The first day of my second sobriety, I crashed my friend’s car into a concrete wall. I’d borrowed his car because ours wasn’t starting and I needed to get to my morning shift at the hospital so that medical students could diagnose my fake appendicitis. It was a frozen December day and I was jumpy and nervous, hungover and jittery: I need to stop. I don’t want to stop. Stopping didn’t work last time. My hands were having trouble staying still. And then I pulled into a parking space and hit the accelerator instead of the brakes and slammed right into the concrete wall. I remember thinking, Oh shit. And then I wondered if I could pretend it hadn’t happened. Do I definitely have to tell him? And yes, I did, because the front bumper was dangling like a loose Band-Aid and one of the headlights had been cracked into a glass web. My immediate impulse was simply to back out and pull into another parking space, as if that would give me a do-over.

I was trying to do the right thing, after all—get sober again—and today was supposed to be my big watershed, the first day of the rest of my life. Now my reward, for those intentions, was this battered station wagon? I was indignant. If I was going to stop drinking, I was supposed to discover a spectacular new version of myself, or at least recover the presence of mind not to accelerate into a concrete wall. But sobriety didn’t work like that. It works like this: You go to work. You call your friend. You say, I’m sorry I crashed your car into a wall. You say you’ll fix it. Then you do.

“Why do you deserve another chance?” one drug-court judge asked his defendant, an addict trying to explain his latest relapse.

“There’s hope,” said the defendant.

“What makes you think you have hope now?”

The defendant said he was getting clean for his kids. He had to give a reason it was different this time.

“How is life different?”

“I have better coping skills and listen more.”

“Do you still know everything?”

“No. I’m open-minded now.”

“Humble?” the judge asked. “Willing to listen now?”

The defendant laughed and shook his head. “It’s been a personal challenge,” the defendant admitted. “I thought I knew everything.”

It’s an uncomfortable ritual: the addict asked to perform his humility, expected to regard the judge as both therapist and punisher. It’s just one of many ways that drug courts—the American legal system’s main concession to the possibility that there might be something to do with addicts besides locking them up—still live imperfectly inside their ideals, one of the ways they still treat addiction as a form of failure.

In drug court, the judge and defendant are meant to collaboratively construct the person the defendant is supposed to become—not just someone recovering but someone who sincerely desires this recovery. But sociologists find that drug courts are full of “tongue lashings” from judges: “I’m tired of your excuses!” “I’m through with you!” Some defendants are treated as “salvageable” while others are deemed “irremediably deficient.”

Part of proving that you’re truly ready to recover—in drug court, in a meeting, in a memoir—involves admitting that you don’t know if you can recover at all. Part of getting into the right narrative involves admitting you can’t see the end of it. Like the Narco Farm reports: Prognosis guarded. In Lady Sings the Blues, Billie Holiday warns her readers against believing her own tentative happy ending: “There isn’t a soul on this earth who can say for sure that their fight with dope is over until they’re dead.”

In the afterword to Beautiful Boy, a memoir about his son Nic’s recovery from meth addiction, journalist David Sheff confesses that Nic relapsed again after the book was published. “Yes, Nic relapsed,” he writes. “Sometimes I tire of the convoluted, messy truth.” Sheff’s afterword doesn’t just disrupt the provisional happy ending we’ve just read, it disrupts the possibility of any certain ending. This is a staple of the addiction memoir genre: the afterword, the epilogue, the “author’s note” confessing that since first publication, things have not gone entirely as hoped. But confessing uncertainty outright—saying no soul on earth can say for sure—isn’t cynicism. It offers an honest hope that doesn’t depend on something impossible: knowing the end of the story before it comes. It’s more ragged than Bill Wilson’s mountaintop vision, and it’s a more frustrating story to tell—just as so many stories I heard at meetings, over the years, involved countless cycles and repetitions. That’s how humility gets built into hope. Old-timers sober for forty years say, “With any luck I’ll stay sober till the end of one more day.”

When I came back to my first meeting, I said: “When I started drinking again, I promised myself I’d never come back to a meeting. Now I’m here.”

