the parting glass

Coming clean on coming clean.

Of all the money that e'er I had 
I have spent it in good company 
Oh and all the harm I've ever done 
Alas, it was to none but me  

 - The Parting Glass

I have a small red Moleskine sitting on my desk right now that dates back to 2018. There are only two entries in it:

• a thumbnail selfie of me, taken in my bathroom shortly after waking, and;

• a short note that includes my weight, blood pressure, and general mindset, which was then not great.

The photo, which I will not share here, was taken eighteen months after my mother’s fall, when I was in year two of being her primary caregiver. My face is red and bloated, my eyes bloodshot and puffy, my hair thinning (which it started doing in my twenties, from stress-related alopecia owing to, the doctors said, an overabundance of cortisol). I am roughly twenty pounds heavier than I am as I write this; at the time, I remember not being able to get my rings off.

The purpose of this little book was to quietly document a life evaluation, which included what would happen to me physically, spiritually, and emotionally with an overhaul comprised of the removal of alcohol, regular exercise, and cleaner eating. (And by cleaner eating, I don’t mean to imply that I was not eating well; I was, and mostly still do, except for the stress manicotti I had last night.)

This life evaluation was well-intentioned and sincere; it also did not last. I did not share the little red book with my wife, nor had I then told her that I had, at that point, attended a few 12-step meetings in a nearby town during the day while she was at work in New York; my attendance abruptly ended when a lovely woman sitting across from me said, Nice to meet you! I never met a Jew before, and then looked for my horns. (In Fairfield County, Connecticut. I’d like to say I’m kidding.) A week or so later, I turned to an acquaintance I knew who had been sober for many years. They put a solemn hand on my shoulder, looked at me with kind eyes, and invited me out to talk. In a bar.

Since 2018, I have stopped drinking wine and started back up again in the neighborhood of thirty times.

That is not a typo.

By the end of 2019, I was having regular reverse-drinking dreams, which I didn’t even know were a thing: instead of dreaming that I was drinking — drinking dreams are dreaded by most sober people — I dreamt that I wasn’t.

Sometimes, the breaks lasted months, or weeks, or days. I keep track of these truncated spates by looking at the day counter app that I downloaded on my phone one middle-of-the-night when I awoke sweaty and tachycardic; it lists every reset and includes early AI-generated comments created by the app itself — things like thumbs down emojis, and Hey!' Need to talk? and No worries! You got this! and finally, Tap here to call your sponsor! Somewhere between 2018 and 2020, I realized that my love of wine was something I’d come to organically, first as a former food writer who got paid more if I could tell the difference between specific varietals, and what regions and even sides of the river they were from in, for example, Burgundy. A chalky, thin, low-alcohol, tongue-achingly dry white could have been from anywhere in the alpine Savoie; a big, round fruit-bomb redolent of jam and berries, a leather western saddle on a humid summer day, petrichor, mold, sex, and a hint of cayenne was from Bandol, or southern California, or Argentina, and often more than 14.5% alcohol, which is enough to make anyone stagger. I made my living in the food world for many years, going back to the late 1980s in Soho (NYC), and I wrote about that here. I also grew up with a 1960s Mad Men adman/advertising creative director for a father — I adored him and I miss him every day, and our relationship was nothing if not complex — and spent weekends going with him to places like La Grenouille and La Cote Basque. I was fifteen when the two of us ended up alone one bitter night in a lovely Upper East Side Czech restaurant called The Praha; the winter wind howled and the windows were frosted with rime ice, and the Mendelssohn violin concerto was playing, and my father ordered two small glasses of Slivovitz. I was suddenly hooked on the psychic security of it all — the belonging, the physical and emotional warmth, and the fact that, as my father said that night, he, my mitteleuropish grandfather, and I were the only people in the entire family who could manage to choke it down. I didn’t even like the Slivovitz, but the acceptance was glorious.

By the end of 2019, when the possibility of giving it up entered my brain, I was having regular reverse-drinking dreams, which I didn’t even know were a thing: instead of dreaming that I was drinking — drinking dreams are dreaded by most sober people — I dreamt that I wasn’t, and that I had gone years without it and was safely on the other shore. And then I’d wake up and find a half-empty glass of Sangiovese on the kitchen counter, a cork still attached to the corkscrew, and a few slices of cold pork roast still sitting on a small white Apilco platter on the oven shelf above the burners. I began to work with a local therapist who specialized in alcohol disorder issues; she could not fathom, often aggressively, how anyone could struggle so much, and considered it a personal flaw that I couldn’t just stop for good the first time out. Another local therapist ended our professional relationship after a bout of pneumonia resulted in my Mt. Sinai pulmonologist prescribing a low-dose narcotic cough medicine to enable me to sleep and to keep me out of the hospital because I have asthma, and even though I had three-quarters of an old bottle sitting in the back of my medicine cabinet that had gone untouched for years. (She was also the one who asked how old I was, did the math, and said Well, I guess you’ll only have about twenty sober years if you manage to live till eighty.) Another therapist giggled relentlessly. And then came 2020 and Covid, and my mother moved in with us for four months; she sometimes requested a 10 am whiskey sour (which she’d never done before, at least not to my knowledge), and we all drank boxes of spigot wine — probably two a week — squeezing the bladder to get every last drop so that we wouldn’t have to suit up in protective gear to go out to the wine shop, which was considered an essential business and therefore allowed to remain open.

