving home. Not more than a month went by before i fell back into drinking. Not just fell, the way you fall into bed with an exlover because you dont have anything better going on. I cant pinpoint an exact moment when i said, screw it, this is too hard. It was more like a slide from not drinking to drinking. I was a nondrinker, then i was a drinker again. Simple as thatment i passed the liquor aisle in the Grocery Store, doubled back and dropped a bottle of smirnoff in my basket casually. I bush i had a better story to tell you wish i had a better story. Maybe if a close relative had died or i had lost my job or been evicted my relapse would have been justified. Some alcoholics refer to this as reservation. If my mom dies, ill drink. If my husband leaves me. But i dont have a reason. Normal people who are alcoholics relapse the way i did and wonder what made you take that first true. For me, the answer was always nothing in particular. One minute youre a sober person in recovery, the next youre telling yourself everybody else does it, why cant i . Ive learned so much, ill manage it this time. The collective amnesia of the chronic relapser is a force of nature. No matter how many times we say never again and mean it, we forget all of it the instant we happen to look up as we walk past a liquor store. It was more an act of not deciding. It is true as manaddiction researchers have argued that people who suffer from the addiction have several developing higher ordering cognitive assumptions like impulse control. But i left rehab with the emotion almaturety of a 13yearold. Not that i didnt remember what happened the last time i drank or hear the warning i learned to repeat in rehab. Before you take the first drink, play the tape forward. I did. Its just that theres a louder voice in my head saying you know how to handle it. Itll be different this time. Rehab equips you with mantras. What it cant do is force you to hear them. The voice of someone at a meeting, alcoholism is cunning, baffling, powerful and patient. In the morning after buying that first almost celebratory model, look at me, i beat this thing, i woke up with my hands shocking and race ford for the bathroom o retch in the toilet bowl. On the way to work i grabbed another bottle. And by three in the afternoon i was peering over the edge of the same familiar pit. Oldtimers say you dont have to drink even if you want to, but the fact is most of us do drink again. Our brains make relapse practically inevitable. Even after physical withdrawal and the fuzzy thinking of early sobriety has subsided, but brain wouldnt stop saying, wouldnt this be better with a drink . Each maintaining equilibrium without a steady supply of spirits. Out also creates longlasting pathways between neurons that cause the brain to strongly associate depression, loneliness, excitement, guilt or experiences with an overwhelming urge to drink. Every time i relapsed and went through withdrawals, those links got stronger and stronger making out more likely that i would relapse again. Failure in this case meaning that people dont stay sober after they leave, but that rate is important, and its something people should be armed with before they decide to spend tens of thousands of or dollars on what may be little more than a 28day dryout. Here are the numbers. Four in six alcohol you cans stick it out until the end, and of those, about half will relapse within the first year of leaving treatment. Over four years, 90 of people who go to treatment will start drinking again, although many of them will eventually quit. And yet Treatment Centers focus almost entirely on relapse prevention while teaching patients almost nothing about what to do about relapse when it occurs. They teach you to halt when you feel like drinking, four conditions that can precede relapse x they teach you to practice dream; diet, rest, exercise and meditation. A Cognitive Behavioral Therapy or cbc. If youre having trouble keeping track of all these acronyms, imagine how hard ifs for an alcoholic in early society. I carried a card in my wallet for months to keep them all straight. In early sobriety your brain is still putting itself back together during a process called post acute withdrawal dream. It can syndrome. It can last for more two years. My first two weeks i pictured my brain as a soft, pliable sponge. I never found out how long it would take me to get through this phase because before i could get there, i went back through the reinvolving door. Revolving door. Thank you. That should give people some idea of the nature of this book, the quality of clarity the, honesty the, immediacy and the way that erica weaves reporting and research in with her own personal story. Its quite astonishing. She makes it seem easy e and its not. So thank you. I wanted to start but just asking if you could give the people in the audience, since the book is not out yet and will be out on july 7 and you can buy it, preorder, but since the book is not out yet, i was wondering if you could give the audience just sort of an overview or macro sort of a funny word idea of your drinking story. Just what that looked like, what the time frame was. Sure. I started drinking pretty young, like i think a lot of, a lot of people who become heavy drinkers later in life do. But i didnt really drink much, you know, when i was in college. I was a good kid, quoteunquote. I