Drink: The Deadly Relationship Between Women and Alcohol

Drink: The Deadly Relationship Between Women and Alcohol Ann Dowsett Johnston The new face of risky drinking is female. The problem: a global epidemic of bingeing. The solution: a brave new approach to female recovery.This is my story, and it's particular. But I am not alone. Drinking problems challenge a growing number of women.The new reality: binge drinking is increasing among young adults – and women are largely responsible for this trend. Women’s buying power has been growing for decades, and their decision-making authority has grown as well. The alcohol industry, well aware of this reality, is now battling for women’s downtime – and their brand loyalty.Our relationship with alcohol is complex, and growing more so. This book will be essential reading for a huge number of women, a book that's breaks a major taboo. This will be a book for best friends to give one another, mothers to give daughters, sisters to give to each other – a book to read in hiding, when you know you're in trouble. This book will offer companionship for women of every age. It will answer a myriad tough questions.Intimate and startlingly honest, ‘Drink’ will be a book to change the lives of women of all ages – and those who love them. A book for anyone who thinks they have a problem, or knows someone who may have a problem, and wants to know more. Which means: just about everyone. Copyright (#ulink_4886ec6c-93b6-55bb-b9ba-1571841c555e) Fourth Estate An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street, London SE1 9GF www.4thestate.co.uk (http://www.4thestate.co.uk) First published in Great Britain by Fourth Estate in 2013 Simultaneously published in the US in 2013 by Harper Wave, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Copyright © Ann Dowsett Johnston 2013 Ann Dowsett Johnston asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work Grateful acknowledgement is made to the following for permission to reprint from previously published material: Various portions of this book first appeared in the author’s series on Women and Alcohol in the Toronto Star in 2011. Used by kind permission from the Atkinson Foundation and the Toronto Star. Portions of Chapter 2: Out of Africa first appeared in Maclean’s as “Postcards from Paradise” (Aug. 20, 2001). Reprinted by kind permission from Maclean’s magazine, Rogers Publishing Limited. “The Laughing Heart” from Betting On The Muse: Poems & Stories by Charles Bukowski. Copyright © 1996 by Linda Lee Bukowski. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollinsPublishers. Excerpt from “East Coker” from Four Quartets by T.S. Eliot. Copyright © 1940 by T.S. Eliot; copyright © renewed 1968 by Esme Valerie Eliot. Reprinted by permission of Faber and Faber, and Houghton Miffl in Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved. “The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you” from The Essential Rumi by Coleman Barks (HarperCollinsPublishers, Inc., 1995); copyright © 1995 by Coleman Barks. Reprinted by permission of Coleman Barks. “Natural History” from Letters of E.B. White, Revised Edition, originally edited by Dorothy Lobrano Guth and revised and updated by Martha White. Copyright ©2006 by White Literary LLC. By permission of HarperCollinsPublishers. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins. Source ISBN: 9780007503568 Ebook Edition © October 2013 ISBN: 9780007503575 Version: 2014-12-18 AUTHOR’S NOTE (#ulink_96d189b6-b2d0-574b-bc9b-6d84b7a6fec1) The names and other identifying details of some major and minor characters have been changed to protect individual privacy and anonymity. TO MY MOTHER, for her courage and love AND TO NICHOLAS, for his infinite wisdom Our excesses are the best clue we have to our own poverty, and our best way of concealing it from ourselves. —ADAM PHILLIPS, BRITISH PSYCHOANALYST the laughing heart by Charles Bukowski (#ulink_aea9ac9f-31c7-59f6-8c26-9c489987edcf) your life is your life don’t let it be clubbed into dank submission. be on the watch. there are ways out. there is a light somewhere. it may not be much light but it beats the darkness. be on the watch. the gods will offer you chances. know them, take them. you can’t beat death but you can beat death in life, sometimes. and the more often you learn to do it, the more light there will be. your life is your life. know it while you have it. you are marvelous. the gods wait to delight in you. CONTENTS Cover (#u7be8cec3-9903-5ab1-bdf5-247e1bee5214) Title Page (#ua5742dbd-d283-5e57-afca-3d0638c95b84) Copyright (#ua7250590-e732-5352-b5ed-aa515a6c06ff) Author’s Note (#uead09522-813b-5a14-8675-afbd15ee3f36) Dedication (#u9f5ed50a-b868-5679-946f-7f67cdbdd915) Epigraph (#u95437e6e-b3ae-5c88-9602-1500e5282bab) By Charles Bukowski (#u46231db4-32f8-5dda-94f3-b2763767396c) Prologue (#u9fc1b451-5bc6-5f1b-bc39-a2cbe030124f) PART ONE: SINGING BACKWARDS (#ubaad7d65-f4c7-5ed9-aff1-913d52f75361) 1. The Monkey Diary (#u885d46a7-c058-5ac7-b121-c1c84f5dec08) The beginning of the end 2. Out of Africa (#u88f100f4-818c-537c-8ab3-401f28a25119) A family unravels 3. You’ve Come the Wrong Way, Baby (#u3b29050c-f9e0-5af6-bf55-fb3fd4e3a729) Closing the gender gap on risky drinking 4. The Future Is Pink (#u6dc886a5-c59b-5c46-94f8-8938eb73899c) The alcohol industry takes aim at the female consumer 5. The Age of Vulnerability (#litres_trial_promo) The consequences of drinking young 6. Binge (#litres_trial_promo) The campus drinking culture PART TWO: ON THE EDGE OF THE BIG LONELY (#litres_trial_promo) 7. Searching for the Off Button (#litres_trial_promo) Drinking to forget, drinking to numb 8. Self-Medication (#litres_trial_promo) Mood disorders and alcohol: A seductive combination 9. Romancing the Glass (#litres_trial_promo) A slim stem of liquid swagger 10. The Modern Woman’s Steroid (#litres_trial_promo) Popping the cork on mother’s little helper 11. The Last Taboo (#litres_trial_promo) Drinking and pregnancy 12. The Daughters’ Stories (#litres_trial_promo) Growing up with an alcoholic mother PART THREE: HEALING (#litres_trial_promo) 13. In Which Everything Changes (#litres_trial_promo) Getting sober, staying sober 14. Breaking the Trauma Cycle (#litres_trial_promo) The mother-and-child reunion 15. Something in the Water (#litres_trial_promo) Shaping a strong public health strategy 16. Wrestling with the God Thing (#litres_trial_promo) Spirituality and sobriety 17. Stigma (#litres_trial_promo) A call to action 18. Becoming Whole (#litres_trial_promo) In which I recover my self Notes (#litres_trial_promo) Acknowledgments (#litres_trial_promo) About the Author (#litres_trial_promo) About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo) Prologue (#ulink_8577c8b6-8849-58bd-8461-9c1dcd1009c2) Hang out in the brightly lit rooms of AA, or in coffee shops, talking to dozens of women who have given up drinking, and this is the conclusion you come to: for most, booze is a loan shark, someone they trusted for a while, came to count on, before it turned ugly. Every person with a drinking problem learns this the hard way. And no matter what the circumstances, certain parts of the story are always the same. Here is how the story goes: At first, alcohol is that elegant figure standing in the corner by the bar, the handsome one in the beautiful black tuxedo. Or maybe he’s in black leather and jeans. It doesn’t matter. You can’t miss him. He’s always at the party—and he always gets there first. Maybe you first saw him in high school. Many do. Others meet him long before. He finds his moment, some time when you’re wobbly or nervous, excited or scared. You’re heading into a big party or a dance. All of a sudden your stomach begins to lurch. You’re overdressed, or underdressed; too tall, too short; heartsick, or heart-in-your-mouth anxious. Doesn’t matter. Booze wastes no time. He sidles up with a quick hit of courage. You grab it. It feels good. It works. Or maybe you’ve fallen in love. You’re at a wedding, a dinner, a celebration. You want this moment to last. You fear it won’t. Just as your doubts begin to get the best of you, booze holds out a glass, a slim stem of liquid swagger, pale blond and bubbly. You take a sip and instantly the room begins to soften. So do you: your toes curl a little, your heart is light. All things are possible. Now this is a sweetheart deal. This is how it begins. And for many, this is where it ends. Turning twenty-one or twenty-five or thirty, some will walk into a crowded room, into weddings or graduations or wakes, and for them, he’s no longer there. Totally disappeared. Or perhaps they never saw him in the first place. And he doesn’t seek them out. They’re not his people. But you? You’ve come to count on him, this guy in black. And as the years pass, he starts showing up on a daily basis. Booze has your back. In fact, he knows where you live. Need some energy? Need some sleep? Need some nerve? Booze will lend a hand. You start counting on him to get you out of every fix. Overworked, overstressed, overwhelmed? Lonely? Heartsick? Booze is there when you need him most. And when you don’t. Suddenly, you realize booze has moved in. He’s in your kitchen. He’s in your bedroom. He’s at your dinner table, taking up two spaces, crowding out your loved ones. Before you know it, he starts waking you up in the middle of the night, booting you in the gut at a quarter to four. You have friends over and he causes a scene. He starts showing you who’s boss. Booze is now calling the shots. You decide you’ve had enough. You ask him to leave. He refuses. A deal is a deal, he says. He wants payback and he wants it now. In fact, he wants it all: room and board, all your money, your assets, your family—plus a lot of love on the side. Unconditional love. You do the only thing you can think to do: you kick him out, change the locks, get an unlisted number. But on Friday night, he sneaks back in, through the side door. You toss him out again. He’s back the very next day. Now you’re scared. This is the toughest thing you’ve ever dealt with. You decide to try the geographical cure: you quit your job, pull up stakes, relocate to a new city where no one knows you. You’ll start afresh. But within days, booze comes calling in the middle of the night. Like all loan sharks, he’s one step ahead of you and he means business. This is how it happens. This is addiction. PART ONE (#ulink_48b93f4d-6cdb-5a32-90db-1a3131e5754d) 1. (#ulink_a0e87912-4084-5621-b324-91d5ab1f7c4b) The Monkey Diary (#ulink_a0e87912-4084-5621-b324-91d5ab1f7c4b) THE BEGINNING OF THE END To be rooted is perhaps the most important and the least recognized need of the human soul. —SIMONE WEIL For me, it happened this way: I took a geographic cure to fix what I thought was wrong with my life, and the cure failed. Much later, I would learn the truth: geographic cures always fail, especially when they’re designed to correct problematic drinking. Of course, that wasn’t how I saw it at the time. In the winter of 2006, when I pulled up stakes and moved to Montreal, I was full of hope. Hope that my fabulous new career would blossom. Hope that my long-distance sweetheart and I would flourish in this new city. Sitting by candlelight at my farewell dinner, these were the dreams I shared with my closest friends. The third hope I kept to myself: that with this move, my increasingly troubling drinking habits would miraculously disappear. That my nightly craving for a glass of wine—or three—would go poof. I was full of new resolve. I had made a New Year’s resolution never to drink alone. I had made that promise to my sweetheart, and I intended to keep my word. It was an icy blue February afternoon when I first dragged my suitcase up the marble stairs of Sam Bronfman’s faux castle on Montreal’s Peel Street, a Disneyesque confection that had been headquarters to the world’s largest distillery for many decades. Donated to McGill University in 2002, Seagram House had taken on new life as Martlet House, named for the small red bird on the university’s crest, believed to be blessed—or was it cursed?