As winter turned to spring, I kept taking long drives past strip malls on my days off work, through cornfields where snow was thawing into smaller patches of crusted dirty white. But these drives seemed empty, my life unbeautiful. I was just a woman jamming my fingers into the heat vents of my car. Everything glossy or buzzed or hot-blush-drunk in my life was gone. Only strip malls and that big fucked Iowa sky remained. On one of my routes, I passed an indoor water park, with a single curve of waterslide protruding from its stucco wall, and I fantasized about that pocket of warmth and rushing water—that chlorinated speed, its oasis.

When I was seven years old, I’d told my mom I was pretty sure I could make an apple crumble topping better than hers: a brown sugar crust baked with cinnamon and nutmeg. She gestured at the kitchen—unfazed, smiling—and said, “Go ahead.” I made a disgusting concoction with too much butter and, for whatever reason, raw macaroni, and then, too proud to admit I’d failed, I sat there eating the mixture in front of her, pretending that I loved it. Sobriety felt like that.

Everything made me think about booze. Empty shower caddies for sale at the student store made me imagine the hypothetical undergrads who would someday use them to get ready for their sorority parties, and I envied all the drinking they’d get to do, still smelling faintly of vanilla body scrub. When I thought of my nephew in San Francisco, at the other end of I-80, I imagined all the drinking he’d get to do someday. He was just over a year old. One afternoon a stranger in my regular coffee shop, two tables away, sat with his beer half drunk in front of him for hours, and I thought, Come on already! The woman in front of me in line at the Co-op bought a split of wine, half of half a bottle, and I thought: Why would you do that? I watched Leaving Las Vegas and felt envious of Nicolas Cage because he got to drink as much as he wanted.

Sobriety was shaping up to hold precisely the blankness I’d feared it would. I woke up every day without anything to look forward to, except the hour I spent craning my face to get closer to the small blue UV lamp that was supposed to combat my winter gloom. It was exhausting to be around anyone, because I didn’t have much inside—much energy or interest—so I had to portion it carefully across the day. Talking took effort. What was there to talk about? My family thought I might be clinically depressed, which wasn’t particularly interesting to talk about either.

The question of producing interesting conversation in sobriety has always been tricky. In Junkie, William Burroughs describes the Narcotic Farm as full of patients who talk about nothing but drugs, “like hungry men who can talk about nothing but food.” In The Fantastic Lodge, an “autobiography” published in 1961, culled and edited from taped interviews, an addict named Janet arrives at the Narcotic Farm to find it full of patient-prisoners talking about the drugs they miss: “There’s just nothing to do, nothing—except talk about junk. All is junk, and that’s all, you know; that’s the way it is.” Even Janet’s grammar is saturated by obsession; she keeps saying the same thing over and over again—about how there’s nothing else, really, to say.

By the end of The Fantastic Lodge, Janet has written a manuscript about her addiction and recovery, but it hasn’t done her any good. “She had come to put great hope in getting this book published,” says her psychiatrist in an afterword, and she “carried the manuscript with her wherever she went,” in a brown paper shopping bag that nearly split open from its weight.

In meetings, I had been told that telling our stories would save us, but I wondered if this was always true. What if your story was just dead weight, a bundle of pages in a soggy paper grocery bag?

When the Narcotic Farm’s annual reports classified discharged patients in terms of their suspected likelihood of relapse, the statistics did little more than suggest their own futility: “Cured, prognosis good (3) / Cured, prognosis guarded (27) / Cured, prognosis poor (10).” Another said: “good (23); guarded (61); poor (2).” The “guarded” category still loomed large: 61 out of 86, and 27 out of 40. Prognosis guarded essentially meant: We have no idea what will happen to him.

I’d envisioned the logic of sobriety working like a recycling redemption center, where I’d bring all the booze I wasn’t drinking, and in return I’d get back my relationship as I’d known it in the beginning. This was the contract logic version of sobriety: If I get sober, I’ll get x in return.