Here is the thing that no one ever tells you: you don’t have to be falling-down drunk to have a complicated relationship with alcohol. You don’t have to be a daily drinker to have a complicated relationship with alcohol. You don’t have to have problems with cough medicine (or novocaine or Benadryl) if you have a complicated relationship with alcohol. You do not have to come from a drinking family to have a complicated relationship with alcohol. You do not have to be an alcoholic to have a complicated relationship with alcohol. One size does not fit all, ever. It would actually be much easier if it did, but it doesn’t. And I say this — and it will raise eyebrows — because we, every one of us, categorize and label those around us, as a rule; it seems to be part of the human condition. This person is this, and that person is that. Winner, loser; drinker, sober; California sober, pothead; on-again, off-again; gray-area, tee-totaller; tall, short; fat, thin. On and on and on. The center of that very neat Venn diagram looks something like this (below) for a lot of us, and the problem is: nobody ever talks about it. If you’re not living in the neat and tidy binary, it's too hard for people to conjure. (Read this recent essay by Holly Whittaker about re-introducing cannabis back into her life. I have no opinion on it, other than that her decision is her own; inevitably, the response to her announcement has ranged from vicious to supportive.)

The center of my Venn Diagram.

I am a woman of a certain age (62) and so I remember the widely-held cultural beliefs of the seventies and eighties that 1) women didn’t drink because it was unseemly; 2) women who drank kept small bottles of booze in their handbag (I used to carry a little bottle of gin around in my purse, said Marion Cunningham to Kim Severson, in Kim’s’ great book, Spoon Fed); 3) women who drank were in some way irreparably broken; 4) women who drank did so because it had been completely normalized in their families and nobody ever got help because of an intergenerational perfection narrative, its inherent shame, and lack of permission to tell their stories (more on that here); 5) women who drank did so to numb themselves from their particular condition. (When I was at school in England in 1983 and it hadn’t yet occurred to me that I was gay despite copious evidence, I was dragged kicking and screaming to see the John Sayles movie Lianna, about a married woman with kids who falls in love with another woman, heaven forbid, and there is in the movie, if I remember correctly, some predictably drunken, 1980s weepy lesbian club dancing. Translation: Lesbians are all depressed club rats who drink too much and paw at each other on the dancefloor. I say this having spent a fair amount of time at Henrietta Hudson in New York when I was coming out in the nineties, making up for lost time. It was fine and even sometimes fun, but it wasn’t my jam.) Truth: Susan and I drank exactly half a bottle of Syrah over three days during our first weekend together. Still, when I came out to family members, one of them — an artist/hippie with an absolute heart of gold — said Will you have to go to the bars and drink a lot?

My mother’s Covid-era morning whiskey sours not withstanding, I do not at all come from a family of particularly excessive drinkers — there were other addictions, like gambling, sex, and shopping — but my stepfather, who I loved deeply, essentially drank himself to death while married to my mother, and left behind children and grandchildren, some of whom have struggled with substance disorders. Like my stepfather, my father loved his double Scotches after work when he was married to my mother, and learned to drink very dry gin Gibsons back when he was a twenty-one-year-old World War II night fighter pilot in the Pacific. I wrote here, in a guest essay for Laura McKowen’s Love Story, about my genetic predisposition to hiding — this is directly connected to shame — and how one night during the war when my father was called in his officer’s club to make a night run after pea soup fog had cancelled his flight and he’d had a few too many, he had to take off, fly, and land his plane in the dark, all with one eye open. When he moved me into my first apartment in Boston — I was between my junior and senior year in college — he took me out for the usual stuff: a bed and a bedframe, a rug, drinking glasses (Duralex, eight for six dollars), silverware, and a coffee pot, a shower curtain, an answering machine, and left in my refrigerator a bottle of Bombay Sapphire gin, a bottle of vermouth, and a jar of cocktail onions. I remember standing in the kitchen with the fridge door open and looking at them quizzically: I didn’t much like martinis back then, but he assured me that that was moot — I just needed to know how to fix a good one because I might have a special guest over, and drinking, he said, greases the skids for shy people like me. It was a social endeavor, he added, especially for people from our background who had it historically drummed into our heads that alcohol is a sacrament and nothing more. So don’t worry, my father told me. And for a long time, I didn’t.

For years, it was just that: a social endeavor. It was work-related when I was in the food business. It was work-related when I was in book publishing and attending important gatherings and events, including one company Christmas party at the St Regis in Manhattan, where one of our mid-level executives got so hammered that she lost her shoes, and the CEO spent an hour on his hands and knees, crawling around in his Brooks Brothers’ suit and looking under every table for them.