—with constant flight. A martlet never rests. I chose to see this as a happy omen. I was looking for signs that I had made the right decision in accepting the big job of vice principal of McGill, in charge of development, alumni, and university relations. I had left my beloved home in Toronto and a successful career in journalism. I took this Martlet business seriously. As vice principal, I was ushered into Bronfman’s large second-floor office, the very same place where the booze baron had hosted Joe Kennedy and Al Capone during Prohibition—or so the story goes. It was here that I would sit, at his massive hand-carved desk, ensconced at one end of an airless chamber, walled with recessed curved bookcases and ornate oak paneling. The history was impressive. Once upon a time, the office had been, too. But when I arrived, stained green carpet, broken overhead fixtures, and the lack of natural light made the room oppressive. Still, it had loads of potential. I was optimistic. In honor of my arrival, a fellow vice principal had placed hot pink gerbera daisies in a jaunty citrine vase. There were welcoming bouquets from the principal and others, and a vast array of notes and cards—a happy distraction on my first day. My gut was speaking to me, but I chose not to listen. Over time, I grew to dread that behemoth of a desk, and all it represented. But on the first day, its novelty was a distraction. My effervescent blond assistant, only two years out of university herself, perched opposite me, pulling out the secretary’s table to write on. She introduced me to a fat binder and handed over a pile of documents for my signature. Most of all, she was interested in securing a date for my welcoming reception. Her top choice was St. Patrick’s Day—or St. Patio Day, as she liked to call it, the booziest day on the Montreal calendar, and her personal favorite. (She was single and anxious to change that status.) Five weeks later, she made it happen: the majority of my new staff—there were more than 180 in all—crowded into the ground-floor boardroom of Martlet House for coffee and croissants as the principal welcomed me to McGill. I was in charge of mobilizing this group to launch the largest campaign in the university’s history, a $500 million fund-raising effort that would change the face of McGill, boost research, help students. The principal was a woman I deeply admired. My heart was full. My geographical cure was going to work. For the first months, I spent many nights behind that big Bronfman desk. Sometime around six in the evening, as the last of my staff headed home to husbands and wives, children and friends, I would walk half a block to the small caf? on the corner, order a takeout salad, and chat to the owner in broken French, getting ready for another evening at work. Occasionally, I’d stay past midnight, and return on the weekend. I was used to long hours. I had no real friends in the city and my learning curve was steep. The previous vice principal, recruited from Stanford, had left before her tenure was up. Most credited her with professionalizing the fund-raising machine of McGill, and it was my job to continue the process. I dug in hard. Senate documents, issues of governance, fat background packages on donors: these were the easy files. What was confounding was the management challenge, picking up where the Stanford woman had left off. At bedtime, I’d close the day with a few emails, place my BlackBerry on the pillow beside me, and struggle through a few pages of The First 90 Days: Critical Success Strategies for New Leaders at All Levels, a farewell gift from a seasoned manager back home. Shutting off the light, I’d review my day in terms of the “monkey rule,” advice I’d received from a renowned university president. “There is only one way you can fail at your new job,” he had warned. “Your key reports will come into your office with monkeys on their shoulders. When they leave, make sure their monkeys are on their shoulders, not yours.” Great advice; tough to follow. I’d fall asleep, visions of monkeys dancing in my head. By spring, the light of Montreal was transformed. Patio season had arrived, and my assistant’s agenda was full. Each morning, she’d bring me a fresh installment of romance along with my coffee and documents. As she rushed out each evening, glowing with possibility, I would crank open the latches of the leaded glass windows behind the Bronfman desk and let the sounds waft up from the back alley. The popular Peel Pub, a rowdy favorite with undergrads and their out-of-town visitors, was only doors away. So too was Alexandre, a cozy local. In the morning, my assistant would frown at the open windows: “Why on earth would you want to look at a brick wall?” How could I explain that I found the nighttime sounds strangely comforting? The staccato chatter of busboys on their smoking breaks, hauling buckets of empties to gray bins, grabbing a quick smoke before they headed back to work; the occasional burst of laughter; furtive snatches of a melody, a bit of bass. It reminded me of what a friend once said of sex on antidepressants: “I can manage an orgasm, but it seems to be happening to someone down the hall.” Life, once removed. My sweetheart Jake—a writer living thousands of miles away—had just proposed to me. One week before my move, we had escaped to a remote island in the Bahamas. There, on a deserted beach at sunset, he had asked me to marry him. I had said yes. Over the years, Jake and I had had many honeymoons. For a decade, we had spent as much time together as possible, summering at Jake’s octagonal wooden houseboat in the wilds of northern Ontario, wintering in each other’s homes. In between, we traveled: Paris, London, Mexico. We each had one child: a daughter, Caitlin, for him; a son, Nicholas, for me. Born six months apart, they had been eleven when we met. We had raised them with dedication and delight, in tandem with our former partners, and each other. For years, it had been a perfect arrangement. In summer, we moored by pink-streaked granite and woke to otters stealing from our minnow bucket; on our morning swims, there were occasional moose or bear sightings. At night, nursing glasses of Irish whiskey, we would sit under the stars on a handmade driftwood bench, our personal playlist wafting across the water. In winter, we read and stoked the fire and wore flannel fish pajamas while we cozied up to watch classic movies. “We have something better than everyone else,” Jake would say, and I was certain he was right. In Jake’s presence, I felt like Grace Kelly in Rear Window—the cosmopolitan girl, head over heels in love with the globe-trotting Jimmy Stewart. More often than not, it was bliss. For the first two months in Montreal, I was buffered from the full-frontal blow of my decision to move, living two minutes from Martlet House in an executive apartment hotel. In many ways, it felt like an extended business trip. Jake—whose nickname was Jackrabbit—had shipped a package to the front desk for Valentine’s Day: I am sure I was the only person in that hotel with a stuffed jackrabbit on her pillow. Each night, Jake would tell me about his writing day, a world I understood intimately. “Feels like cracking concrete with my forehead,” he’d say. “Tell me about your day, baby.” Holding on to that rabbit, I’d try to entertain him with the complexities of my new world. I’d always end the same way: “Looks like someone forgot to book my return flight,” I’d joke. Neither of us ever laughed. There was a peacefulness to our nightly calls. He had just had an unexpected hip replacement, and I had flown out to nurse him. He was anxious to heal, to come to Montreal, to take a crack at the city. I was keen to have him by my side: I was growing more lonely by the day. By June, I’d stopped spending evenings in the stuffiness of my office. Night after night, I’d lug my work to the warm glow of Alexandre, settling in at the same cozy table with my BlackBerry and my reading. I could see other people, and it eased the deep sense of isolation. Night after night, the same waiter would bring me the first of three glasses of crisp Sauvignon Blanc, a warm ch?vre salad, and a baguette. Every evening, he did his best to change my habits. “Escargots, madame?” “Non, Fran?ois.” “Steak tartare?” “Non, merci, Fran?ois. Un autre verre.” With that first sip, my shoulders seemed to unhitch from my earlobes. With the second, I could exhale. I loved the way the wine worked on my innards. That first glass would melt some glacial layer of tension, a barrier between me and the world. Somehow with the second glass, the tectonic plates of my psyche would shift, and I’d be more at ease. Jake used to say it this way: “When you drink, that piano on your back seems to disappear.” I had always taken my work seriously—maybe too seriously. Somewhere between the first and second glass, I’d take a fresh look at a problem, or find an answer to some complex question. Suddenly, it all looked simple. By the third glass? Well, that one just took my clarity down a notch, and I’d know it was time to go home. Did my evenings at Alexandre count as drinking alone? I tried to fudge it in my mind, thinking of it this way: I wasn’t exactly alone. There were people at neighboring tables. Besides, I had no one to have dinner with. But in my heart, I knew the truth: I was breaking my promise—not only to Jake, but to myself. I was drinking because I was lonely. I was drinking because I was anxious. This wasn’t Grace Kelly pouring a glass of Montrachet for Jimmy Stewart. This was something else, something I had never encountered, and it felt wrong. I don’t know what month