But now that I was sober, the main difference seemed to be that it was much harder for me to fall asleep after Dave and I fought. Our fights left me with so much restless energy—a vinegar tonic of anger and guilt—that I’d often leave the house at three or four in the morning and go walking like that first time, often to the same gas station on Burlington. It was strange to be out late without being drunk, strolling into the gas station utterly sober at four in the morning, as if I needed to explain myself to the clerk: I’m not partying, just awake. At a certain point, my mom—apologizing for even saying it at all—wrote at the bottom of an email: “If it were possible for me and you to have a conversation sometime about yours and Dave’s relationship when it wasn’t in response to an immediate crisis, I would really like that.”

That winter, after months spent in a dull, zombie dream, I eventually went back home to Los Angeles and sat in a chair in the middle of a psychiatrist’s office. He asked me if I ever felt like I was seeing everything through shit-colored glasses. I said: Always. He gave me a prescription for an antidepressant and said I should dose up slowly and watch for a rash. My mother and I drove to a convent where the trimmed grass was sliced into pieces by the gray ribbons of concrete pathways. We wrote our wishes for the year and burned them to make them come true. But when I tried to pray, nothing happened. It was like I was trying to edge my way into a conversation that had already begun without me.

Back in Iowa, on the days I didn’t work at the bakery, I trudged into my office at home—the room where I used to drink alone—and tried to work on the novel I wanted to be writing about the Sandinista revolution. Sobriety was supposed to mean you got beyond yourself, and I was drawn to the premise of the novel as a way to hurl myself as far away from my own life as possible. The novel itself was actually about the desire to give yourself to something bigger than your particular life: a revolution.

I started researching with frantic propulsion, from the subtleties of the Sandinistas’ hybrid-Marxist doctrinal debates to the jars of blood thrown in protest against the white fortresses of Somoza’s for-profit blood banks. I covered one wall of my office with grainy photocopied photographs: black-and-red FSLN flags waving above a crowded plaza; men in berets riding buses to Managua with their guns pointed against the sky. I wrote heated debate scenes that took place in cobblestone courtyards. Did the revolution depend on mobilizing the rural peasants or gaining the support of the urban elite? At least I had the courtyard down: candles tucked in the crevices between stones; their fluted, flickering light; the sweet stink of piss and flowers; the faint shushing of palm fronds in the wind overhead. Minor sensory details were all my imagination could muster, a sublimated nostalgia for my drinking days in Nicaragua. But the prose sagged under the weight of all my desperate research. We must not forget the middle classes in Managua! It was terrible. I gave my characters plenty of rum to drink, the same rum I’d drunk years before, to ease the burden of all the soapbox lecturing I was foisting upon them. I imagined all that rum running in tender spicy streaks down their throats. I could have described that rum for paragraphs, for pages.

Every once in a while, I would creep into my bathroom, get on my knees, and ask God to help me write the book. Then I’d correct myself, ask Him to help me do His will, and secretly hope that His will would be for me to write the best novel ever written about the Sandinista revolution.

In those days, I prayed grudgingly. My faith was skeptical and contractual. I wasn’t sure God existed, but if He did exist, there were definitely a couple things He could do for me. It felt fraudulent to get on my knees in front of my own futon—right next to where I’d stashed the whiskey bottle under the frame—as if, by kneeling, I was pretending to have a faith I couldn’t actually summon.

In order to convince myself that sobriety was worth it, I tried to write day and night. But most evenings I broke down and watched hours of reality television instead. I got especially attached to The Gauntlet, a reality-TV show where former cast members from better reality-TV shows went to beautiful parts of the developing world and competed in absurd gladiatorial contests. They dunked themselves in ice water and buried themselves in coffins. They ended up eating ice cream mixed with their own vomit. I was glad to see Trishelle get into a bike accident because I still hadn’t forgiven her for choosing Steven over Frank back on Real World: Las Vegas, though she’d eventually hooked up with both of them. (“Everyone’s cute after twelve cocktails,” she said, and I couldn’t disagree.) Sometimes I glanced up at my Sandinista wall and thought the revolutionaries must be gazing down at me, judging.