Iowa City is a small town. When I returned to meetings, I knew I’d see the same people. It made me anxious. They would remember how I’d walked in a year earlier, full of desperation and pathos, and then quit their solution. Now I was back: my sadness stale, my case compromised. It made me picture Civil War deserters branded with a D at the hip, or forced to wear wooden signs proclaiming their cowardice.

But everyone was happy to see me. People said: “Glad you’re back.” Some said: “It was like that for me, too.” A woman I’d known the first time around knelt on the floor next to my chair and said, “You never have to drink again,” and I thought, Never HAVE to? Drinking was all I wanted to do. I wanted to do it right then.

Years later I looked back and saw the truth of what she’d said: that I’d taken one step away from that tight crawl space full of endless scheming and apologizing, deciding and redeciding. But that first night back, the trap was still the thing I desired most. It made me anxious that the first thing I’d heard didn’t ring true at all. Had it been a ridiculous mistake to come back? But I was crying, I was a wreck, and that woman had seen that whatever I was in the middle of, I was desperate for relief from it.

Relief came from sitting still and listening. That night, a man talked about getting drunk for the first time when he was twelve, babysitting his little sisters one night, how he broke into his parents’ liquor stash, then ate a whole bag of licorice and woke up in a puddle of his own black vomit. He talked about how his diabetic wife had died of a blood infection six weeks after he left her. She’d stepped on a piece of glass, drunk—had to get her toes amputated, and then her foot. Then she died. That really sent him off. Survivor’s guilt, he said. He also had that from working in the Marriott World Trade Center on 9/11. After he made it home that day, he turned on the news and drank a whole bottle of wine—then checked how many bottles he had left, in case the world was ending.

Hearing his voice in that church basement, above the scrape of metal chair legs across linoleum and the percolations of the coffeemaker, I listened to his story as a writer—for its themes and climax—but I mainly heard it another way: as a woman who still wanted to drink more than she wanted to do anything else.

During the zenith of his involvement in AA, during the mid-1950s, Charles Jackson started to believe that recovery was inspiring him to write in a new way. He had a new angle on the book he was writing, an approach committed to simplicity and honesty, and wrote to one friend that his “stopping-drinking and… enormous interest in AA” had “a lot to do with this new attitude.” At that point, Jackson was working on the book he imagined would become his magnum opus: an epic called What Happened, a “novel of affirmation and acceptance of life” that would tell the story of his old antihero, Don Birnam, once he’d left all his lost weekends behind him.

The epic’s first installment, titled Farther and Wilder, would begin with a two-hundred-page overture constructed around the central event of a massive family reunion. Don “would be host to the gathering, they should come to him and be his guests, and he would not only take care of them all but be able to take care of them all.” Jackson wanted to write a different Don than the one the world knew from The Lost Weekend. This Don would be stable and affluent, not only taking care of his family but able to take care of them. The syntax is poignant in its repetition.

Jackson had been stymied by the book for years—his biographer Blake Bailey has observed that Jackson was a master of “working on every conceivable thing but [this] novel”—but in the months after Jackson got involved in AA in 1953, he was finally able to generate more than two hundred pages. As he wrote to a friend:

it’s far & away the best thing I’ve done, simpler, more honest, and, for the first time, out of myself—that is, not self-tortured or -absorbed or -eviscerated. No, it’s about people—life, if I may say so.… My stopping-drinking and my enormous interest in AA, if you’ll pardon the expression, have a lot to do with this new attitude—well, everything to do with it, I think.

The novel was anchored in the ordinary texture of a sober alcoholic’s daily experience. “I can put it best,” Jackson told his editor, Roger Straus, “by saying the story happens, is happening—taking place, like daily living—on every page.” He wanted to write a novel that humbled its content—by taking up the topic of ordinary people and ordinary living—as well as its style, by resisting the siren call of virtuosic performance. These were both ways of trying to write away from his ego. In another letter to Straus, Jackson described his approach: “It is really wonderful, simple, plain, human, life itself—nothing in the dazzling intellectual class… but unless you are James Joyce, the ‘relaxed’ novel is good enough.”