didnt want drink in i didnt drink in early adulthood. The period i talk about in the book is really a period of about ten or so years from, basically, my early 30s to my late are 30s. So i was here in seattle, i was working and, you know, you sort of described a lot of the places that wife work ad. That ive worked. Of course, i didnt mention this in that particular excerpt because it was about the first time i went to rehab, but i got fired from my job and then got sobber shortly after that. So that was about five and a half years ago. So were talking about a decade of time. Got it. Thats okay, thats helpful just to sort of have that out there about what happened. And i think that one of the things thats astonishing about this book and we talked about this a little bit before is that its a socalled ugly drunk story. Yes. Its very warts and all, and the warts are warty. These are some tough stories in here, and i feel like thats really in contrast with most recovery stories we see from women. Womens memoirs of alcoholism tend to the whole idea of im high functioning, im keeping out together but im a drunk, and i can only think of a couple of exceptions to this rule. I think there is its taboo admitting that youre a messy drunk, a problematic person or a piece of crap and i thought of myself even when i was still drinking, kind of a dirtbag drunk. Because theres some early discussion of the books cover being a glass of wine and my reaction to that was like, i never drank from a glass. I drank from the bottle and thats just the kind of drinker i am. As a woman, i think its very uncomfortable for people to think about women being that way although we can think of all kinds of examples of men being that way. The guy on the bus drinking out of a paper bag. You know, the stereotypes and even like the sort of the ones that we adulate, hunter thompson. And i think that women are supposed to be tidy and were supposed to be careful and i think were supposed to keep our problems secret and small and my problem was not small and it certainly by the end was not secret either. I think that one thing thats happening, well talk more about this later, but in the dialog around women and drinking right now is this idea, and just going off what you just said, that this idea that we need to push against that stereo type of like the wino with the brown paper bag, right . Because alcoholism can look a lot of different ways, the bottle of wine you drain after putting your kids to bed. Its important to tell that story, but thats not every womans story and the fact that thats sort of getting represented as the face of female alcoholism, your story, your book pushes against that and says that theres, you know, this is where addiction can end up and its scary and raw and real. Do you think thats fair . Yeah, and i think i think that its not just where it can end up, but that this is where it can end up for women, too. Yes, yes. And i think there is, you know, a very, like upper middle class white aesthetic to the new acceptance of like a certain kind of woman drinker and you know, this is not a book about drinking per se, but cat marnells book. And she wrote a wonderful, wonderful book about being an absolute mess and not in like a hot, fun way. Like i didnt read her book and thing, oh, my god i did think shes cool because shes so much cooler than me, but i also was just like, wow, i relate to this and i havent related to many addiction memoirs because they do tell kind of a story that takes an arc and then everything is okay. And my story is like arc after arc after arc after arc. I think, this is just an aside thats popping into my head as i think about especially good or wellknown books about drinking and women, including some of the people like tara or Carolyn Knapp and one thing thats unusual about your book, you stay with it at every step. Often what happens with drinking books are you calling it relentless . Im calling it relentless. Lets jump ahead to the relentless question. The book, not only do you stay with it, you stay with it in theme. You dont start to generallylize generalize what happens, you take us moment to moment to moment. And i want to acknowledge the structure and writing of the book. Its completist, its exhaustive and as i said at times here, exhausting and i mean that in a good way. We feel your weariness and inability to escape and you hold us to the story in a way thats quite unusual. Can you talk about how you structured the book and especially the length of the book. It quite big. Its funny that you say that because the original manuscript that i turned in. I dont know what we eventually got to, but i think its under 100,000 now. I think the manuscript it was 125, 135. We cut so much from this book and i think that was i had this amazing editor who just was able to get to the heart of like when i was being repetitive and when i was being a little too relentless and i needed to kind of let the reader take a breath. I wanted to i wanted to be, you know, very thorough about telling the various points when i had what you would consider to be in a traditional narrative, a rock bottom. And the book kind of starts with one of those and then comes back to it later. But there are many in between and it just, it happens over and over again because thats what it was like. I mean, it was just like, theres no such thing as a wakeup