I began picking up another bottle on my way home, in case I wanted a glass before bed. But I do know exactly when I began sleeping through two alarms. One fateful June evening, after a particularly difficult interchange with a senior employee, I headed off to Alexandre. Here is my journal: Four. I had four last night. Maybe it was five. One was vodka. And I slept through both alarms. My boss’ car left for the country and the annual executive retreat, and I missed the ride. The car came to pick me up, with her in it, and found no-one waiting. I will have to resign. In 30 years of professional life, I have never made an error like this one. I made it by 11:00, but there is no mending what is broken. My boss asked me: “Did you take a sleeping pill last night?” “No,” I said. “I was hoping you’d say you had.” Two weeks later, in one of our regular meetings, she asked me how I was doing. I surprised myself with the answer: “I don’t know how to explain it, but I am losing my voice.” And somehow, this was true. I was losing myself in Montreal. And missing journalism—my writing, my world—was only part of the story. That summer, Jake bought me a beautiful gold engagement ring, hand-carved with delicate leaves—or were they bird feathers? Either way, it spoke to our love of nature, and of our time in the woods together. I stole two weeks at the houseboat. We swam each morning before breakfast, and indulged in our long morning meals, sitting on the driftwood bench, the table laden with fruit and eggs and coffee. It always ended the same way: “Come here, baby, sit on my lap and I’ll rub your back.” Jake and I would kiss before we parted for our morning chores. By mid-afternoon, he would be baiting my hook, mid-river, the two of us on one of our four-hour adventures in either the Boston Whaler or the classic wooden boat. But this summer, the talk was less about writing and more about BlackBerry reception. I might be on vacation, but the monkeys weren’t taking a holiday. Rumor had it that the principal’s husband had tossed her BlackBerry in the lake one summer, so frustrated was he by her constant emailing. I thought the story was apocryphal: it was hard to imagine her unrufflable husband—screenwriter and yoga master—tossing anything. Still, Jake found the story amusing, especially when my own work habits tested his patience. His mother was concerned: “You look exhausted,” she said to me. “Something about this job isn’t good for you.” I held her hand and told her it would be fine. By fall, my loneliness was overwhelming. But like the unhappy couple who decides to have a baby to fix their marriage, I had started to work with a real estate agent to purchase a home. In the meantime, I moved into temporary digs on the executive floor of the new student residence. My peripatetic ways were raising alarm bells with the principal, and so they should have been. Most weekends, I was flying home to Toronto, BlackBerry in hand. During the week, I’d troop through a selection of condos and houses, rejecting them all. They looked like movie sets to me, backdrops for a life that had nothing to do with mine. The frosh had arrived. Each night, gangs of fresh-faced kids would pour out of the residence, eager to down another heady gulp of Montreal nightlife. From where I sat, they seemed to have the city on a string. Me? I was up on the fifteenth floor, with a glass of white wine, checking out real estate listings, lost as lost could be. I had a big job, a life partner halfway across the country, and not a true friend in sight. My summer holiday with Jake was long over and I felt like my life was close to over as well. All that fall, the residence rocked late into the night. Sometimes, all night. “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” pulsing at 2 a.m. The gravelly voice of Leonard Cohen trailing down halls. Four years earlier, my own son had headed off to university himself, taking his guitar but leaving a CD on my pillow, with a note: “If you get lonely, play this music LOUD.” This residence felt as close to home as it was ever going to get in Montreal. I liked wandering the corridors, listening to the Korean student play the grand piano in the foyer, watching young girls in bunny slippers giggle over pizza. One evening, when I was coming home late, the elevators opened to reveal three semi-nude guys, all dyed various shades of red, with matching towels tied around their waists, their heads encased in Molson Canadian boxes, with eye slits. “Well, hello, miss! I take it you’re new in town?” All three were weaving slightly. “Not as new as you,” I said. “I’m one of the vice principals.” One head case straightened up. “Oh, sorry, ma’am!” He wiped his hand on his towel, and gave my hand a good pumping. “Nice to meet you!” American, I thought. From the South. “Nice to meet you, too,” I said as they drifted off into the night. The elevator doors closed. I thought: “I’m the oldest coed in this place.” As midterms got closer, the music got a little softer, but the drinking never seemed to slow down. Girls sobbing in the front lobby, their eyes smudged black with mascara. Guys lying facedown on the sidewalk, passed out, their pals swigging beer beside them, texting. Once in a while, the elevators would smell of vomit. My life was lonely beyond measure. There was the occasional visit from an out-of-town friend or a McGill parent in town for graduation, or someone checking on a troubled son or daughter. Once in a while, I would have a meal with Professor Dan Levitin, musician and producer turned neuroscientist, author of This Is Your Brain on Music. Dan lived alone with his dog Shadow. I liked hearing about his new pal Sting, his old pal Joni Mitchell, Rosanne Cash, Tom Waits. He was a moderate drinker, a lover of puns, and had great taste in restaurants. He was also single. After a while I felt awkward seeing him. With regret, I let our friendship wane. One night before Christmas, Fran?ois came up to me, looking concerned. “Madame, I think you are very, very lonely. I think you are the most lonely woman in the world.” “No, Fran?ois, I am not.” Fran?ois looked unconvinced. “I am just very busy.” I picked up the pile of papers on the banquette. “Oui, madame.” The geographic cure was not working. I knew it, and others were beginning to suspect it as well. That New Year’s, Jake and I wrote out our resolutions for each other, as we always did, signing one another’s promises. This year he looked up from his own list and interjected as I wrote mine: “No more than two drinks on any one occasion,” he said. “And no drinking alone.” “Don’t you think three is more realistic if it’s an evening out?” I bargained. “Three over three hours,” said Jake. He didn’t look convinced. And so I wrote: “Given the genetic predisposition to alcoholism in our family, I do resolve to do the following: to limit my drinking to two drinks in social situations, three over three hours; no drinking alone, ever; nine drinks total a week. If I have broken any of these rules within six months, I promise to get help.” Jake and I signed each other’s sheets, and dated them: January 1, 2007. Jake wasn’t the only one worried about my drinking. My son had noticed a big change, and was vocal about it. My sister was quiet, but I could read her silence. Our mother had had a serious drinking problem. Me? I was beyond worried. I decided to take action: I called an addiction doctor, and booked his earliest appointment. Sadly, it was March. Most of all, I wanted to go home. This was not an option, or I didn’t see it as one. At Martlet House, we had closed a very successful year: a record year of fund-raising. I was proud of my association with McGill and with this achievement. In two weeks I was taking possession of a beautiful light-filled condo in an historic building. In nine months, the major fund-raising campaign was going public. I was in the middle of helping to recruit a cochair for the campaign. I was on deadline and I took it seriously. So, I did the only thing I could think to do: I started a drinking diary. My sister suggested rewarding good behavior with stickers. I ducked into a toy store and bought the first ones that jumped out at me: monkeys. Perfect. I would get this damn monkey off my back. Of course, as I learned much later, this is how the ending always starts. You know you’re drinking too much, so you decide to keep a tally. And if you’re like most, you keep this tally hidden. In your wallet, or your underwear drawer. Last night you drank four. Or was it five? Tonight, for sure, you will do better. This is how it begins. You set some rules. Maybe you switch from red to white (less staining on the teeth). Or maybe it’s no wine; only beer. No brown liquids, only clear. (Vodka doesn’t smell, does it?) Only on weekends. Never on Sundays. Never, ever alone. The problem is: The rules continue to change. Your drinking doesn’t. You take up running or swimming. (In my case, it was power-walking. People who power-walk can’t be alcoholics, can they?) You start to wake at four in the morning. (Doesn’t everyone wake at four in the morning?) You promise to do better tonight, to drink less. Only you don’t. In fact, the only commitment you seem able to keep is the diary. It tells a story, and the story is starting to look scary. Worse still? This is only the beginning of the end. Like many a drinking diary, mine started off well. For a few days, the monkey stickers began to accumulate: I had kept to my limits. Of course, I kept the diary hidden. (What vice principal pastes monkey stickers into a journal?) But it wasn’t long before those stickers petered out. Alcohol is a formidable enemy: once you name it, it digs in hard. I said this to the addiction doctor in March. He nodded. “How do you feel about alcohol now?” he asked. “I love it.” He frowned. “And I hate it.” “Be careful,” he warned. “Alcohol is a trickster. And using alcohol to cope is maladaptive behavior.” One spring evening, I had dinner with the eloquent dean of medicine, Rich Levin. He was newish to McGill, having moved with his wife from New York, and he had had a difficult day. Rich was a martini drinker, and he ordered one, then another. “Why did you come to Montreal, Rich?” “I came here for the waters.” I fell for it. “The waters?” “Turns out I was misinformed.” I looked puzzled. “Casablanca.” “Another drink, Rich?” “Never, my dear. You know what Dorothy Parker says.” The next time I saw him, Rich pulled a gently used cocktail napkin from his pocket and handed it to me. There were Parker’s words, emblazoned beside a martini glass: “I love a martini—but two at the most. Three I’m under the table, four, I’m under the host.” That night, I pasted the napkin into my diary. Beside it I wrote: “I am bullied by alcohol. I am hiding behind it.” I knew the jig was up. Days later, on Father’s Day morning, I learn that my cousin Doug—childhood confidant and best friend—had been killed by a drunk driver, on his way home from his mother’s eightieth-birthday celebration. His young daughter, the youngest of four, was in the front seat. She survived but was severely injured. It was a sunny Sunday morning, and I remember thinking: “What else do you have to lose to alcohol before you give up?” I had already lost a big part of my childhood, now my cousin—and I was losing myself. I pulled out a bulletin board and tacked a piece of paper with four handwritten words at the top: “The Wall of Why.” As in, why I needed to give up drinking. Or: why I needed to avoid dying. The diary was no longer working. In fact, it had never worked. For the first time, I was terrified this habit might kill me. I spent an hour filling the board with images and words I loved. In that condo, I had very few photographs—one of Nicholas with his arm around me, after winning bronze at a rowing regatta; one of Jake casting a line off the houseboat deck; one of my dog Bo. There were so many faces missing. I took out my fountain pen and wrote the names of others on pieces of white paper, pinning them carefully to the board. Then, I added several pieces of prose—Annie Dillard, Simone Weil—and some poetry: “Love after Love,” by Derek Walcott. Then I got down on my knees and said the only prayer I believed in, words from T. S. Eliot’s “East Coker”: I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love, For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith. But the faith, and the love, and the hope are all in the waiting. Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought: So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing. Within weeks, Jake and I would find our way to a recovery meeting in a church basement. He held my hand while tears rivered down my cheeks. For an hour I listened to a roomful of seemingly happy people share their stories, their faith, their gratitude. As they started to stack the chairs, a tall black stranger in a funky hat came up to comfort me. “Darlin’,” he drawled, “believe me, whatever you did wrong, I did way, way worse.” Every season has its own soundtrack: that summer, it was Keith Jarrett’s introspective K?ln Concert wafting over pink-streaked granite, keeping us company as we drank cranberry juice and soda with our meals. Jake’s precious mother had just died a difficult death. When Jarrett felt too haunting, Jake would toss in a little Frank or Van to keep the tone romantic. “I’m making love to you with my playlist,” he’d call out from his computer, and I’d be enveloped, newly sober, in a fresh cocoon of sound. But for the rest of the world, the summer of 2007 belonged to the defiant Amy Winehouse: “They tried to make me go to rehab. I said No, no, no!” An earworm if ever there was one. The point wasn’t lost on me as I headed back to McGill, having tallied my first seventeen days of sobriety in the north woods of Ontario. Checking my BlackBerry as I cabbed in from the airport, I found myself humming along. “No, no, no!” Little did I understand that it would be more than a year before I was able to secure any meaningful sobriety, to put alcohol somewhat solidly in my rearview mirror. It would be three years after that before I regained what could be called a true sense of equilibrium. And it would take all my journalistic skills to put what was killing me—and as it turns out, a growing number of women—into some profound and meaningful context. In the meantime, I was about to lose many things I cared about: my livelihood, my heart, my gusto. And before things got better, they were going to get as tough as tough could be. 2. (#ulink_def81764-98bd-5996-bdc3-7552cda16185) Out of Africa (#ulink_def81764-98bd-5996-bdc3-7552cda16185) A FAMILY UNRAVELS One always learns one’s mystery at the price of one’s innocence. —ROBERTSON DAVIES I had a bifurcated childhood, split perfectly down the middle between joy and distress. Most of the latter was alcohol-fueled. My sister and brother will attest to this, and my mother will as well: there was great happiness, despite the extended absences of my peripatetic father, followed by years of terrible despair, years we barely survived. What we don’t agree on is when it all changed. For me, it split pretty tidily this way: before South Africa—a move we made when I was nine—and after South Africa. South Africa was the hinge experience. Once we had been there, it seemed there was no turning back. Before we moved, there were many memories, but none so dominant as my mother’s devotion to her parents. Night after night, I fell asleep to the sound of her typewriter keys as she wrote her long letters home. Handel or Beethoven on the record player, clackety-clack. Telling them of her life in a small northern mining town, with three small children, where the whistle blew every evening to signal that the miners’ day had ended. Clackety-clack. Writing of life alone with those small children. My father in Africa or Australia, a geophysicist overseeing exploration in the outback. Clackety-clack. Once in a while she would go to her bridge club. Kissing me when she returned, she smelled of cold air and clean hair and Guerlain’s l’Heure Bleue. But those evenings were rare. Most evenings, I fell asleep to the comforting sound of her keys. And then glorious silence: come June, the typing would stop and we’d hit the road. Year after sunburned year—long before people worried about global warming or SPF—we would escape for the entire season. As soon as school was out, my mother would load up the car and head off down the highway. In the trunk would be our tartan cooler, the car rug for picnics, plus an entire suitcase of library books. In the backseat: the dog, my sister, my brother, and I, unencumbered by care—or seat belts, for that matter. On paper, my mother would say we were Protestants. But in reality, heading to the cottage was our religion: we were the true believers. Not that we worshipped in just one spot. As newlyweds, my parents had honeymooned at my father’s family place, a log cabin on a sheltered teacup of a lake near Algonquin Park, the same lake where iconic Canadian painter Tom Thomson planned to honeymoon before he mysteriously drowned. But after that initial trip, they split their vacation time between their families’ summer homes. And since my father’s holiday time was limited, more often than not we would find ourselves nestled in the bunk beds of my mother’s childhood cottage on a stretch of Georgian Bay, a place where August storms swaggered in at night, tossing sailboats at their moorings, working their bonsai magic on the pines. Thanks to my two grandfathers—both of whom had fought in the First World War, one as a fighter pilot, the other having his leg shattered at Passchendaele—there were two log cabins we called home. During the 1930s, they and their spunky wives had searched the north country for land, tenting with their children before the cottages were built. In my maternal grandparents’ case, they bought a local farmer’s log home for five hundred dollars in 1930 and had the thick hemlock timbers numbered and transported by horse and wagon to be reassembled by the shores of Georgian Bay. My paternal grandparents, on the other hand, built a tidy one-room log place from scratch, adding little pine bunkhouses along the shoreline as their family grew. As a result, we gorged on summer in two distinctly different places. At the little lake cabin, we would fall asleep to the mournful call of loons, snug under heavy red Hudson Bay blankets, in flannel pajamas my mother had warmed by the fire, our hair smelling of wood smoke. My sister Cate and I would whisper by the dying light of the woodstove. What was that noise? Was it a bear? Or a ghost? I was sure there were ghosts. Poor Tom Thomson, vengeful in his soggy plaid shirt, rising from his watery grave to return to his never-to-be honeymoon spot, wielding an axe. Always an axe, to give us forty whacks. Before I knew it, morning would break with a slam, my grandmother’s screen door announcing she was up, coffee on, porridge started. Time for the morning paddle to the lodge to see if the paper had arrived. Within minutes we would be off, her voice ringing clear across the mirrored water: “By the li-i-ight of the sil-ver-eee moo-oo-oon …”Another day had begun, a day of snooping in the woods, racing to the raft, horsing around with the Patterson boys. At the other cottage, days and nights were different. There I would fall asleep to the sulky rhythm of Georgian Bay and the tinkling sounds of masts, the sweet taste of marshmallow in my mouth and even sweeter comfort of my cousins. By day I’d wake to thick wedges of sunlight on the painted floorboards and the whirrrr-dee-dee-dee of the birds. In a flash, I’d be downstairs, joining Dougie as he cracked open a new variety pack of little boxed cereals, dousing his bowl of Frosted Flakes in chocolate milk because shhh, the mothers were still sleeping. Off we would tramp in our still-damp bathing suits to our secret fort at the Point. Back to the cottage to head out in the Swallow, our bathtub of a homemade rowboat. Adventure after adventure, punctuated only by meals, served by my mother and aunts and grandmother on little birch-bark place mats, ones sold by the “Indians,” said my mother, “when they used to tent on the Point.” All week long the cottage was a women-and-children affair. But on Friday afternoons the air would begin to crackle. For hours we would line ourselves along the top of the split-rail fence, chirpy faces trained toward the curve, looking for the first sign of a Buick. My mother would head into the bedroom to brush her freshly washed hair, put on lipstick, and emerge transformed: burnished and blond for my dad. I thought she looked like a movie star. For the next two days there would be laughter: games of charades, rounds of bridge, impromptu skits. Tall shoulders to be tossed from, into the water; strong arms to help us build boats and forts. Handsome men drinking “Hey Mabel, Black Label” beer after splitting logs and stacking the woodpile. Was there too much drinking? I have no idea. All I remember is that most of the adults smoked cigarettes or pipes—and we did, too, sneaking them into our homemade tepee. It was a poor plan. The smoke billowed out the top and we were caught, red-handed, forced to chain-smoke until we turned green. At night, lying under white sheets, little needles of sunburn prickling our shoulders, our noses peeling for the umpteenth time, my cousin and I would decide that no, we weren’t going to sleep, not when the adults were telling dirty jokes downstairs. And so we would eavesdrop, and then whisper very quietly, because “for the last time, kids,” my uncle had warned, “it’s time to go to sleep!” Then it would be Sunday night, and we would all wave as the