Books |
Blame: A Novel
Michelle Huneven
By
Published: Oct 20, 2009
Category:
Fiction
I saw nothing in The Shriver Report about female alcoholism, yet it’s estimated that a third of America’s 18 million alcoholics are women.
Six million women. That’s not an easy number to ignore — if, that is, these women were openly and publicly drunk. But many are not. They’re covert drinkers. High-functioning alcoholics who understand exactly what Diana Vreeland meant when she said, “If you’re drunk, it doesn’t matter how pretty your dress is.” So they hide their drinking.
I know a number of women who have had problems with alcohol. Their stories forcibly remind me that this is a disease, not a moral failing. And while you can’t blame society for a genetic predisposition, at the same time, you can’t look at the work/family/attractiveness load on women without thinking that this is sufficient pressure to turn coal into diamonds — or send a woman scurrying to the bottle.
[Just a thought: Our culture promotes the hard drink, the exciting high and the fast car over the stick of ganja, the goofy joke and the soft touch. But what if women were to smoke dope instead of drinking? Do you think they would become “addicted” in large numbers? Or is it possible they might gain some insight and pleasure?]
When I read Drinking: A Love Story, I thought I’d never need to read another book about women and alcohol; Caroline Knapp’s subtitle alone speaks volumes. But recently, in rapid succession, I read a novel and a memoir that have alcohol at their centers.
The novel is Blame, by a Southern California novelist named Michelle Huneven. I’d never read her, never heard of her. My bad — she’s extremely good at making you care about people as damaged as the people you know, even when you’re screaming at them to make other choices.
“Blame” is the story of Patsy MacLemoore, described by the author as “a tall, beautiful intellectual. She’s a newly minted PhD. And she’s a chronic alcoholic, and she’s a blackout drinker. She’s had plenty of DUIs — three or four by the time she wakes up in the Altadena Sheriff’s Department, only to find out that she’s been arrested for a double homicide, killing a mother and her daughter.”
One other detail: Patsy was driving with her license suspended.
So the beautiful college instructor is sentenced to four years in prison. Is she changed there? Totally: she will spend the rest of her life dealing with her guilt.
Fortunately, Patsy has Alcoholics Anonymous. Huneven has been in recovery for over 20 years and credits AA with much of her continued sobriety — no wonder she writes a great meeting. And she knows exactly how it is that Patsy should make certain friends and be attracted to a certain kind of man, and how that might work out and then how that might change — she writes a beautiful, heartfelt, brilliantly observed and exasperating book, maybe the most realistic and empathetic novel I’ve read all year.
In Lies My Mother Never Told Me: A Memoir, Kaylie Jones takes another path. That is, she gets revenge. And I can understand that. While I never knew her father, I spent a few dozen evenings with her mother, and I can tell you that when Gloria Jones had alcohol in her — which was every night — she was a dangerous drunk.
Tell your kids whatever you like, you’re wasting everyone’s time. Kids learn by watching what you do, and in that, Kaylie was Exhibit A. Listen to her:
I grew up in Paris, in the heart of the expatriate literary world, the daughter of James Jones, in a home where drinking was de rigueur, and anyone who did not drink was considered a square, or a phony. I learned that a little shot of booze was the answer to almost anything –– illness, heartache, good news and bad news alike. As a child, I filled martini glasses with water and sipped demurely, an unlit cigarette between my fingers. I couldn’t wait to grow up so that I could drink. I drank as soon as I could, and as much as I could.
When Kaylie was 17, her father died. After that, Gloria drank even more. With a predictable outcome:
For the next 14 years, I tried to stay connected to my mother, but I refused to stop telling her that she needed to quit drinking. She never once admitted she had a problem, even when she was dying from cirrhosis and encephalitis. And as she lay in the hospital only weeks from her death, her body and mind completely destroyed, she continued to accuse me of being a liar and a traitor to my name.
Ugly stuff. And you do think, “Kaylie, stop this. You’re over 30. You can’t keep prosecuting the dead.” But ugly stuff is the byproduct of alcohol.
“He who makes a beast of himself,” as Samuel Johnson wrote about drunkenness, “at least rids himself of the pain of being a man."
Or a woman.
To buy “Lies My Mother Never Told Me: A Memoir” from Amazon.com, click here.
To buy the Kindle edition of Lies My Mother Never Told Me: A Memoir” from Amazon.com, click here.
To visit Michelle Huneven’s web site, click here.