I left New York in 2001 and moved to Connecticut to begin my life with Susan. In August 2002, my father died after a horrific car accident; admonished for my eviscerating grief, my relationship with many of the people in my family changed overnight. In 2008, I lost a beloved younger cousin to suicide. There was job loss and illness, isolation, and, in 2016, a cataclysmic accident rendering my mother, from whom I’d been emotionally estranged for years, entirely dependent upon me. There was our near bankruptcy as a result of her accident — she had foregone traditional Medicare for managed Medicare, which determined that she didn’t need a particular kind of anesthesia during reconstructive ankle surgery because, I was told by her “insurance” company, Everyone knows that old people don’t feel pain. And then I was handed a bill for her $181,000 copay.

In Let’s Take the Long Way Home, Gail Caldwell writes, For years, the psychic balm of alcohol — its holy grail certainty that it could take me through anything — eclipsed the hangovers and emerging fear that I was in trouble. When I read it, I wrote it down in my journal. And the more I began to silently wonder about alcohol and its place in my life, increasing numbers of sober people began to wander into my field of vision completely unbidden, as though I’d accidentally stepped on an ant hill. I hadn’t announced anything to anyone, and yet, there they were. The work colleague from a million years earlier who, when we were speaking at a Santa Barbara food conference together, declined my invitation for a post-meeting glass of wine; it would be ages before I found out why (she was already a few years sober, and in the throes of massive life changes; she now writes the wonderful substack Six Burner Sue). The apparently clairvoyant functional physician to whom I’d been referred by a former student after my Covid stroke, and who, when I walked into his office having never met him before or even filled out intake paperwork, started our conversation with You need to give up the wine, before reaching into his pocket and putting his thirty-year AA chip on the desk between us. A famous actress who was writing a memoir, and who became a friend when we worked together on her manuscript, had cut alcohol out of her life sixteen years earlier. A childhood sleepaway camp friend who had become a well-known actor, and who, many years before, had left alcohol behind. A friend who worked at my local running shop. The husband of a former boss, whom I’ve known for almost forty years. The sister of an old friend who had been my dean at college. The writer (and his wife) who lived downstairs from my apartment at a writer’s residency. A photographer whose work I love. A favorite poet who told me over lunch when I’d asked her permission to use her words for an epigraph in one of my books. More chef friends than I can possibly count. Andrea Gibson.

If I care for myself the way I need to — with my head and my heart in lockstep — then I succeed, shedding my life’s existential shrapnel like a carapace.

And yet: on again, off again. For years. If someone says to me, snarkily, Oh, I’m sorry, I thought you were not drinking back when [fill in the blank], I likely wasn’t. It might have been related to the fact that I have a long-term liver condition that dates back to my senior year in high school, and has nothing to do with alcohol, but my liver actually hurts if I drink. It might have been related to the fact that I was doing a round or two or three of The Whole 30. It might have been that I was just flattened by existential exhaustion, and that I was trying to stop, and failing, and starting, and stopping, and failing, and flailing, but choosing not to say anything because relapse is considered by most people in the sober community to be complete failure and, I have been told, evidence of lack of sincerity, will-power, or devotion, and it can get mighty judgy out there. And I grew up with enough judgy to last me a lifetime.

It’s taken me a long time to get to this place of kicking down the walls of judgement; as I recently told Leslie Shapiro on her podcast Shit Show in Short Hills, no one seems to ever talk or write about the process of disentangling oneself from alcohol in real time. It’s written about from the opposite shore, from a safe port, with the struggles existing in one’s rearview mirror. And so I wonder: how many of us are there who need or want to understand how profoundly human and Odyssean this journey really is? How deeply personal? How singular? And that even if one follows the established playbook — which I happen to love; it is one of the greatest social documents of the 20th century, whether you’re a believer or not — virtually no one has the same experience even if they appear, on the surface, to be identical.

Looking at the little red Moleskine with the horrendous thumbnail, now seven years old, I say this without hesitation: for me, the act of trying to end my relationship with wine — that which has given me so much comfort (and even joy) and agony in equal measure — runs parallel to the existence of the spiritual in my life; if the latter vaporizes for whatever reason (the horrors of caregiving for a person at the core of my trauma, the blinding cruelty we are all witnessing, the illnesses of those I love, the C-PTSD I live with daily) the former does, too. If I care for myself the way I need to — with my head and my heart in lockstep — then I succeed and I move forward, shedding my life’s existential shrapnel like a carapace.

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Upcoming events:

8/1/25 - The Hotchkiss Library, Sharon, CT: signing

8/7/25 - East End Books, Provincetown: reading, q&a, signing

9/16/25 - Zibby’s Bookshop, Santa Monica: in conversation with Annabeth Gish, q&a, signing

9/18/25 - Book Passage, Corte Madera: reading, q&a, signing

Workshops:

8/4-8/8/2025 - Castle Hill/Truro Center for the Arts: Permission to Write the Story You Must Tell (WAITLIST available)

Spring 2026: Kripalu: Permission: The New Memoirist and the Courage to Create - stay tuned for final dates and sign-up