When my first novel came out that winter, the girls at the bakery made a cake decorated with a version of the cover—which showed a faceless woman in a mauve negligee, not my first choice—fashioned from pink and purple chocolate. The book didn’t sell well. The high point was the day it reached ninety-something on the Alcoholism sublist on Amazon, far below the Big Book—translated into twenty different languages. My mom was excited to see it ranked on a sublist. She emailed me about it. Thanks for letting me know! I wrote back, as if I hadn’t been checking for myself. I read my online reader reviews obsessively, all ten of them. The most passionate one said that my descriptions of alcohol were so detailed I must be an alcoholic, and gave the book three stars out of five.

I was still trying to work myself as hard as I could—to prove to myself that sobriety was worth it—but mostly my writing felt like riding a stubborn horse, kicking it with spurs until it bled.

In The Shining, Jack Nicholson plays a dry drunk desperately punching away at his typewriter in an empty off-season resort—an embodiment of grudging sobriety, its maze of carpeted corridors haunted by the sinister ghosts of prior revelry. Jack hurls himself at his manuscript but ends up typing just one phrase for hundreds of pages, All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy, varied only by margins and typos: All work and no play makes Jack a dull bog. All work and no play makes Jack a dull bot. It’s sobriety through a glass darkly. All work and no play—no booze—makes everything hopelessly dull. Life, prose, everything.

Jack starts drinking again in the movie, or at least he wants to drink so badly he hallucinates his own relapse. He gets a tumbler of bourbon from poker-faced Lloyd, a ghost bartender at the empty lobby bar. “Here’s to five miserable months on the wagon,” Jack tells Lloyd, “and all the irreparable harm that it’s caused me.”

Stephen King’s novel The Shining, on which the Kubrick film is based, is the story of a failed recovery set in a twisted vision of rehab: An unhappily sober man relapses in an empty hotel perched high in the Colorado Rockies. Instead of the community of rehab, we get life in an isolation tank. When Jack Torrance takes a job at the Overlook Hotel, he no longer drinks, but he’s still consumed by the resentment and anger that fueled his drinking. “Would he ever have an hour,” he wonders, “not a week or even a day, mind you, but just one waking hour [without] this craving for a drink?”

After the winter’s first major snowfall, the phone lines go down and the road that connects the Overlook to the rest of the world is closed. Jack and his family are utterly alone, left to the devices of their own unraveling. The hotel’s walls are banked with fallen snow, its rooms full of rotting ghosts, its wallpaper stained with blood. The topiary animals come alive. The elevators fill with confetti and deflated balloons, the menacing afterlife of revelry. The Shining isn’t just a relapse story; it’s a story about the frustrations of a dry drunk—recovery-speak for someone who no longer drinks but isn’t in any recovery program—a man literally white-knuckling his way through life. Jack’s hands and fingers appear constantly throughout the novel’s six hundred pages, “clenched tightly in his lap, working against each other, sweating,” his nails “digging into his palms like tiny brands,” or shaking, or balled into tight fists, contorted by “the wanting, the needing to get drunk.”

Though Jack has been dry for longer in the novel than the movie—fourteen months, to be precise, not that he’s counting every second of it—he’s angry that he hasn’t gotten enough credit for his own self-improvement. “If a man reforms,” he asks himself, “doesn’t he deserve to have his reformation credited sooner or later?”

Everything conspires to make Jack drink again. He pictures guests drinking in the gardens during summer: sloe gin fizzes and Pink Ladies. He wipes his handkerchief across his lips in longing. He starts chewing Excedrin just like he used to for his hangovers. He eventually finds himself facing Lloyd at the bar, asking for twenty martinis: “One for every month I’ve been on the wagon and one to grow on.” Jack sits on his bar stool telling Lloyd about the trials of staying high-and-dry, the five months he’s added to his sobriety during the long winter: “The floor of the Wagon is nothing but straight pine boards, so fresh they’re still bleeding sap, and if you took your shoes off you’d be sure to get a splinter.” Sobriety is Spartan and uncomfortable, sticky and joyless. It pricks you at every turn. The ballroom behind his bar stool fills with ghosts—ghoulish creatures with sagging skin wearing fox masks and rhinestone brassieres and sequined dresses—and they’re all egging on his relapse, “looking at him expectantly, silently,” as the bartender tells him: “Now drink your drink,” a command that all the spirits repeat, in chorus.