Jackson wanted to believe his novel could be wondrous in its attention to ordinary human life. But he was also worried. You can hear the doubt seeping into his justifications. Although he argued that the novel “can do just about what it pleases,” and announced, “I please to make it plain, like everyday people,” his underlined “I” suggested a fragile sense of his own prerogative. It was as if his social self-consciousness about his AA fellows (who were, as his wife said, “not very bright or interesting or anything”) had its corollary in his anxiety about whether this new style would seem ambitious or intellectual enough. At times, he openly confessed his anxiety that this approach of “life unfolding moment by moment” could seem “careless and rambling,” or just marked by a “total lack of originality”—the very lack of originality that AA was teaching him to embrace. Jackson’s conflicted attitude toward the project had everything to do with the split he perceived between the spheres of literature and recovery. How could he write a novel that would satisfy the demands of both? He feared the judgment of a shrewish literati that wasn’t much like the crowd at his AA meetings, people whose ethos of fellowship had asked him to imagine himself into their “everyday” lives and away from his own.

If Jackson had gotten drunk because he couldn’t get outside himself, as he would tell AA crowds, then getting out of himself in the novel translated this newfound sense of sober purpose into prose. As he wrote to one friend, he wanted “all of it outside of myself—outside!” It was a curious claim for Jackson to make, that his project—another semi-autobiographical novel—was somehow leaving his own life behind. The AA ethos was key to these paradoxical ambitions: the belief that every person was simply a vehicle for delivering a story, and the faith that illuminating your own life was a way to be of service beyond yourself.

That first winter of my second sobriety, my sponsor gave me a chart to fill out for my Fourth Step, which involved making an inventory of all my resentments.

“Just that?” I joked. “How long do you have?”

She smiled patiently and said: “Trust me, I’ve seen worse.”

My sponsor—Stacy—was a funny, generous woman who’d gotten sober before she was legal. She was nothing like me, except that neither of us had ever wanted to drink any other way besides a deep dive into drunk. She was matter-of-fact about her own experiences, and listened patiently to my rambling, comprehensive monologues, nodding but not particularly impressed, often distilling them to their core urgencies: So you were afraid of being left? Her distillations weren’t reductions. They captured something it was useful for me to see starkly, without the webbing of so much language. Every time I thanked her profusely for taking the time to meet with me, she told me the same thing: “This keeps me sober, too.”

When I first got into AA, I had been told to choose a sponsor who “had what I wanted.” I sensed this didn’t mean a Pulitzer Prize. I eventually chose Stacy not because she reminded me of myself, but because she didn’t. She moved through the world with assurance—helpful without seeming righteous, humble without excess apology. It felt viscerally good to be around her ease, like silk against the skin. She was not ashamed to confess the size of her love for her Pomeranian. We shared a sense of humor, both laughed at the part of Bill’s story in the Big Book where he said he’d never been unfaithful while he was drinking, out of “loyalty to my wife, helped at times by extreme drunkenness.” We liked that he confessed the less-than-noble reason, too.

Stacy and I had worked together before my relapse, and when I decided to get sober again, she and her fiancé had taken me to my first meeting back. “Thank you for giving me another chance,” I’d gushed, thinking it was all about our connection.

“Of course,” she’d said. “That’s how the program works.”

When it came to my Fourth Step, I was anxious about the format of the list—a spreadsheet with extremely narrow columns—because I wasn’t sure how I’d tell the full story of each item I was listing. “Some of my situations are pretty complicated,” I explained.

“So are everyone’s,” my sponsor said. “I’m sure you’ll manage.”