cars, honking, disappeared around the curve, and the cycle would begin again. Often there was a visitor I loved: the painter A. Y. Jackson, a close friend of my grandparents. A bachelor with an infamous appetite for my grandmother’s jam—jam that would dribble down his sweater vests along with his cigarette ashes when he chuckled at my grandfather’s jokes. Looking at his belly, I knew why Aunt Esther had never married him. “I’ll be away many weeks of the year,” he had warned when he proposed. “Make it fifty-two, and I might agree,” was her response. Or that’s how the story went. Maybe he never really wanted to get married. Maybe he was afraid of marriage the same way he was afraid of fire. In one of the cottage bedrooms, he had had my grandfather install a thick rope, attached at the windowsill so he could shimmy down it in the event of a blaze. (He never used it, but Dougie did, when we played hide-and-seek.) Clearly, this was a man who liked to escape, just like my father. He stole my heart because he taught me how to steer a paintbrush with my thumb, and because he painted a naughty little sketch of a Shell station with the S missing. He was just about the only bachelor I had ever met, a rambling guy whose snowshoes hung on the wall beside the fireplace. But I used to think that maybe he’d outfoxed himself, taking all those painting trips and somehow forgetting to get married and have his own little family to go home to. Year after sunburned year, this was how we lived. If my father was away more than most—and he always was—summers buffered my mother from her pervasive loneliness. She flourished near family, and so did we. When this chapter ended—when her parents died too young, and her drinking started—I used to think that those summers at the cottage were like money in the bank or gas in the tank: she had accumulated so many good memories for us that it took a long time to get to zero. Of course, we did get to zero, and far, far beyond in those many years when her drinking was dire, when she seemed to give up eating and sleeping, weaving down the halls like a passenger on a bumpy train, the sound of ice cubes declaring her arrival. But that was much later, after the cottages had been split up and the cousins had scattered, a long time after Africa. Rural South Africa, 1963 The birth of anxiety. An outdoor music festival. I am ten years old, about to sing my first solo, “All Through the Night.” Suddenly, the large Afrikaans woman next to me starts to slap my arm. I can’t understand a word she’s saying. (Turns out, I’m not clapping for her son, my competition, who’s taking a bow.) Now it’s my turn to take the stage. I freeze. The audience starts to mumble. The judge walks over to see what’s wrong. My father comes, too. He talks me into performing. Maybe after the lunch break, suggests the judge. I nod. I can do this, on one condition. I don’t think I can face the crowd. The judge smiles. No, it’s not essential to face forward. After lunch, I keep my promise. On uncertain legs, I climb the stage. I turn to face my teacher, Mrs. Duplessis, at the piano. My back is to the audience. At the end of the afternoon, I’m awarded second prize: first for voice, marks off for delivery. Many years later, as I wrestled with major depression and a serious case of writer’s block, the judge’s verdict would become a constant in my head: “First for voice, marks off for delivery.” Code for: you’re failing. For decades I forgot this incident. Then it reappeared, just as I was to deliver a cover story on teenage suicide. Frozen at my computer, I would hear the judge’s words, over and over, in my head. In Montreal, as my world unraveled on the fifteenth floor of the student residence, I heard it again: “First for voice, marks off for delivery.” What does this story have to do with my drinking? Everything. Liquor soothes. It calms anxiety. It numbs depression. Ask any serious drinker: if you want to find your off button, alcohol can seem like an excellent choice. But not when you’re ten. Back then, as I sat with my parents on sticky chairs on an unforgiving African afternoon, my confidence was deeply shaken. I was pink with humiliation. And I felt my parents’ confusion at my behavior. I had always been top of my class. I had accelerated at school. I had never blown anything this badly before. It was a wobbly time for me. For my parents, our move to Africa was their great romantic adventure. For the first time in their marriage, they had finessed their situation and were truly together in a sustaining fashion: making a home on an acre in Mount Ayliff, a village of a hundred people nestled in the hilly terrain of the Transkei. All of a sudden there was a cook, a maid, a garden boy. Each night, my father would park his Land Rover out front and saunter through the door, darkly handsome in his khaki field clothes. He would light the propane lanterns—there was no electricity—and cast a warm glow through the long-halled house. My mother was delighted. For me, he was our bachelor father, and everything seemed new. At dinner, when my mother’s back was turned, he’d line his peas on his knife and toss them down his gullet, pressing his finger to his lips: “Shhhh!” “What, John? What did you just do?” We’d giggle. When she wasn’t looking, he’d open the fridge and swig milk straight from the bottle. This guy didn’t seem to know the rules. At bedtime, he’d read to us: Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons, C. S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. My mother was in love with him, and we were, too: this dad was different than the person I expected, but he made the house hum. My mother was chatty, extroverted, radiant. They entertained, and there was laughter. This was an era of cinch-waisted dresses and “sundowners.” I knew I was meant to be happy. But for me there was a deep sense of foreboding, a shadow I could not shake. And it went deeper than the obvious disappointment that I was no longer my mother’s primary companion, the eldest with special privileges. More often than not, I felt like the bad fairy at the birthday party. There was a deep, subterranean rumble I could feel, although I couldn’t put my finger on it. Something was not right. It started with our trips to the library, back in Canada, when we were busy getting shots and passports. While the librarian was loading my sister’s arms with animal books—books full of lions and poisonous snakes—I was reading stories about violence in the Belgian Congo, murder. I was deeply skeptical about this trip, and my fears seemed justified. When our plane landed for refueling in the Congo, en route to Johannesburg, I thought that the cleaners were boarding to kill us: I ran to the washroom, burst in on a man shaving, and promptly threw up. When my father introduced us to the snakebite kit in the kitchen, my fears were confirmed: this was African Gothic. I had always loved school. But in Mount Ayliff’s barren two-room schoolhouse—twenty students in eight grades—I couldn’t understand a word being said. This was Afrikaans immersion, and I was lost. For the first time in my life, I was bullied on a regular basis. While two large boys would pin me to the ground, another would hold an insect close to my face, tearing its legs off, yelling at me for speaking English. I didn’t tell my parents: as far as I was concerned, there wasn’t much point. They didn’t know Afrikaans, either. Of course, in a very short time, my sister and I learned Afrikaans and Xhosa, too, the Bantu language spoken by our servants. I found a defender at school, a much younger English boy named Nicky Hastie, so staunchly loyal that I later named my son after him. My sister and I adopted a pet frog, named him Sam, and carried him to school in a little cardboard suitcase. He lived under my desk, and I’d peek on him when Mrs. Duplessis had her back turned. In other words, we adjusted. While my mother developed a close relationship with our cook, we learned that the maid had a vicious temper and hated children. When my mother was out, she would threaten us with a hot iron, chasing us down the long halls of the house. On more than one occasion, she burned a hole in my sister’s favorite blue dress. One Saturday night, we paid her back. Left in her care, we disappeared into our bedroom wardrobe, leading her to believe we had run away. Screaming at the sight of our empty beds, she ran to the servants’ quarters to fetch the cook. By the time she showed up, we were safe and sound. The cook left, and we hopped back in the wardrobe. Later, the maid would get even: when we headed back to Canada, we knew she was planning to chop the heads off our favorite bantam chickens to cook them for dinner. But by then our little pack of three was well established: John and Cate and I were tight as tight could be, and that fact would never change. On Thursdays, Cate and I would wander by the local jail on our way home from piano lessons, passing hard candies through the fence to the neighbor’s former cook. Rumor had it that she had killed a younger servant, whom she had caught sleeping with her boyfriend, the garden boy. Maybe it was the garden boy she killed. We weren’t concerned: we loved her for the corn bread she had cooked, and for the hugs she gave us when we first arrived in the village. We liked her smile (although I used to imagine her washing the blood off the knife, after she stabbed the person; I thought she must be very brave). There was a political undercurrent in the village. We knew we were the last whites to live in Mount Ayliff, that soon this would be the first homeland given back to the blacks. One Saturday a group decided to speed up the process: they would burn the whites out of town. They warned two families to leave: ours and the doctor’s. My parents woke us in the middle of the night and told us to get our clothes on: we had to decide whether to evacuate or not. We ended up staying. The crisis was averted, but the anger was real. At Christmas, my mother gave both Ivy and Evelina presents. And on Christmas night our family joined a handful of others, sitting in church with the black congregation. Soon after there was a visit from the police: presents, they said, were not a good idea. Nor were the mattresses in the servants’ quarters. My feisty mother was unfazed. On vacations we would visit the Indian Ocean or a game park. Truth be told, I always thought those trips were risky business: I had been chased by a herd of warthogs and was certain it was only a matter of time before we were killed or maimed. While others enjoyed the view, watching monkeys try to pry open the car, I usually had my eyes trained out the back window, checking for a marauding rhino. On weekends we would head off in our big boat of a Mercedes and end up at the Stanfords’ ranch, where my parents would ride horses into the mountains, coming