Nice Girls Don't Drink

Rating:
Summary: None of those women were me.
Review: As a women, a mother, a wife, a student and a teacher, I did not see myself in any of the women in Nice Girls Don't Drink. My life is successful. I have not had any of the "consequences" of heavy drinking but for more than three years recovering from my love affair with alcohol has been foremost on my mind. Perhaps there are others out there, who, like me, drink too much but don't fit into to the "AA" mold of an alcoholic.

Rating:
Summary: The Color of Truth is a Rich Grey
Review: I am not an alcoholic. I am not a woman. I am not chemically addictive. So the world of alcoholism and drug addiction, especially as it impacts women, is psychologically remote to me. I read this book because I have read and enormously admired Sarah Hafner's novel, THE ELEMENTS OF STYLE, which struck me as hauntingly like a good deal of the best Salinger. In moments, I found it truer than Salinger.

The color of truth is what characterizes this book for me. At first, I was struck by the sameness of the tales these women tell. And then, I began to realize, that's the point. It is essentially the same story told over and over. And because the cruelty and pain that fills them all, as cruel as it is, is not sensational, is not dramatic, does not have the unfamiliarity of the truly original, you gradually come to realize that that is precisely because it is not original, unusual, special. It is ordinary hell just as hell is. No fire and brimstone, just ordinary, miserable, hopeless unhappiness into which these women wander and from which they emerge. Though the apparent cruel causes of their addiction are all there to be seen (abuse, denial of love, and the rest), they are clearly not the real causes, they simply trigger the real cause, which is a physical vulnerability to chemical addiction. And though the causes of their emergence from heavy addictive use of chemicals are also faithfully reported by these women - a word, an impossible to deny moment of self-awareness, etc. - it is even more difficult to be sure that these apparent causes are the real ones either. There is only so far we can see into ourselves. All we can be sure of, as we listen to the women tell their stories of recovery, is that at some point something in them grew stronger than the addiction. It all feels, especially as you read these stories consecutively, as mundane and ordinary and opaque as we know the truth out of which fiction is made, to be. It is all a rich gray.

Sarah Hafner's aim here seems finally to be precisely this: to take the glib sensationalism out of alcoholism in particular, and by doing so to offer hope. The reality of addiction, as terrible as it is, is not the demonic thing we outsiders have made it. It is just terrible wretchedness, different in degree but not in kind from the wretchedness most of us have known. This book reminds me some of Hannah Arendt's book on Eichman in which she discovers 'the banality of evil.' It is only fantastically horrible from outside. On the inside, it is banal. It is totally human experience, it is absolutely continuous with the human experience we know. It is not something safely outside and beyond us, painted in gaudy shades of red and yellow. We are not safe from it.

And alcoholics are not fundamentally different from us in any way beyond their inherited chemically addictive natures. It is the lives their addictive natures leads them into that are different.

One final note: Because Sarah Hafner is a fine writer, she knew enough to trust her subjects to tell the story she wanted told. Had she been more intrusive, had she said the kind of thing I've said here, her book would be less powerful and affecting than it is. The best writers know how to turn their stories over to their characters.

Rating:
Summary: Riveting Stories
Review: I enjoyed reading this book. I could relate to a lot of what these women were saying...fear...codependency. One line that sticks out is in one women's story she said if you think your drinking was in control then it must of been out of control at some point. This stuck home to me...I was getting out of control. I liked the back of the book how it entails the 13 affirmations from Women in Sobriety and also lists the 12 steps of A.A. I recommend this book for any women who has been drunk on more than one occassion. Another good point was one women questions what was the pain of her drinking....