call. Maybe there is for some people, but for me, it was important to tell that story of like, look, you dont just hit a rock bottom and then get it. Theres no theres no its not like theres no cause and effect that you can find in any alcoholic who stays sober. If you want to tell that story after the fact and say, i quit and therefore, the worst thing that happens before a quit was my rock bottom. Thats fine, you do you. But i think thats like an exfacto justification or way of creating a narrative and explaining to yourself why how you were able to get sober. For me, this is my way of explaining it to myself. Which is why i didnt get it until i just did. Yeah, okay, thats really helpful. I think that first, i want to acknowledge still on the writing part of it. I want to acknowledge what you said about repetitions. And i think that this is something really interesting in writing life stories, writing memoirs, when youre really getting at honestly with the experience, repetition is kind of both bug and feature. Like when we make bad decisions, it doesnt matter if you make one bad decision, but if you make them 14 going to 44. Thats to me what is interesting, but it creates a narrative problem because how do you represent that honestly and yet not, you know, not make it inert for the reader, which i feel like you really achieved. Well, thank you. [laughter] i wanted since you brought up rock bottom. I really want to talk about this. Its kind of at the heart of whats going on in this book contentwise. Youre pushing against certain perceived narratives in drinking stories like rock bottom, how the rehabilitation industry works and what it means to relapse. These are all ideas that youre working with, but a lot of what youre dealing with is this idea that rock bottom needs to be kind of interrogated. So, can you talk a little bit more about that and how youve seen it work for other people as well . Well, i think that when you think of yourself as having hit rock bottom and you think of yourself as, you know, as having learned a lesson from that, it makes it really, really impossible to then relapse and feel i mean, not, im not saying you should feel okay about relapsing, but i think it makes it really impossible to look at that experience and fit it into the story that youve told yourself about what, what the alcoholic or the drug addict art is. So if i got fired from my job and evicted from my house, say, i would probably think, you know, and my husband left me, i dont have a husband, okay, this is hypothetical, but all of these terrible, like milestones that we think of ourselves. If all that happened and then i got sobered and i relapsed, like what is my problem, it must be a me problem. It must be Something Like i am failing to fit into the story as opposed the story doesnt fit, and so, i think that that actually does damage to people and i think that because relapse is so incredibly common, as i was describing in that excerpt i read, its you know, it sets us up for disappointment, but also sets us up for failure because we dont have the tools that we need because we dont think well need the tools. We think that well be the exception that just gets it. And i thought that. I thought that when i left rehab the first time. I thought well, i know that none of these are going to get it, but i am. And i could not have been further from the truth. So many questions. Whats interesting is i just opened the book and was leafing through it while we were having all of tease these technical issues and i happened to open it to the page germane. And you were talking about your friend, our friend josh. Hi, josh. He knew something about me that i wasnt willing to acknowledge about myself. I will turn anything into an intellectual exercise, even my own life. Do you think your intellectualism and your intelligence kept you stuck in your loop . Thinking that you had this figured out . I think one. Things, one of the characteristics i dont want to talk about myself on that front so im trying to deflect a little bit to say that, this is kind of a universal truth that i found with people who relapse a lot, is like they overintellectualize everything. And i thought especially when i was in treatment, doing outpatient and all of these Different Things and going to therapy, i thought i could talk myself through it and i thought if i just fully and thoroughly understand every aspect of this, i can do the things that are required. Here are the things according to me that are not required because im smarter and better than that. And the work, and i mean, the funny thing is the thing that ended up working was a combination of everything i had done up to this point, but the last thing i tried was aa, and it is i mean, its not a dumb system, but its a system that literally anybody can just do, and its kind of like, you plug yourself in and you decide not to reject things. And i it could have been something in aa that did it, but i just decided to stop rejecting things and stop making intellectual arguments about why i didnt need to do things. I feel like thats the theme obviously touched on at length in the Leslie Jamieson book, the idea of a certain kind of alcoholic who is very, very special. Yeah. Whos preoccupied with their own specialness and aa with a really structured approach pushes it brings you to your own ordinariness. Yes, and i think one of the things