Jack’s relapse exists in a strange purgatory between hallucination and actual intoxication: “Jack brought the drink to his mouth and downed it in three long gulps, the gin highballing down his throat like a moving van in a tunnel, exploding in his stomach.” Does he actually drink, or just imagine drinking? It gets him drunk either way.

After this fantasy has ended and its imagined bottles have disappeared from the shelves, Jack finds himself at the bar with his crying wife and their traumatized child, wondering: “What was he doing in a bar with a drink in his hand? He had TAKEN THE PLEDGE. He had GONE ON THE WAGON. He had SWORN OFF.” It sounds like a temperance play—like my old all-caps superlatives, or Lowry’s melodrama—and it sounds like one to Jack, too: “It was just before the curtain of Act II in some old-time temperance play,” he thinks, “one so poorly mounted that the prop man had forgotten to stock the shelves of the Den of Iniquity.” Jack is aware of his own self-dramatizing tendencies, but he’s also aware—with keen disappointment, like a real alcoholic—that all the bottles are gone. His son, Danny, telepathically curses the hotel: “You had to make him drink the Bad Stuff. That’s the only way you could get him.”

The novel and film versions of The Shining both present bleak visions of the relationship between sobriety and creativity. In the movie we get a sober man without a story—his mind fallow and fumbling, typing the same words over and over again—but the book imagines a writer seduced by the wrong story. Jack becomes obsessed with the story of the Overlook Hotel itself, its history of depravity: murders and suicides and mafia scandals. One day while Jack is checking on the boiler in the basement—the novel’s Chekhovian gun, spotted in the first act and fired by the last—he discovers a scrapbook full of articles about the hotel’s violent past. His fascination quickly starts to sound like relapse, as he examines the scrapbook “almost guiltily, as if he had been drinking secretly,” all the while worried that his wife “would smell the fumes on him.” When Jack thinks about writing the story of the Overlook, he gets the same sensation “he usually felt… when he had a three-drink buzz on.”

Whether he’s working on a story that doesn’t exist (in the film), or committed to telling a story of dissolution (in the novel), Jack’s monomaniacal focus on creation is what obliterates his decency. In the novel, he relapses because he finds himself drawn to the wrong tale, not a recovery narrative but something nearly opposite: the hotel’s own sordid drunkalog. The sinister revelry beckons, all the ghosts beckon: Drink your drink. It’s a relapse writ large. The stakes are supernatural. When the boiler explodes and the hotel goes up in flames, there’s no triumphant recovery, only finality: “The party was over.”

When Stephen King wrote The Shining, in the mid-seventies, he wrote it “without even realizing… that I was writing about myself.” At the height of his use, King was filling his trash cans with beer bottles and doing so much cocaine he had to stuff tissues into his nostrils so he wouldn’t bleed on his typewriter. The Shining was a nightmare written by an addict terrified of sobriety. “I was afraid,” King wrote decades later, “that I wouldn’t be able to work anymore if I quit drinking and drugging.”

When I wanted to force myself to write, I spent my evenings at the Java House, a cavernous coffee shop stocked with fist-sized cookies—often stale—that I purchased with dogged determination, trying to tell myself that pleasure was still possible. I opened my laptop by the front windows and watched people walk into bars while I pecked at my keyboard, working on a short story called “The Relapse” that was supposed to be an inoculation against actually relapsing.