back with stories of baboons and more. My mother always looked so gorgeous on a horse, her hair windswept, a girlish joy on her face. She loved the adventure, and I thought she was remarkable, going off as she did, facing baboons. Remarkable, and a little reckless. While they were gone, we would play hide-and-seek with the Stanford girls, discuss what little we knew of the facts of life, and look after our baby brothers. I liked those weekends: it felt like the cottage, with my cousins. I finally felt at home. And then it was over. Before we headed back to Canada, my father presented my mother with a beautiful double-diamond ring to celebrate their African honeymoon. For two solid months we meandered up through Africa, from Zanzibar to Kenya, on to Egypt and Greece, Italy, Switzerland, and more, traipsing hand in hand like the happy band that we were. Years and years later, after we were all married, my parents moved back to Africa, spending six years in Botswana. They took a trip one Christmas, down through South Africa, to visit old friends, stopping in at Mount Ayliff on their way. Our house was now a magistrate’s office; the neighbor’s house was lined with broken beer bottles. The garden was long gone. My mother said she was sorry she ever saw our home that way: it broke her heart. By then it was the 1980s, and everything had changed. My mother’s years of heavy drinking had cast a terrible pall over our entire family. While loneliness, depression, and anxiety would take me down, something took her far, far further. For years, she—like so many other women—added Valium to the mix, and it diminished her. The woman we knew in Africa had disappeared, and in her place was someone full of rage, bitterness, and despair. Most of all, she was completely unpredictable. One minute our mother was present; the next she had transformed into Medusa with a tinkling glass. I often look at photos of all of us on the trip home from Africa—pictures in Florence and Athens and Cairo—and wonder if anything had started to go wrong. Dad slim and tanned in his Ray-Bans, Mum just steps ahead in linen and pearls, and those Jackie Kennedy shades. Both look inordinately happy. Did Dad know what was about to happen? Did she? Had the drinking turned dangerous already? I think not. If anything, the time in South Africa was too good: my mother never quite readjusted to her loneliness again, and she never forgave my father for leaving her behind. It was decades before they would have another big shared adventure. And in the intervening years, life was very tough. Or that’s how I see it. It’s one way I have been able to make sense of the story, to love her through the madness. It’s tough to parse addiction, even when you’ve succumbed to it yourself. Most of all, I like to remember my parents the way they were in Rome. My father, scooping my mother in his arms, carrying her up the hotel stairs. Her head tossed back, laughing: “Oh, John!” I never saw her laugh quite that way again. Once her parents died, both from cancer when they were barely into their seventies, and my father resumed his overseas travel, she took her comfort in hard liquor. For years she seemed to live in her nightgown, wandering the halls by night, cursing by day. “This isn’t living, it’s existing,” she would announce, over and over, her eyes belligerent. “I’ve had it up to here”—gesturing to her neck—“and the rest is toilet paper!” At sixteen, I began my feeble attempts to leave home. If my father was around to hold the fort, I would pack a small bag and head off on foot, aiming for my cousins’ house. I would never make it very far before my father would retrieve me, slowing down beside me in the family car. “Get in, Ann. Your mother needs you.” And back I would go, in tears, to a house that felt like it was on fire, burning with rage. Perhaps because he knew just how difficult my mother found his absences, and because he loved her, my father stood by her. We often wondered why, and how, he was able to do this. Only once did he lose his temper in front of us, and the image is seared deeply in all our brains. He has lined us up in the kitchen—my mother, my sister, my brother, and me—making sure we are watching as he smashes all the bottles he has found in the house, breaking them, one by one, over the kitchen faucet. Bottle after bottle in his powerful hands, crashing on that slim bit of curved aluminum, until he punctures it and it begins to spout like a whale. Broken glass, spouting water. And we all stand, dumbfounded, tears of fury and despair rolling down my poor father’s face, tears of contrition pouring down my poor mother’s cheeks, all of us trapped in the hell of a family cursed by addiction, with no escape pending. For years she was on the phone, drinking and dialing. Sober, she rarely picked up. Drinking? No call was too difficult, including to the police. More than once I had a date interrupted by a cop. “Your mother needs to find you,” they’d say. “There’s a family emergency.” And I’d roll my eyes. If there was one quality I hated most, it was her disinhibition. The bills added up. Once, my father had the phone cut off, and there we were, having to explain to our friends that ours was a phoneless household. There was no end to the embarrassment. Years later, when we had all left home and wanted to visit them, my father would rarely warn us if she was on a bender. We’d just arrive, and be back in living hell. Later he learned to give us a tip-off. “Your mother is not feeling very well today,” he would say. It was a feeble bit of code: I used to be angry that he didn’t name it for what it was. But it seemed he could not. Nothing changed, not for decades. She missed coming to the hospital when my son was born. She missed most important occasions. There were so many sad birthdays, depressing Christmases. And then it ended. Sometime in her seventies, my mother followed the discipline of a weight-loss regimen and changed her drinking habits in the process. Over time my real mother reappeared, a tinier, softer version of her younger self, a woman who could manage to have two drinks of wine and put the cork in it, heading off to bed at ten in a way she hadn’t in decades. It was deeply confounding, albeit welcome. There she is, at my son’s graduation, beaming into the camera. Could this not have happened a few decades earlier? Saved us years of sorrow, fury, and pain? “I don’t touch hard liquor,” she now declares. “I only drink wine.” And but for the rarest occasion, she’s right: her drink of choice is white wine and Diet Coke. A downer and an upper, I always think. It’s a curious mix, but who am I to argue? Never underestimate real life. Things you think will never happen will occur, and more. Bad, and good. I know this, in my bones. My gifted father, my precious sober parent, followed my mother on the same terrible path into alcoholism. His journey was very different—discreet, private, late—but it was alcoholic all the same. It took him down, and it broke everyone’s heart. Most of all, it shook my mother. “He needs help,” she would say. “I, of all people, know just how awful this can be.” But my father was a quiet man who grew more so with age: he wasn’t going to reach out for help. When I told him I had started going to an abstinence-based support group, he took a long draw on his cigarette and said simply: “I went once. You know, I should have gone back.” A river runs through our family, through our bloodlines. It curdles our reason, muddles our thinking, seduces us by numbing all pain. Sons and daughters, nieces and nephews: they all need to be vigilant. Tom McGuane once called alcoholism the black lung disease of writers. But I can’t blame my profession. Over the years, my mother watched me develop into a heavy drinker and she was concerned. One night, near the end of my bingeing days, I passed out in the bathroom at the cottage. I was sitting, fully clothed, on the toilet, pants up. She banged on the door. “Did you know you were asleep in there?” she asked, incredulously, the next morning. “I never want you to go through the same hell I went through.” I was taken aback. This was my straight-talking mother. I promised to slow down. Within a week I was sitting in a church basement. In truth, this is the one blessing her drinking gave me: it terrified me into quitting faster than I might have otherwise. Luckily, I quit when I was in the middle stage of the disease: there are many embarrassments I incurred, but many tragedies I avoided. Over time, my mother and I began to see more of each other. When my father died, I insisted she get a passport and let me take her to California. “You’re a great traveler, Mum,” I said, watching her peer over the edge of a gondola as we headed up the rock face of a mountain. “You sound surprised,” she said, smiling. “Why wouldn’t I be? We were so lucky, you know, having that trip to Africa.” Fifty years later, and it’s still the highlight of her life. The next morning, standing by the kitchen sink, she turned to me and said: “I will never be able to thank you enough for bringing me here.” “I love your company, Mum,” I said, softly. And I realized: it’s totally true. I love my mother’s company. I still love the way she puts on her lipstick at night and combs her hair. I love the way she looks like a teenager when we take out the Scrabble board. Most of all, I love her appreciation of my son’s journey as an artist. She has an open mind, a generous heart, and an endless appetite for adventure. She looked serious. “You know, I am heartsick when I think what my drinking did to all of you.” It happened like that, just out of the blue: the apology I had waited for, for so many heartbroken years. All I could think to do was hold her tiny frame close for a long, long time. She smelled good: of Guerlain’s l’Heure Bleue, just like she always used to in the early days, when I was little. She was silent, and so was I. I realized that I had forgiven her, as my son has forgiven me. But our reconciliation only deepened my growing obsession: What was this thing that had taken us both down, albeit to such different levels and for vastly different lengths of time? What was this trapdoor that we both disappeared into? Down the bunny hole we both fell, into a seductive altered reality. Why do some disappear for a few years, and others lose themselves for decades, or forever? A river may run through my family, but it’s also coursing through a significant and growing portion of femalehood. Ever so slowly, my search for answers, once so deeply personal, began to turn profoundly professional. Sitting on a hard metal chair every Thursday night at my recovery group, I am surrounded by women of every age and every walk of life: young mothers with strollers rubbing shoulders with grandmothers; high school students with teachers, professors, musicians, dancers, actresses, life