The Fourth Step was supposed to include all my “harms and resentments,” but I asked Stacy if I was supposed to list people I resented, even if I hadn’t caused them any harm. She smiled. I was clearly not the first alcoholic who had asked this question. “Anyone who gives you a knot in your gut,” she said. The chart had a column asking me to link each of my resentments to a motivating fear—fear of conflict, fear of abandonment—and I filled it out dutifully, always a model student. (Fear of inadequacy.) I hadn’t done an inventory during my first sobriety, and it was part of my attempt to do things differently this time around. The inventory wasn’t about asking for absolution for my sins; it was about bringing discomfort into the light, all the toxic grudges that might make me want to drink again. Listing them was like emptying a cluttered drawer.

When I looked back at what my drinking had been, I saw someone hurling herself at the world—asking it to give her back to herself with some edges. I saw myself standing in a man’s doorway, my body thrilling with coke and already smarting with disappointment, practically begging him to kiss me. My sister-in-law had once asked me, “Would you rather have no bones or no skin?” and at first it made me picture a creature without bones, a shapeless dough-blob of flesh; and then a creature without skin, a taut sculpture of glistening nerves and muscles. How would you describe the creature without either? Just totally fucked? Sometimes I suspected I had no structure; at other times, no boundaries. I looked back at the girl in the doorway, waiting to be kissed, and wanted to clap a hand over her mouth—to shake the coke from her nose and drain the vodka from her stomach, to say: Don’t say that, don’t drink that, don’t need that. Except I couldn’t, because she did—say that, drink that, need that.

She wasn’t the only one with needs. This was part of my inventory, too, accepting that I wasn’t the only victim of my insecurities. In the chart called “Sexual History Inventory,” the most telling column was this one: “Whom did I hurt?” It wasn’t just telling because it was full of names, but because most of them were followed by question marks. I’d rarely paid enough attention to know whether I’d hurt them or not. My insecurity had convinced me I didn’t have the power to hurt anyone.

By the time I was ready to go over my chart with Stacy—this was the Fifth Step, talking about the Fourth Step inventory with someone else—I was in the recent aftermath of another surgery, a procedure to fix residual damage in my nose from the time I’d been punched. I’d shared about the surgery in a meeting, hoping for sympathy, but the main thing I got was: “Be careful with your painkillers.” It turned out to be good advice. I was surprised by how much I looked forward to the drugs that would knock me out, and the ones I’d get afterward; by how obsessively I’d imagined the possibility of laughing gas or Valium. It was like a surge through my belly, this anticipation—unbidden and unexpected. In meetings, people sometimes said: Your disease is always waiting for you outside. It’s out there doing push-ups. I pictured alcoholism as a small man with a mustache and a wifebeater.

It turns out I didn’t even get the pre-op stuff I’d been hoping for, nitrous oxide or Valium. All my anesthesia did for me was make me vomit after the surgery into a bucket Dave held beside me. He’d been there for me—over and over again—and in sobriety it was getting easier to see that; easier to tell him I was grateful for that tenderness.

The night before I was supposed to do my Fifth Step, my face was still bandaged. I hadn’t taken any Vicodin, too scared of how much I wanted to take them all—or at least enough to make the whole world swim. I was on a zero-salt diet to bring down my swelling, subsisting largely on a mixture of Cheerios, walnuts, and dried cherries, like a vain little squirrel. I texted Stacy suggesting that maybe we should postpone our session for a few weeks.

“Are you physically able to speak?” she asked.

I told her I was.

“Then let’s do it,” she said.

So the next day we sat across from each other at my kitchen table. I put out a little bowl of Cheerios and cranberries. I poured us glasses of water. My chart lay on the table between us, its boxes reductive and true. It felt useful to look at my regrets in terms of fear rather than selfishness. Perhaps it was just a question of seeing how often selfishness, mine and everyone’s, was motivated by fear.

I started explaining the first situation on my inventory, in all of its nuance and complexity, its layers of guilt and shame and—

“Just the short version,” she said. “Keep it simple.”

Through the course of his attempts to stay sober, Berryman took many personal inventories:

  1. What has bothered me most about myself all my life?

    Whether I would be a great poet or not.

  2. What bothers me most about myself at the present time?

    Poverty of love for others.

  3. What bothers me most about myself in relation to the future?

    Whether I can overcome this.