The story begins with a woman named Claudia binge-drinking while pregnant, just like I had. When I wrote about the clear sweet booze surrounding her fetus, I wanted to drink it. I wanted gills so I could swim through it. After Claudia decides to quit drinking, she meets a man named Jack at an AA meeting. This plotline was a way for me to dramatize one of my relapse fantasies: that I would meet a man in the program and throw everything away with him—my relationship, my sobriety, all of it. Claudia and Jack trade drinking histories the way other people might flirt by talking about their sexual pasts. Claudia isn’t sure if she is using the possibility of alcohol to flirt with Jack, or the possibility of Jack to flirt with alcohol. Claudia tells Jack she wants to relapse so she can know—without a doubt—that she has absolutely lost control. Then she’ll be able to get better.

In the first draft I wrote, Claudia and Jack got drunk together. Then I decided the ending was too predictable. I gave it away in the title! That version of the story seemed like a pathetic version of wish fulfillment, without any larger purpose in sight. So I revised: She didn’t relapse. She stayed straight. But all this flip-flopping, draft to draft, was just another version of what I was doing every day in my own head.

“The fantasy of every alcoholic,” says one textbook, “is that there is a nearby, possible world in which he discovers a decorous dosing regimen, and drinks like a perfect gentleman or lady.” From the safe perch of sobriety, I started to summon a catalog of my finest drinking moments. Recovery wisdom said, You can’t turn a pickle back into a cucumber. But I was busy re-cucumbering, marinating in nostalgia. I could still remember drinking on a balcony with Dave while the dark sea frothed and surged below us; or stumbling back to my college boyfriend’s concrete high-rise dorm, exhaling puffs of frosted gin breath into the cold, falling into his twin bed on the nineteenth floor as the high tower creaked and moaned in the wind. I could still remember getting drunk during a work trip to Xi’an, on a clear liquor that a Chinese writer told me was white wine. But it wasn’t white wine. It was fire. I could still remember picking up a fried scorpion from the pile of fried scorpions, under the watchful gaze of two birds carved from turnips, and making a joke with my chopsticks, acting like a total fucking idiot but not caring. That was the point: not caring. As if I’d been released from a contract. Drinking was plush and forgiving. It sparkled like backyard fireflies. It smelled like good meat and smoke. It was already happening in the nearby possible world. It said, Come on over.

In that world, I would drink like I’d always wanted to drink, except it would work out; it would be okay. I definitely wouldn’t get drunk and stuff my face with old crusty leftover pasta from the fridge and tell Dave it made me sick to watch his compulsive attachment to affirmation, something I obviously knew nothing about. I definitely wouldn’t start crying and wiping the snot from my nose with my hand and asking him why he couldn’t even comfort me, why he was so repulsed by my sadness.

At a meeting, when I shared about how hard it was to be at parties, one woman suggested that in that case I might not want to throw so many parties at our house. But I was going to meetings less frequently, and we were throwing parties more often. Twenty-two-year-olds in heavy eyeliner were taking shots in my kitchen. At one I went to the fridge and found that my Diet Wild Cherry Pepsi, the one I’d tucked behind the soy milk to keep it safe, was gone. Dave had given it to a visiting poet, who was sober and thirsty.

“But I’m sober,” I told him. “I was thirsty.”

These things were both true. It was also true that I could have said, Hey, let’s not have sixty people get drunk at our house. But I was wary of imposing another limit—already worried he resented the ones I’d tried to impose—and I liked imagining that I wasn’t entirely banished from the realms of revelry.

After that party was done, thirty minutes after everyone was gone, a tiny poet climbed out of our hallway closet. We were picking up red plastic cups, still sticky with wine. “Where is everyone?” she’d asked. “Is it over?”

And I envied her, because she was drunk.

When Sasha finally decides to drink herself to death in Rhys’s Good Morning, Midnight, she reflects on how easy it can be to disappear entirely: “You are walking along a road peacefully. You trip. You fall into blackness. That’s the past—or perhaps the future. And you know that there is no past, no future, there is only this blackness, changing faintly, slowly, but always the same.”

