118: A Blessing for the New Year
On travel, two books, and the evolution of one writer's sobriety—plus, a New Years treat from a poet friend.
Years ago, when I was working on my first book, I spent a little time in Croatia with a poet friend. We stayed in a hotel on the coast, on a beautiful inlet where waves crashed against high rocks in the mist, which would go suddenly, intermittently brilliant in brief, dizzying moments when the sun pierced through the cloud cover. It was the off-season, November 2015, and the place smelled like stale cigarettes and cleaning fluid. At meals we often had the hotel restaurant to ourselves. We had rented no car, so we walked everywhere—a path on the edge of a dramatic cliff, up and down the winding road into the quiet town. The trip was only a couple of days, but my conversations with this friend (who lives in France, so I see her very rarely) invigorated my writing practice, fortified my creative confidence, and changed the course of that novel. Shortly after that trip, I began rewriting SELF-PORTRAIT WITH BOY, beginning to end. A year and a half later, it was complete.
Looking back, I recall a lot of casual drinking on that trip. Glasses of wine at the pizza place in town. Cocktails in the empty dining room. Whiskies in a smoky bar at one in the afternoon, surrounded by local old men who laughed at us, American women on vacation at the wrong time of year. I was not yet willing to give up alcohol completely. I was drinking a lot—often alone, sometimes at work, and certainly after work, every single night. By the time SELF-PORTRAIT WITH BOY was accepted by Scribner, and then scheduled for publication, I’d become aware that, if I was interested in taking myself seriously, if I wanted to achieve even a meager degree of self-respect—not to mention refrain from alienating my romantic partner and most of my friends—I’d better quit. I gave myself until the end of 2017. On New Years Day 2018, a friend handed me a cocktail and I couldn’t say no; I did, however, successfully quit a week later. When the hardcover edition of SELF-PORTRAIT came out in February ‘18, I’d been sober less than a month.
It was during what I think of now as my last drunk summer—the summer of 2017—that I wrote what would become the original paragraphs of FRUIT OF THE DEAD. Those paragraphs were pretty psychedlic: steeped in metaphor, pulsing with almost erotic surreality. Over the years that followed, of course, I rewrote (and re-rewrote, and re-re-rewrote) them, but through all those versions I tried to preserve that quality of lush exaltation. I appreciated—I appreciate even now—that they reflect the state I was in at the time: already eulogizing the substance-enabled euphoria I’d soon give up, already mourning the drinking I loved. Here they are as they appear now, after much rewriting, in the eleventh chapter of the advance review copy I keep on my desk:
Once sober, I learned (very slowly) to forget a little how much I loved to get fucked up. Or, more accurately, I learned to replace that romance with something else, something more grounded, honest, and real. At any rate, it is no coincidence that the protagonist of FRUIT is a young woman, a girl, who’s just beginning to have some increasingly dangerous fun with substances. This is part of what the book is, to me: both retroactive warning about and nostalgic paean to “the allure of the drug and the drinks . . . like the allure of a cave full of diamonds, a glorious, luxurious, protected place [to] crawl deep into, out of the moonlight, out of reality . . . [where one can be] completely, deliciously, fearfully alone.”
Now it is New Years Day, 2024 (what? how!), the most popular day of the year to quit or at least pump the breaks on your substance abuse. The first few years of my sobriety, I stayed pretty quiet about it. I was afraid of relapsing—if I’m honest, I was half-planning to relapse. And, you know, relapse is always possible! I still do this thing one day at a time, as they say. But, as I approach my sixth anniversary, as well as the publication day of this book, I feel moved, I guess, just to say, if you’re struggling, you’re not alone. Corny but true. For me, living without alcohol was very fucking difficult at first, but it has gotten easier every year, and every year I’m more sure that it’s worth it, more grateful to be present for my life.
Anyway. I’d like to close with this. As luck would have it, that same friend who helped me move through and complete my first book, she recently started a Substack, and she posted something yesterday that I’d like to reshare, in part, here. It’s a blessing for your creative spirit in 2024. It’s a little like a series of New Years resolutions, a little like a prayer. I won’t quote the full thing here—I’d encourage you to read her whole, moving piece, “Creating Space for Threshholds”—but I’d like to share this fragment:
Blessing the Creative Spirit in 2024
May you take time to set up workspaces that inspire you.
May you feel the ennui, then get to work.
Don’t wait for inspiration. Be curious and serious about your own process.
May you honour your longing but not drown in it.
When you need community, may you find those who feed you and avoid those who don’t.
May you see projects to completion. May you know when to keep going. May you know when to call it quits.
Break bread. Lose interest. Take breaks. Take naps. Have a snack. Go for a walk.
May you hold space for thresholds and cross over in big and small ways into the unknown.
May we all honor our longing, and not drown in it.
Happy new year,
Rachel
p.s. I have more calendars available, which I’m sending as thank-you gifts to those who preorder FRUIT OF THE DEAD. Email me your address + a screenshot of your receipt before 10 AM this Friday, 1/5, and I’ll happily mail you one. :)
p.p.s. One more thing. I have been enraged to learn about Substack’s despicable policies enabling Nazi propaganda and hate speech. Due to this platform’s blatant greed and bewildering commitment to profiting off of white nationalists, I have turned off paid subscriptions, so they may not profit, at the very least, off of you or me. I am also currently looking into other, less fucked-up platforms, to which I might migrate Postcards from Mountain House. If you have any suggestions, let me know.