when i was in treatment, i got a bunch of my i got basically my entire medical file as part of the reporting process for writing this book, and one of the things that just kept coming up over and over again was intellectualizing. Intellectualizing. And i think thats just like it was almost like they could have checked a box because its so common. And so i think it is just i think in intellectualizing unfortunately, because i love it and i want to do it around everything, and it doesnt work for sobriety. I never saw anybody get sober, but talking themselves out of drinking. [laughter] so is aa a part of your life now . To an extent. To a much lesser extent than it was at first. I think aa is like, you know, its like a it was really like a lifeboat for me so i think as you or as i got a little more sobriety under my belt and you know, was not as just didnt need that kind of daytoday like going to a meeting every single day. Thats something i did at first, but i will say, you know, even when im not going to things like meetings and just, and like working the steps of aa, theres just, theres so much of it that i just integrated into my life. Like just kind of pausing and being grateful and doing all of that cheese y cheesy sh i was told i could swear, sorry if my parents are watching. All the cheesy stuff that they told we could do, i integrated into my life as organic and i have a much just a completely different attitude and outlook on life now, even when i was first getting sober. Im going to kind of take it down to basics for a second because i dont know how many questions were going to end up getting and i feel theres a couple of important things to say. One is theres 150 people listening right here and if some of those people are maybe, i want to start by thinking some of them might be trying to quit drinking or relapsing or considering it. And i guess, just on a basic human level, is there anything that you can say to people in early sobriety . I know i clung to any word i could get when i was in the earliest sobriety. As did i. I mean, i think the thing that helped me was just knowing i mean, of course, theres a million aa things are coming to me which is one day at a time. Which is thats one of the things i clung to when i was very early in it. And the other thing is, what i found over time is that things and this is not universal necessarily for everyone, but my own experience is that things got different very fast. And for me they actually got better very fast, but i dont think you can guarantee that your lifes going to get better. Its just going to get different. And if you just kind of wait a little bit and just say, you know, im going to make it to this point, and im not going to drink until this point and well see what happens. And then keep seeing what happens. I think what you will find is that in addition to just kind of all the Health Benefits of not drinking, especially if youre a heavy drinker like i was, just, your brain will come back, and thats such a gift. And for me, like i talked about pause. I cant remember its totalstotals ly totally true. It took my brain a year to mend itself and i felt i was back at baseline. Its such a gift to have that happen. If you dont stick with it, youre robbing yourself of that experience. Yeah, i mean, thats early so bright. Early sobriety is getting through the first 60 days and feeling better every day and its, man, i mean, i couldnt do it for a long time and the other thing is, if you relapse, you know, i do think that counting days is pernicious and i think that it makes a lot of people feel like failure because you feel this compulsion to crawl back into whatever program youre in and say, i messed up. I was at 37 days, now im at zero and i think its a problematic and sometimes toxic way of thinking about that. Because you didnt lose that time. You know, you had whatever experiences you had during that time and you learned something from it. Whether you realize it now or not. You absolutely learned from however many days you were able to make it and then, you know, you can just start over. Its a new day. Yeah. Thank you for speaking to that. While were talking about things that are pernicious and problemat problematic, can you talk about some of your thoughts about the rehab industry . I think you call it the alcoholism industry . I would get this treatment industrial complex. I went to treatment twice, i went to detox a bunch of times. I went to, you know, various therapists and i think ill confine this to i guess rehab because thats what most people think of with treatment. I went to 28day treatment twice and i think ultimately was good i went both times, but im saying that from the perspective of someone who had Health Insurance so my debt from that ended up being like less than 10,000, which is a lot, but it wasnt, you know, ultimately the end of the world. I paid it off. You know, but the thing is, i mean, what they teach you, i mean, just going into treatment, i mean, one of the things they teach you in every single aspect of it is you dont know how to manage your own life and that yessentially need to be helpless. They take away your phone, cant have the outside world. Cant bring in any outside Reading Materials and so, its very they make you do chores. And its like, and what they tell you about that, its because you dont know how to be responsible for anything. And