After publishing Good Morning, Midnight, in 1939, Rhys tripped and fell off the road herself—as if the novel had been prophecy. Rhys disappeared for a decade, publishing nothing, and no one knew where she’d gone. Rumors spread that she’d died at a sanitarium; that she’d died in Paris; that she’d died during the war. Occasional articles about her work referred to her as “the late Jean Rhys.”

In 1949, an actress named Selma Vaz Dias put out a personal ad in the New Statesman, a weekly newspaper, to see if Rhys was still alive: “Will anyone knowing her whereabouts kindly communicate.” She was interested in turning one of Rhys’s novels into a radio play. By this point, Rhys was married (for the third time), to a disbarred lawyer named Max Hamer, a devoted but unstable husband who was convicted of fraud charges shortly after their marriage, in 1947. When Rhys saw Vaz Dias’s ad, she was living alone near Maidstone Prison, in Kent, England, where Hamer was incarcerated. Rhys had been in jail for drunk and disorderly behavior several times herself. A local paper had recently run a headline about one of these run-ins with the law: MRS. HAMER AGITATED, ONLY HAD ALGERIAN WINE. When Vaz Dias wrote an article about “finding” Rhys, she framed the fifteen years Rhys had been lost to the world as an open mystery: “But who was JEAN RHYS and WHERE WAS SHE?”

Where was she? Mainly, she’d been somewhere drinking. Her days played the same tracks on repeat. Even her biographer got tired of it. “Jean’s life,” wrote Carole Angier, “really did seem to be the same few scenes re-enacted over and over.” The drinking made Rhys plump, or else it made her scribble phrases on the wall: “Magna est veritas et praevalet,” she scrawled in lipstick. “Truth is great and it prevails.”

After Hamer was released from prison, he and Rhys moved into a Cornwall summer cottage in the middle of winter, where she made a sign telling people to go away: “NO teas—NO water—NO lavatory. No matches. No cigarettes. No teas. No sandwiches. No water. Don’t know where anybody lives. Don’t know anything. Now Bugger Off.” They eventually moved to a dilapidated cottage in a little village called Cheriton Fitzpaine, where the roof leaked and the walls were full of mice and the villagers thought Rhys was a witch because she once threw broken bottles at a fence in the middle of the night.

During the years of her “disappearance,” Rhys also began working on the book that would eventually make her famous. It was a novel about the madwoman in the attic from Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre—an attempt to reclaim this woman from her villainy and her insanity, to write her backstory as a woman exiled from her Caribbean homeland and wronged by a man. Nothing like Rhys at all.

“I’m struggling with a new thing,” she wrote a friend. “What a tiresome creature I was, or still am. But if I can do this book, it won’t matter so much will it?”

The first spring of my sobriety, I got a month off work at the bakery so I could go to a place called Yaddo—a swanky writing residency in upstate New York. Half of me imagined this month as a creative whirlwind that could justify the dreary trudge of my sobriety, but the other half of me imagined it would be the perfect place to start drinking again: among strangers, far from anyone I’d ever told I was an alcoholic. I’d heard Yaddo described as a messy swirl of debauchery—infidelities and drunken rambles through the woods—and imagined slurred recitations of “The Raven” in a glossy wood-paneled library that would feel like the inside of a walnut shell, with tasseled brocade curtains and gleaming booze trolleys. “I am drunk every morning, almost, at Yaddo,” Patricia Highsmith had written. “I am the God-intoxicated, the material-intoxicated, the art-intoxicated, yes.”

Sobriety had disappointed me in almost every way I could imagine: It hadn’t repaired my relationship with Dave. It made me feel drained and shy. It made my writing lifeless and effortful. I thought of it this way—as if I were a victim of my own life, as if sobriety were a snake oil salesman who’d made promises he hadn’t kept. He had taken away the main thing I looked forward to when I woke up in the morning. He had launched me into a series of tiring days cloaked by a gray scrim that only my antidepressant seemed partially able to lift. Now that the grayness had given way enough to see around its edges, I was telling myself the drinking didn’t have to be so dark.