coaches, investment experts. Over by the coffee urn, tattooed beauties dating rock stars confide in well-groomed mothers of three. Rows and rows of women, banding together to find a solution to a problem both cunning and baffling. Each Thursday, my home group welcomes newcomers. More often than not, they’re female. More often than not, they’re young: impossibly fresh-faced, if somewhat confused. Six months in, they’re bringing their friends. A year in, they’re starting to mentor fresh new arrivals. It goes on and on, the sisterhood of the newly sober. “What’s happening?” I always think to myself, nursing my tea in the second row of a capacity crowd, waiting for the meeting to start. “How on earth did we all get here?” 3. (#ulink_470c6f5c-c07f-5801-9a3d-026f0da77b92) You’ve Come the Wrong Way, Baby (#ulink_470c6f5c-c07f-5801-9a3d-026f0da77b92) CLOSING THE GENDER GAP ON RISKY DRINKING One mojito, two mojitos, three mojitos … FLOOR! —POPULAR BIRTHDAY CARD Alcohol is ubiquitous in our society. It’s hugely linked to our notions of celebration, sophistication, and well-being. It’s how we relax, reward, escape—exhale. Know your wines? You’re affluent. Know your vodkas? You’re hip. Know your coolers, your shots? You’re young and female. Alcohol abuse is rising in much of the developed world—and in many countries, female drinkers are driving that growth. This is global: the richer the country, the fewer abstainers and the smaller the gap between male and female consumption. The new reality: binge drinking is increasing among young adults—and women are largely responsible for this trend. What has not been fully documented, understood, or explored is that while women have gained equality in so many arenas, we have also begun to close the gender gap when it comes to alcohol abuse. Women’s buying power has been growing for decades, and our decision-making authority has grown as well. The alcohol industry, well aware of this reality, is now battling for our downtime—and our brand loyalty. Wines with names like Girls’ Night Out, MommyJuice, Mommy’s Time Out, Cupcake, and yes, Happy Bitch; berry-flavored vodkas, Skinnygirl Vodka, mango coolers, Mike’s Hard Lemonade: all are aimed at us. When it comes to alcohol, we live in a culture of denial. With alcoholics representing just a tiny fraction of the population, it’s the widespread normalization of heavier consumption that translates to serious trouble. In the Western world, the majority of us drink. And the top 20 percent of the heaviest drinkers consume roughly three-quarters of all alcohol sold. Episodic binge drinking by a large population of nondependent drinkers has a huge impact on society. Most of us understand the major role that excessive alcohol use plays in family disruption, violence, and injury. Death? When compared to illicit drugs, there are many more deaths due to alcohol. According to Robert Brewer, leader of the alcohol program at the National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta, excessive drinking is the third leading preventable cause of death in the United States, after smoking and a combination of bad diet and inactivity. By conservative estimates, it’s responsible for roughly 80,000 deaths each year: of those, 23,000 are female. Of the 23,000, more than half are related to binge drinking. For women, binge drinking is defined as four or more drinks on one occasion in the past month; for men, it’s five. According to a recent CDC Vital Signs report, female binge drinking is a serious, underrecognized problem: almost 14 million American girls and women binge drink an average of three times each month, typically consuming six drinks per bingeing episode. Meanwhile, one in five high school girls binge drinks. Among those who consume alcohol, the prevalence of those who binge drink rises from roughly 45 percent of those in their first year of high school to 62 percent of those in their senior year. Women most likely to binge drink: those between the ages of 18 and 34 (in other words, those in their prime childbearing years), and those with higher household incomes. Binge drinking not only increases the risk of unintended pregnancies: if pregnant women binge, their babies are at risk of sudden infant death syndrome and fetal alcohol spectrum disorders. Meanwhile, for all women, binge drinking increases the risk of breast cancer, heart disease, and sexually transmitted diseases, among other health and social problems. “People who binge drink tend to do so frequently,” says Brewer. “Most people who drink too much aren’t addicted to alcohol. Most of these people are not dependent. What’s the big picture? This is a major public health problem.” The United States is not alone in naming alcohol abuse a major health challenge. In Britain, Prime Minister David Cameron has declared binge drinking a national “scandal.” Deaths from liver disease have risen 20 percent in a decade. Last year, Britain’s chief medical officer, Dame Sally Davies, pronounced: “Our alcohol consumption is out of kilter with most of the civilized world.” In a recent report by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, British girls were cited as the biggest teenage drinkers in the Western world: half of fifteen-year-olds said they had been drunk twice in the past year, as compared with 44 percent of British boys the same age. Says Sir Ian Gilmore, past president of the Royal College of Physicians: “In the thirty years I have been a liver specialist, the striking difference is this: liver cirrhosis was a disease of elderly men—I have seen a girl as young as seventeen and women in their twenties with end-stage liver disease. Alcohol dependence is setting in when youngsters are still in their teens. This mirrors what we saw with tobacco, when women caught up with men on lung cancer.” If leaders in Britain are concerned, so too is much of the world. In 2010, the World Health Organization passed its landmark Global Alcohol Strategy, with 193 signatories. In the developed world, where noncommunicable diseases pose the greatest health threat, alcohol abuse is moving much higher on the health-risk agenda, and will continue to do so. Is alcohol the new tobacco? In many ways, it is: a multibillion-dollar international industry dealing with market-friendly governments, enjoying a virtually unrestricted market for advertising, despite growing evidence that the substance has significant health risks. In fact, recent research has revealed that alcoholism is a more serious risk for early mortality than smoking—and more than twice as deadly for women than men. German researchers found that compared with the general population, alcohol-dependent women were 4.6 times as likely to cut their lives short. The rate for men: 1.9 times higher than the general population. On average, both women and men died roughly twenty years earlier than those who were not dependent on alcohol. “It is just like Virginia Slims,” says David Jernigan, director of the Center on Alcohol Marketing and Youth (CAMY) at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. “Alcohol is a carcinogen, and it’s particularly risky for women. Breast cancer is the poster child for that position. But the alcohol industry is selling young women on the notion that only really, really good things happen when there’s alcohol. And to have really, really good things happen, you have to drink.” I came of age in the seventies, a heady time for women in North America. Smack-dab in the middle of second-wave feminism, my baby-boom peers and I headed off to university in our miniskirts and tie-dyed T-shirts, assured by Gloria Steinem and a host of others that the world was ours for the taking. We could, in Steinem’s words, “grow up to be the men we wanted to marry.” Not for us the confining roles of our fifties mothers, harnessed to aprons, and what seemed like cookie-cutter lives. Not for us the quiet desperation, the Valium, the acquiescence. And for me? Not the path of my mother. Sitting in my dorm room at Queen’s University, unpacking my things—a brand-new copy of Joni Mitchell’s Blue, a not-so-new edition of A Room of One’s Own—I was unequivocal on one point: my life was going to look different. Very different. (Of course, it already did: I had rose-colored aviator glasses custom-made for this new chapter. I kid you not.) If there was one trap I was determined I would never fall into, it was alcoholism. Risky drinking? Maybe. It was frosh week. There were keg parties and buckets of what we called Purple Jesus in my immediate future. I was five minutes from meeting my first serious boyfriend. Most conveniently, the legal drinking age had just been changed to eighteen, my age exactly. But alcoholism? Never. Three times my family circled the residence, eager to get one last glimpse of me before they headed home. Not once did I look out the window. Not because I didn’t love them, but because I did. Too much: I was deeply entwined in the family drama. I was ready to set out alone. I was in good company: my whole generation wanted to start fresh. This was the school year of 1971–72. Politically, we were well steeped in the My Lai Massacre, just a heartbeat from Watergate. Ramparts was still alive and well on the newsstands, and the first issue of a new women’s magazine was having its debut: it was called Ms. Nothing, we were certain, would ever be the same. And frankly, nothing was—especially if you were female. Ours was the generation that would have it all: careers, families, freedom of expression, equal rights. Fulfillment on every level. Did we have it all? With courage, endless creativity, and gusto, we certainly tried. Without a blueprint, many of us established excellent careers while raising children and nurturing marriages, juggling deadlines, child care, and housework. We experimented with full-time, part-time, flextime, and freelance work, nannies, day care, and shared babysitters, home offices, and virtual offices. In many cases, our marriages were strained, and failed. Mine certainly did. Could we have it all? Could we be the mothers we wanted to be and rise to the top? Many of us said yes—albeit sequentially. Or with enough help. Others said no, ditch the cape. The jury was out. Today, more than thirty-five years after I graduated, women outstrip their male counterparts in postsecondary participation. “We Did It!” crowed a cover of the Economist, featuring Rosie the Riveter. “Women’s economic empowerment is arguably the biggest social change of our times,” trumpeted the article. An enormous revolution, with enormous ramifications. As the magazine warned, dealing with the social consequences of this victory will be one of the great challenges of the next fifty years. More than forty years after Steinem helped launch a revolution, the debate rages on: can women have it all? These days, there are two powerful women