No surprise, perhaps, that Berryman’s final book of poetry was called Love & Fame. During the last four years of his life, he went to rehab four times, detoxed at hospitals, went to countless meetings, and even chaired one at a local prison, inviting the prisoners to have dinner at his house when they got out. (One took him up on it.) He read piles of AA literature. He filled out charts and checklists. Every one of his monthly inventories from Hazelden was full of check marks and x’s. He put little crosses next to “Self-Importance,” “Dishonesty,” and “False Pride.” Next to “Resentment,” he wrote: Hurts oneself. Always for the unchangeable. He underlined the “Immoral” in “Immoral Thinking.” He was immersed in the so-called Minnesota Model (what we now call rehab) in the heart of Minnesota, residential treatment in the land of ten thousand treatment centers.

The AA First Step that Berryman completed the first time he first arrived at St. Mary’s Hospital in Minneapolis gives a sense of the wasteland his drinking had become:

Wife left me after 11 yrs of marriage bec. of drinking. Despair, heavy drinking alone, jobless, penniless.… Seduced students drunk.… My chairman told me I had called up a student drunk at midnight & threatened to kill her.… Drunk in Calcutta, wandered streets lost all night, unable to remember my address.… Many alibis for drinking… Severe memory-loss, memory distortions. DT’s once in Abbott, lasted hours. Quart of whisky a day for months in Dublin working hard on a long poem.… Wife hiding bottles, myself hiding bottles. Wet bed drunk in London hotel, manager furious, had to pay for new mattress. Lectured too weak to stand, had to sit. Lectured badly prepared.… Defecated uncontrollably in a University corridor, got home unnoticed.… My wife said St. Mary’s or else. Came here.

There’s a palpable heartbreak not only in the devastation of Berryman’s drinking, but in his surprising regrets—not just shitting in a hallway but also lecturing badly prepared. He was preparing better for recovery. Hence the piles of reading, the dutiful charts. In one Fourth Step, he made a list of his “Responsibilities”:

At the bottom of the list, he wrote instructions to himself: “Be careful how you live. You may be the only copy of the Big Book other people ever read.” When Berryman started to consider writing a novel about recovery, he imagined a book that would function not as great literature but as a Twelfth Step—We tried to carry this message to alcoholics—bringing recovery to those who hadn’t found it yet. He scribbled ideas for what this book might become: “make a book of these notes—useful 12th step work—probably hardly worked up at all, only expanded and glossed, with some background… on Hazelden and St Mary’s last spring.”

This wasn’t another lyric dream song. It was something else, hardly worked up at all, not meant to be beautiful but useful. In considering his book “useful 12th step work,” Berryman was following the desire he’d articulated on his inventories: to replace the ambition to be “a great poet” with a creative life committed to “love for others.” He thought of calling the novel Korsakov’s Syndrome on the Grave but found he preferred I Am an Alcoholic. (“Like better,” he wrote next to this simpler title.) Eventually he just called the book Recovery. He wanted to donate the profits: “Give half my royalties to—who? Not AA—they won’t take it, perhaps just lend it privately to AA’s in despair.”

Berryman kept his notes in a beige notebook labeled RECOVERY NOTEBOOK, stained with coffee. His life no longer ran on whiskey and ink but on caffeine and graphite, less godly fuels. He wanted Recovery to constitute an act of gratitude. In an early draft he imagined his dedication:

This summary & deluded account of the beginning of my recovery is devoted to the men & women responsible for it (the founders of Alcoholics Anonymous, physicians, psychiatrists, counselors, clergymen, psychologists, transactional analysts, [group leaders, inserted], nurses, orderlies, in-patients, out-patients, members of AA) and to its primary divine Author.

In the spring of 1971, less than a year before his death, Berryman taught a course at the University of Minnesota called The Post-Novel: Fiction as Wisdom-Work. This was what he was attempting in Recovery, as well: something like wisdom-work.