i dont think thats fair. I dont think thats fair to tell people that and i especially dont think its fair to tell women that. Women, no matter how screwed up we are or how little were taken care of our own lives, we tend to feel responsible for other people and we tend to feel this tremendous weight of guilt and shame when we are not able to be there for other people. I mean, even im not i dont have kids and so i cant imagine what that kind of burden feels like when you feel like youre failing, but i definitely felt like i went into rehab both times with this amazing weight of shame. All they did was compound it, but telling me that i didnt know how to do anything. And also, i think, you know, if you go to rehab more than twice, like youre just giving them money. I mean, you know, it did in one case definitely saved my life in the immediate sense because i was able to detox there, alcohol withdrawal is going to be deadly and detox was incredibly important. So that was very important to me, but i dont know that taking you out of the world for 28 days and then just dropping you back in the world is a very effective way and not teaching you anything what to do when you relapse because i didnt learn any of that, i just dont think its an effective way of dealing with a deadly brain disease. You brought up in your remarks just now, the idea of shame, that they that sort of compounding guilt and shame thats created in rehab is something you experienced. And when we were speaking on the phone earlier this week, you mentioned you were talking about the experience of putting what you had called an ugly drunk book out in the world and you said you dont feel shame though you do feel guilt about your story. And can you talk about shame and putting shame behind you and your relationship to that word, i guess, is what yeah, i think that i wanted to distinguish between guilt and shame because shame is something guilt is something you feel because of other people, you feel an obligation to make things right and i think that guilt is a healthy emotion. It causes us to behave better and causes us to make amends for people and shame is something that you do to yourself and you know, its just its all inside your own head. And so by the time i wrote this book i had, i think, gotten beyond a lot of the shame. So one of the questions that ive heard a lot is, you know, was it really hard to talk about this or that episode. And it was and it wasnt. It wasnt as hard as you would think because i had already talked about it so much with my aa sponsor, with others in my life. I had talked to my parents and you know, apologized and started that process of like trying to assuage the guilt and through that, i was able to not feel pain about a lot of the stuff and its funny because like some of the stuff was fairly public and fairly wellknown locally. Probably not to the extent that i thought it was, because i just thought, like i was going to just be buried in shame for the rest of my life and it was very terrifying and horrible at the time when, you know, when things would become public about my behavior, but, yeah, now i feel absolutely unafraid of talking about the experiences that i went through because, first of all, you know, i have a disease and i do believe that addiction is a type of disease. And second, like i have made my peace and my amends with the people that i owe that to. You know, to an extent. Its an ongoing process for your whole life because youre always screwing up. Everybody is always screwing up and having to say im sorry. But, yeah, theres nothing theres no room i cant walk into and talk about what i have done and say, yes, i did that. That was me. That seems very free. Its like the biggest gift of sobriety that i can even i mean, that i can fathom. You talk about early sobriety, hit three years, four years, and start doing some of the internal work you need to do, you feel great. Shame is the worst emotion. I can be angry and i get over it. But shame just, you know, it gets into your dreams, it gets into your relationships with people, and its just, its so toxic and so part of writing this book was to say like, look, all of this happened. Like, is what happened to you this bad . You know, oh, no . Well, guess what . You can get over it. I got over i got past all this and i didnt have to like leave seatt seattle. I didnt have to go live in antarctica. And people are horrible to me online about my experiences with addiction even now and i just think thats very sad. And i dont take it personally anymore. And i did at first. Right, right. So, im going to open it up to questions in just a minute here. I can see we have one question already. And go ahead and go to the ask a question button at the bottom of the screen, everybody, type your question and ill go through and ask them on your behalf once we gather a few more. Going back to that idea, its really interesting, you know, people weaponizing your struggles with addiction against you in this moment, right . Like you do a lot of work thats politically adjacent and seeing people use that against you, its just its too bad, but its definitely more about them than you. My question was, that i wanted to ask was, youve been doing such incredible work this last month. The reporting, i mean, youre always doing great reporting. This month its been really visible. Can you talk about what