There hadn’t ever been a moment when I decided to stop going to meetings. It was more like I’d peeled away, a bit guiltily, surrendered to not-feeling-like-it for many days in a row, until I hadn’t gone for several months. And without meetings, sobriety had turned into a weight I was carrying around for no reason at all.

Much of my train ride to Yaddo was spent deciding whether or not I should start drinking there. Eventually, I decided it would look too sneaky. If I was going to convince everyone in my life that it was okay for me to drink again, it wouldn’t look good if I started on the sly. But I didn’t want to tell anyone at Yaddo I was sober, either, because I was pretty sure I was going to drink again, sometime soon, and the fewer people to whom I’d introduced myself as alcoholic, the better. So I told people I was celebrating Lent late this year, after Easter, and I was giving up booze. I wasn’t like sober or anything. People looked at me in confusion. “Okay, that’s great.” A few people asked, “Why didn’t you do it during Lent?”

I said, “It’s sort of complicated. Don’t worry about it.” I’m sure no one did.

Yaddo looked like an illustrated fairy tale—a grand mansion with terraces overlooking rolling green lawns, formal parlors upholstered with crimson fabric, a set of glimmering ponds called the “ghost lakes,” a stone ice house where composers made landscapes of sound. With sheer brute force, I was hurling myself at my Sandinista novel. But the writing had no pulse. I was glad I didn’t have Internet access so I couldn’t spend my days checking to see if my novel had somehow miraculously climbed back into the top 100 on the Amazon Alcoholism sublist. Since there was no cell reception in any of the buildings, I had to wander down a dirt road—to a particular bend—until I could hear Dave’s voice through the phone, at which point I usually spent our conversations trying to figure out if he’d seen Destiny, making feeble attempts to sound casual. “Did you hang out with anyone after the reading?” The suspicion was palpable in my voice and I hated it, just as I hated the tightness in his replies.

Nights were stiff and uncomfortable. While self-possessed performance artists were turning their studios into installation spaces and getting tipsy before our nightly games of pool—a variation called Pig where you had to jump on the table and push the balls with your hands—I was deeply sober, deeply stymied, and deeply worried about deer ticks, terrified of catching Lyme disease. One night I lay in bed while three artists drank and laughed in the living room just outside my door. It sounded like they were laughing right into my ear. I was coiled tight with resentment. It didn’t even sound funny, whatever they were saying, though I couldn’t quite make it out. I was ashamed of my prim, ascetic life without booze. I hadn’t felt this far outside the world of others since junior high, back when I rocked suspenders holding up a floral skirt that twirled above my unshaved legs. I thought of asking the artists to be quiet, but couldn’t stand the thought of breaking up a party I hadn’t been invited to. Isn’t that the girl who doesn’t drink? They’d giggle. We should let her sleep. My own desires were cramped and joyless: I wanted to go to sleep early so I could wake up early and work, or punish my body by running around the ghost lakes in the cool dawn.

One day I came back from a run and spotted a tick stuck on my thigh. In a panic, I checked the “Tick Safety” pamphlet in my room. Was the tick partially engorged or fully engorged? I didn’t know. It looked like some kind of engorged. It looked like an evil little button, capable of anything. I pulled it out with special tick tweezers, its fierce grip tenting my skin, and took a panicked ride to a local medical clinic. I went on antibiotics that day, which didn’t seem like a compelling thing to talk about at dinner, but I didn’t feel compelling—about ticks or anything else. I was just a chronic hypochondriac who’d been right a very small but unforgettable number of times. The other residents were natural storytellers who carried quivers full of anecdotes, drank good wine at dinner in our oak-paneled dining room, and then split into smaller cliques to drink harder stuff at night.

By the time I left Yaddo, I was determined to start drinking again. I spent much of the trip home thinking of how I would present this decision to Dave. It was good to stop drinking for a while, I’d say. But I think I’m ready to start. I had to make it persuasive. More than anything, I had to make it sound casual. I couldn’t say it like someone who’d just spent an entire plane ride trying to figure out how to say it. I was nervous but eager. I was sure I had just the right phrasing.