Though Jean Rhys was never in recovery, she once wrote an imagined courtroom scene—called “The Trial of Jean Rhys,” scribbled in spidery script in a plain brown notebook—that looks remarkably like the “fearless moral inventory” of an AA Fourth Step. After the Prosecution lists the major themes of her work (“Good, evil, love, hate, life, death, beauty, ugliness”) and asks Rhys if they apply to everyone, she replies: “I do not know everyone. I only know myself.”

When the Prosecution persists, “And others?” she confesses: “I do not know others. I see them as trees walking.”

That’s when the Prosecution pounces: “There you are! Didn’t take long, did it?”

Part of Rhys’s torment was that her self-absorption wasn’t complete enough to make her unaware of its effect on others. But in the trial, confessing her solipsism doesn’t count as repentance; it just confirms her guilt. The Prosecution continues its line of questioning:

Did you in your youth have a great love and pity for others? Especially for the poor and unfortunate?

Yes.

Were you able to show this?

I think I could not always. I was very clumsy. No one told me.

Excuse of course! (Prosecution shouts.)

It is untrue that you are cold and withdrawn?

It is not true.

Did you make great efforts to, shall we say, establish contacts with other people? I mean friendships, love affairs, so on?

Yes. Not friendships very much.

Did you succeed?

Sometimes. For a time.

It didn’t last?

No.

Whose fault was that?

Mine I suppose.

You suppose?

Silence.

Better answer.

I am tired. I learnt everything too late.

Rhys’s trial echoes Berryman’s inventories: What bothers me most about myself at the present time? Poverty of love for others. Even when Rhys articulates some faith in human possibility (“I believe that sometimes human beings can be more than themselves”) the Prosecution still objects: “Come come, this is very bad. Can’t you do better than that?”

After that exchange, the trial transcript just reads: “Silence.” Objection sustained. But Rhys did believe there was a way she could surrender herself to something larger than her claustrophobic sadness: “If I stop writing,” she told the court, “my life will have been an abject failure… I will not have earned death.”

The fantasy that brilliant writing might redeem a flawed life—If I can do this book, it won’t matter so much will it?—didn’t belong solely to Rhys. When Carver was brought to court in 1976—accused of collecting unemployment while he was employed—his first wife, Maryann, showed the court his first collection of stories as a defense on his behalf, presenting the brilliance of his work as an excuse for the disappointments and deceptions of his life.

Perhaps it’s not enough. For the critic A. Alvarez, Rhys’s “monstrous” life made a “powerful argument against biography itself.” The effect of Rhys’s first published biography was “to make the reader doubt if any book, however original, however perfect, could be worth the price Rhys and those close to her paid.”

Neither of Rhys’s biographies made me want to spend a long weekend with her, but I’m not interested in the question of whether her work is “worth the price,” to us or to anyone, because it was never our choice to make. Her life was. The work is. We can’t trade either back. There’s no objective metric for how much brilliance might be required to redeem a lifetime of damage—and no ratio that justifies the conversion. Whatever beauty comes from pain can’t usually be traded back for happiness. Rhys kept hoping anyway, not for relief but for the possibility of an assuaging beauty—that by voicing her thirst well enough, she could redeem the damage it had caused.

When Berryman scrawled down a daily plan for writing Recovery, he was also outlining the healthier life he imagined the novel ushering him into:

Write 8 or 9–1 pm in study (aim at 2 pp a day, with next sentences drafted)

Walk! Drive!

Libr[ary]: Immunology, Alcoholism—journals!

Exercise + yoga

24 hr. book [AA lit]

1 or 2 short biog’s—esp famous alcoholics: Poe!! H. Crane.

His notes betray a tone of self-exhortation—Walk! Drive!—and willed excitement: Journals! He wanted to do his homework. He wanted to do yoga. He wanted to ground himself in a tradition of other drunk writers: Poe!! His exclamation points hold a certain heartbreak: Walk! Drive! He wanted to believe in rituals and intention. He wanted to believe in showing up for a life you’d chosen.