happened, what changed in your work once you stopped drinking . I mean, everything changed. Immediately when i stopped drinking, i mean, i didnt have a job and so i had a lot of time to just kind of think about what i wanted to do next. And i know this isnt exactly the question you asked me and i will get to that, but one other great gift of having a really a really bad addiction and a really bad addiction experience is that if you can get through it, and if you can go get sober, it frees you in a way that i think is totally it was totally unexpected for me because i had worked this job, essentially the same job from the time i was, you know, 19 years old until i was 37 or whenever it was that i got fired, you know, just thats all i ever wanted to do. It was the most important thing to do. I was my job and my job was me. And when i lost the job it was like i lost everything. I dont know who i am anymore. Yeah. And i have no identity. And when i got so theres that. I got past that, i realized i could do absolutely anything i wanted and that was an incredibly freeing feeling so i started my blog and now its like a selfsustaining thing that i do fulltime. So when im taking such its definitely reader interest. If i was covering something that got no interest at all, it wouldnt be sustainable, but i cover addiction a lot. I cover homelessness a lot, and i cover, you know, issues that affect people that, you know, are vulnerable and for reasons that may not be immediately perceptib perceptible. Particularly with homelessness. People have a lot of theories on what causes homelessness, quote, unquote. A lot of them are partly right and a lot of them are stupid. But for me, you know, when youre talking about people who have really Big Mental Health struggles and struggles with addiction, which is very prevalent among people who are homeless, i feel that it could have been me, but for a lot of privilege and a lot of luck. I mean, another thing that runs through my story is just an insane amount of luck. Theres a story i tell in the book about driving down a freeway for, you know, Something Like 30 minutes and where im from, and in a complete blackout. Like 12lane freeways, complete blackout going too fast and waking up in a parking lot, i was headed to the airport, i was on the other side of town and it sprawls forever and the era before smart phones, i had no idea where i was. Why am i alive . I dont know. So when i look at somebody who is living in a tent and is addicted to, say, alcohol or heroin, i just think, if i didnt if i hadnt been lucky and if i hadnt had a certain number of privileges like that absolutely could be me. And so i feel an empathy for homeless people, but i feel i think a lot of reporters feel empathy for homeless people, but i think i feel it in a different way because i truly feel like i could have been there in that tent. Yes, sobriety has changed my empathy level in a way thats not sort of, you know, about how great i am, its just, it just happens to me because i have that experience of imagining myself in the other persons position so much more im going to move on to audience questions. Peggy asked the opposite of what my question was, how do you feel like your writing was affected by your drinking when you were drinking . What was it that you were held back from or i think i well, first of all, this is something i talk about in another chapter writing a column and, you know, and thinking its like the greatest thing in the world and sitting and knocking back two whiskeys or whatever and then waking up in the morning and looking at it and just thinking, this makes no sense. Or like, this isnt accurate. And so theres just that sort of very base level of, you know, its just not its not as good of writing or great journalism to be drunk, you cant write as well. And i think how else is it affected . I think i limited my ambitions. I think that writing a book would have been absolutely impossible. I told myself a story about myself, which is that i cant really write more than 500 words because i dont have that kind of Attention Span or im not literary. Or i just dont have these capabilities, im not smart enough. I just dont have the focus, and there are so many stories that were partly true. I didnt have the focus, but i also had the capability inside me somewhere. I just thought like, im such a piece of crap that theres no one wants to read, you know, anything more than 50 little items from me. And i really believed that. Its interesting because you do come from an industry thats soaked in alcohol. Yeah. Do you think that a lot of journalists maybe are operating with some of that . Thats a really interesting question. And i never ive never asked that question of another journalist because that would be it wouldnt surprise me. Because i think a lot of journalists, i do know that, you know, you tell stories about yourself based on what industry your is he in and what youve done and i also think if youre somebody barely hanging on because youre drinking every night, because youre hungover in the morning. Because youre trying to get the facts straight in your story and make it make sense, now, youre not going to be anything more ambitious thing necessarily. Maybe this is a gender breakdown thing, too, im speaking as a woman. Maybe guys are like, im going to write the next Great American novel. Perhaps that happens among people