In his novel Kentucky Ham, Billy Burroughs Jr. wrote about working on a fishing trawler after his time at the Narco Farm. “We worked like I never did at Lexington,” he wrote. And he liked it. For him, work was the opposite of addiction: “You know what work does? It provides a constant. It structures time… I realize that a fix has to get done also and no two ways about it, but a fix goes in. To FIX. To adjust, to focus. But what I’m talking about goes out and in a choosy way rearranges reality.”

For me, too, the drinking was always about taking something in, drinking something down—solace from the outside that could, for a time, be misunderstood as strength. And if the drinking had gone in, the work went out, just as Burroughs had said. As I got drunk and got sober, I liked that my bakery shifts stayed constant. It was always the same drill: Show up at seven. Work my production list. It was always: Pick up the pace on those squirrels. The routines of the bakery worked like another ritual, like the comforting structure of meetings—another shape I didn’t have to invent, a way of being useful. We marked the seasons with hundreds of cookies each week: frogs with tiny love letters for Valentine’s Day; ice cream cones for summer and glittery swirled leaves for autumn; snowmen in December with tiny orange triangles for noses. It was ridiculous, maybe, but they gave me a way to say, I did that—brought some small, undeniable pleasure to another person.

The camaraderie of the kitchen was surprising and often humbling. One of our bakers made a light saber from frozen cinnamon buns, and ate green bell peppers for lunch—cradling each one in his palm, whole and crunchy like an apple. Another one liked to tease me about my general ineptness, so on his days off, just to irritate him, I texted him photos of the doughnuts I’d made in our miniature deep-fry, which looked like giant mutant shrimps, captioned “Quality Control.” For a Planned Parenthood fund-raiser, I made a cake with thirty circular cookies stuck around the top like birth control pills. I was trying to adjust, to focus.

That first winter of my second sobriety, I got my first down jacket. For years I’d felt personally persecuted by winter—a martyr to its bitter chill, my numbness epic and inevitable, the air little more than an external companion to my interior weather. But as it turned out, wearing a good jacket made you less cold.

For Valentine’s Day, Dave and I drove north to Dubuque, an old river-money town perched on bluffs over the Mississippi. We played roulette at the riverboat casino and marveled at an octopus at the aquarium—swirling its legs like scarves in the water, purple and pearl-white, its suckers making little moons wherever it squished them against the glass. Dave was someone who could get excited about an octopus, or a dilapidated boomtown, and the fact that he could bring out that sense of wonder in me made me want to give it back to him. That was part of why I’d planned the weekend in Dubuque, though it was bittersweet, everything delicate. We were careful with each other.

Not long before the trip, while I was cleaning our apartment, I’d found a messy pile of notes stacked on Dave’s dresser—all the apologies I’d written, all the mornings after we’d fought—each one acknowledging how many had come before it. A few days later, I’d asked if he was interested in coming to a meeting, something I hadn’t done the first time around. I wanted to invite him into this new version of my life, rather than blaming him for not already being in it with me.

When he came, he was eloquent and thoughtful—moved by the things other people said. Three elderly women came up to me afterward and said, “He’s so charming.” It was like the time we’d gone to see a couples therapist, a middle-aged woman who ran sessions from her house in the suburbs and leaned over when Dave went to the bathroom: “Well, he’s certainly charming.” My face must have looked shocked, because she quickly said: “But I can imagine he’s a real Jekyll and Hyde.”

In Dubuque, we went to a Bavarian pub for dinner and ordered head cheese and goulash. There were approximately three hundred thousand beers on tap. I was desperately determined to enjoy the head cheese. Maybe I wasn’t drinking beer but I was trying something new. At a certain point the bar broke into song. Strangers belted out drinking anthems in German, though the message was clear enough across the language gap: Drinking is awesome and more drinking is more awesome and most drinking is most—The head cheese was disgusting.

Dave and I went back to our bed-and-breakfast full of decorative plates and watched Dune on VHS—watched the fat man fly around with his little jets, deformed and degraded by the spice, his drug, totally slave to it. We curled up under our quilt and I thought, Maybe this can be saved.