who think of themselves differently, but i can, yeah, i can totally see that just because that was so much my experience of just feeling like im not good at this. Like im lucky that im here and that these people are fools into thinking im knowing what im doing, you know, thats what i believe. I do know. [laughter] everybody has a but it was something else. Im going to jump to the next audience question from liz, a question after my own heart. What are some tools you used to get over the regret over the time you lost when you were drinking . I dont feel that i lost the time because, you know, this is perhaps putting a positive spin on what those years were like. I mean, they were terrible, but the fact is, i wouldnt be where i am now had it not gone that way. So, i dont have any way of knowing what it would have been like had i not lost those 10 years or so. And i find that regret, like shame, is a very toxic emotion and its but its harder to expunge in a way because its true. You look at that time and you think, oh, my god, i could have done this, this, this and this. An example ive heard and comports with my own age, and i never had kids, but i could have had kids or people who lost their kids and didnt have time with them growing up. The best way to get through the regret is the same with shame with addiction and i think its talking about it and its finding out how if theres a way to make amends to the people that youve heard. And i dont mean just like apologizing, it means like saying, is there anything i can do now that would be helpful to you and not dictating what it is that you think you should do for them, but just asking. And for me, that helped expunge the regret and i also, i have this strong belief that you are who you are because of everything youve been through. And so i dont know what i would have been like, but i do know that i probably would have spent a lot longer that i was my job and just telling myself stories about myself that werent true as it turned out. I mean, like, for example, you know, i lost my job as i mentioned, and i thought it was the worst thing that could ever happen to me. But it was actually one of the best things that ever happened to me which is like crazy to hear coming out of my mouth now given the way i felt when it happened. I mean, i was just like crushed. So, yeah, i mean, it also just takes time and perspective. Its interesting that the answer to both, you know, these two really sticky emotions, i dont know if theyre emotions, whatever, shame and regret, that your answer to both is the same, which has to do with amends, which takes the emphasis off the self, too. Yeah, i mean, i think that a lot of dd a lot of recovery work is taking it off yourself and what you can do for other people. Which is honestly, a great way to recover from all kinds of things, not just addiction. Yeah, i think its a big theme right now for all of us to talk about, really interesting to think about amends in that context. Weve been do you feel like taking one more question . Thats about right . Yes. All right, lets do that. Theres a couple more. Why dont we try to take two more and then wrap it up. Sure. The first one is another great question from jean. What are your thoughts about the alcohol industrys influence on drinking in our culture and the lack of regulatory limits or outreach on alcoholrelated issues . Thats a great question. I think that part of the reason we dont talk about relapse and the reason we dont talk about alcohol addiction is because the industry is just pernicious in every single, you know, aspect of life, right . I mean, like i have a pile of magazines over here and every one is full of liquor ads and for drink, billboards and walk into the Grocery Store and theyre screaming in your face. And i think it is i would policywise would like to see both more regulation on alcohol advertisements and higher taxes on alcohol because it does, in fact, reduce the amount that people drink. And you know, i dont know that were ever going to get to a point where you think of its funny because we have these drugs that we make completely illegal like heroin, which i dont think should be illegal and we have drugs that we make extra, extra legal like youre really supposed to be consuming them and if you dont theres something wrong with you, like alcohol. It used to be cigarettes as well. And i think we can make a cultural shift, it is possible, but were not headed in that direction right now especially in quarantine are the message is have happy hour with your friends, its 4 00 somewhere. You know, its 11 00 in the morning somewhere, and people just, i think, see all and i have picked up on this myself even as a sober person, this tremendous pressure to turn to drinking as this is the one way you can have fun at least while youre stuck inside. Yeah, i did want to bring that up. You had mentioned earlier this idea of reservations, like people having certain reasons that they get to relapse, and i feel like in this moment in covid, that theres constantly people coming up with justified relapse, were sort of surrounded by people talking, social media talking about how people need to be drinking and can you i mean, can you talk a little about how people use how we use situations to justify our drinking . Well, i mean, i certainly did. When i was drinking, i mean, especially when i was still drinking publicly, most of my drinking was pretty shameful and private. And do you think theres a sense i mean, i was reading an advice column the other day and i did a tweet about this. The lead question was, somebodys having a dry wedding. How do i deal . And the answer was bring a flask. And its just, its so everywhere. Its just everywhere. And you know, i wish i could make it stop and just let people make their own choices about things, because the on reasons that we think that drinking is the way to get through things and cope with things, instead of, i dont know, running or another substance, you know, weed or whatever. You know, is because its just constantly pushed on us. Connects right back to jeans question. This idea that youre freely drinking, that its your own choice. Of course you are, its choices that youre making, theres this trillion dollar industry making sure that youre doing that and that you are, you know, subject to a capitalist or choosing to drink. You never choose our choices in a capitalist system. We just dont. Its not possible. Like you think you have free will all you want, but theres still this animal of capitalism over your head at all times that and nowhere more than with your evening glass of wine. Well move on from there. One more question from deanne and you can do with this question what youd like because its openended. How long have you been clean, did you use other drugs and with your writing. Thats our last question. I stopped i think ive lost you. Am i air . This is josh. I can still hear you, erica, if you want to keep going with the answer and hopefully we can have go right ahead. Josh, can you hear me . Yes, yes, claire i can hear you. Youre coming through fine and erica is going to respond. While we wait for claire to reconnect. I started drinking when i was about 13 and then i i did a lot of other drugs then. It was the 90s, in high school, i did acid, smoked weed, pretty minor stuff in the scale of things and then i really didnt drink until i was in my heavily until i was in my 30s and i have been and i didnt really do a lot of other drugs either. I mean, drinking was really my main squeeze, once i really started and ive been sober for five and a half years. My sobriety date is february 4th, 2015 and i have been writing basically since forever. I started writing when i was i started writing professionally when i was about 18, 19 in college. I started taking internships back in the days when internships that you did not get technically paid for and ive just been doing it ever since. As the interest that i started as an intern at Texas Observer and started writing there and been in alt weekly ever since and in 2009 went out completely on the Online Platforms and, yeah, so gosh, how many years has that been . More than 20. Claire do we have you back . Kind of. In and out. Im going to step aside and let you two close this out because im dipping out. Sounds good. All right, erica, any final words . Just thank you so much for hosting this and im really glad we were able to get past our technical difficulties sort of. And thanks for everybody who is tuning in on youtube and podcast and facebook. All right, again, thank you everybody. Our apologies for starting late. Thank you for bearing with us. New again for tuning in this evening and really big thanks to erica and claire for being here. If you enjoyed this event you can find many more just like it on our website, town hall seattle. Org and we hope youll consider making a donation to town hall as your support will allow us to continue having events just like this one. If youre interested in preordering a copy of ericas book, quitter, memoir of relapse and recovery, out july 7th, use the link on this live stream page to purchase at our friends the elliott the bay book company. Thank you for being here, we hope you have a great evening. Youre watching book tv on cspan2. Every weekend with the latest nonfiction books and authors. Cspan2, created by americas Cable Television companies as a Public Service and brought to you today by your television provid provider. Week nights this months were featuring book tv programs as a preview of whats available every weekend on cspan2. Tonight, starting at 8 p. M. Eastern, former defense secretaries robert gates and james mattis take a look at the u. S. Of u. S. Power around the world since the end of world war ii. Then christian rose, former staff director of the Senate Armed Services committee. He talks about the future of hightech warfare. And later, former defense secretary William Perry and plow shares Fund Director of policy,ton killeena talk about the Nuclear Arms Race since world war ii and the Nuclear Threat today. Enjoy book tv on cspan2. Postmaster general louis dejoy testifies to congress on changes in Service Operations and their impact on the upcoming elections. Live friday, in front of the Homeland Security and governmental affairs. And postmaster general dejoy and the board of governors will testify before the House Oversight and reform committee. Watch live coverage of the hearings friday on cspan and monday on cspan2, on demand at cspan. Org or listen live wherever you are with the free cspan radio app. In 2004, Author Tom Wolfe spent a day in washington d. C. Discussing his book i am charlotte simmons, and he was then a guest on a radio show
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