at the microphone, offering a rich diversity of advice: Sheryl Sandberg, chief operating officer of Facebook and author of Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead; and Anne-Marie Slaughter, the first female director of policy planning in the U.S. State Department, a Princeton professor, and author of a persuasive Atlantic magazine cover story, “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All.” In 2011, Forbes magazine called Sandberg the fifth most powerful woman in the world. For today’s young working woman, Sandberg may indeed be the most powerful, period. Long before Lean In appeared in bookstores this year, millions had checked out her 2010 TED Talk, in which she offered women prescriptive advice on how to reach the C-suite. While calling today’s women lucky, Sandberg cites the sorry news that women are not making it to the top of any profession anywhere in the world. Numbers say it all. Of the Fortune 500 companies, only twenty-one are led by women. Of 195 independent countries in the world, all but seventeen are led by men. Meanwhile, in the United States, two-thirds of married male senior managers have children, while only a third of their female counterparts can make the same claim. While offering her prescriptions for change, Sandberg comes clean about some of the most difficult truths for working women. Top among these: while success and likability are positively correlated for men, the opposite is true for women. Saying a woman is “very ambitious is not a compliment in our culture,” writes Sandberg. “Aggressive and hard-charging women violate unwritten rules about acceptable social conduct. Men are continually applauded for being ambitious and powerful and successful, but women who display these same traits often pay a social penalty. Female accomplishments come at a cost.” Finally, she shares, “When reviewing a woman, the reviewer will often voice the concern, ‘While she’s really good at her job, she’s just not as well liked by her peers.’” I say: bless her for telling it like it is. She confronts and exposes some tough truths, among them: women need to smile more than men when negotiating for a raise. Smile, and continue to smile. In fact, I think of her comments when I speak to Daisy Kling, a third-year Queen’s student, currently on a transfer to Britain’s Durham University. “Sexism is invisible, but it’s real,” says Kling. “Girls have more pressure on them to behave a certain way. You think you have the same rights as boys, so it’s hard to understand why you feel held back. But there’s a lot of pressure on girls to act ninety different ways at once: you have to be smart, you want people to take you seriously, you have to be attractive—but not too attractive, not slutty. You have to have experience, but not too much experience.” Sandberg’s well-trademarked advice is aimed, in many ways, at Kling’s generation. It amounts to this: lean into the boardroom table, not back; don’t decide to “leave before you leave”—in other words, to opt out of the fast track before you’ve even had children; and make your partner a real partner. Her focus is what she calls the “Leadership Ambition Gap,” and she’s determined to help women eliminate the internal barriers that keep them from the corner office. All valuable, bracing stuff—especially for those about to embark on a professional journey. Neither Sandberg nor Slaughter airbrushes the truth. As I write this, Slaughter’s book has yet to be published. But I know from reading her Atlantic piece, and her New York Times review of Lean In, that her take and mine are aligned. This is a woman who admits to the complexities of long-distance parenting a troubled fourteen-year-old son. She confesses that “juggling high-level government work with the needs of two teenage boys was not possible.” Says Slaughter: “Having it all, at least for me, depended almost entirely on what type of job I had.” In other words, she believes there are times when you have to lean back. And while Slaughter’s version of leaning back means trading one high-octane superstar position for an illustrious second, you have to love her candor. As a young professional, I could have used both Sandberg’s and Slaughter’s advice. As I said, there was no blueprint back in 1977, when I started my career, two weeks after my wedding. When I gave birth in 1984, the term “second shift” had yet to be popularized. And when I proposed job-sharing to my editors at Maclean’s magazine—job-sharing with the talented Canadian author, editor, and journalist Val Ross, no less—I was turned down. To them, the idea was too unwieldy, preposterous. Motherhood changed my priorities. Before I had Nicholas, I gladly stayed at work all Saturday night when a political leadership race demanded that we close the magazine on a Sunday morning. After I became a mother, the trade-offs got tougher. Here is what I learned: I had to create my own exits, and my own opportunities. I wanted to know my son as a toddler, and as a teenager, too. To be the mother I wanted to be, I would make compromises at work. To be the professional I wanted to be, I would make compromises at home. With those decisions came many blessings, and a couple of deep disappointments. As a mother, I have worked full-time, part-time, and flextime: I have stayed at home and enjoyed a journalism fellowship year back at university. I did the latter when my son was two. In other words, I experimented with it all, and tried to time it well. I was entertainment editor of Maclean’s, Canada’s national newsmagazine, with a young son, and I was a vice principal of McGill University, with that same son at university himself. I could not have done the second job with a younger child. When I look back, I see that I followed well what Sandberg advocates. I leaned in, hard. I did not leave before I left. And I made my partner a true partner: my husband and I separated when Nicholas was five, but we continued to share all daily duties related to our son, and all of the pleasures, too. As an independent television producer, based close to Nicholas’s school, Will was able to respond to midday emergencies in a way I was not. We were no longer husband and wife, but we functioned beautifully as a family, and we still do. Early on, I decided I would rather have my family than a financial settlement. As a result, we didn’t let lawyers get in the middle of our arrangement. We started having family dinners once a week, from the very beginning; that grew to taking shared trips with our son, and sharing cottage time. It was a novel arrangement when it began, less so now. In the end, we shared everything. The more we shared, the more smoothly things went. Over the years, I won five National Magazine Awards for my work, and multiple others. I didn’t travel a lot, but when there was a speaking engagement, I was free to go. Still, there were many opportunities I chose to forgo. More than once, the London bureau of the magazine was up for grabs. I could never apply, much as I wanted to. And I knew that without a more diverse r?sum?, I was unlikely to be selected as editor of the magazine, a job I once dearly wanted. In 2001, when I threw my hat in the ring, I was not chosen. I remember being encouraged to interview for the position. My immediate response: “They aren’t going to choose a woman.” To which came the less-than-resounding “You don’t know that.” But I did. I knew it in my bones. Actually, what I knew was they weren’t going to choose me. After several rounds of rigorous interviews, the publisher poked his head in my office one noon hour. “We won’t be pursuing your candidacy any further,” he said, standing in the doorway, an awkward look on his face. I was eating a salad at my desk: mid-forkful, I received this news. I couldn’t help but wonder: Would they tell a man this way? Wouldn’t they invite him in for a short talk? Who knows, but I was scalded. An insider was chosen, and on his first day he invited me into his office. He asked me what I wanted: I said a magazine column. From there I developed a writing voice, one that gave birth to this book. It’s a twisty road. So much of this comes down to pacing, balance, and juggling—and choices. I took my career seriously; I took being a mother seriously; and for more than a decade, I took being a lover seriously as well. I had a full-time job, a vibrant speaking career, a deep connection with my son, a fabulous relationship with Jake. Always, there were trade-offs. I didn’t write my column as often as I should have, in those years when Nicholas was at home. Most nights I got home late: too often, I was trundling in with groceries after seven o’clock, cooking fast for a hungry boy. In a long-distance relationship, Jake had to do too much of the traveling in the winter months. Everyone compromised. And somewhere along the line, I would surprise myself by drinking too much, using alcohol as a shock absorber. Which isn’t to say that I wasn’t deeply happy with all my individual roles—mother, lover, editor, writer, speaker, daughter, sister, friend, ex-wife. But I always felt like I was failing somewhere, and I probably was. I didn’t see enough of Caitlin, Jake’s daughter, and that became a deep regret. More often than not, I felt stretched between multiple duties. Most working mothers do. According to Wharton School of Business economists Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers, women are less happy today than their predecessors in the 1970s, both in absolute terms and relative to men. No wonder. Between 1979 and 2006, the workweek of the typical middle-income American family increased by roughly eleven hours. According to a 2011 study by the Center for Work and Family at Boston College, 65 percent of fathers believed that both parents should contribute equally as caregivers for their children—but only 30 percent of the fathers actually did so. For me, all the juggling took its toll. Certain disappointments at work were bruising. Menopause hit: anxiety and depression reared their ugly heads. Somewhere along the line, my occasional evenings of drinking too much morphed into drinking on an almost nightly basis. When Nicholas left for university, when the marathon was over and the house was empty, I was lonely: it was then that my evening glass of wine turned into two or three, which eventually became three or four in Montreal. On this, I am not alone. Preeminent American alcohol researcher Sharon Wilsnack, of the University of North Dakota, believes we are now witnessing a “global epidemic” in women’s drinking. In 2011, Katherine Keyes, now an assistant professor at Columbia University, reviewed thirty-one international studies of birth-cohort and gender differences in alcohol consumption and mortality. Her conclusion? Those born after the Second World War are more likely to binge drink and develop alcohol-use disorders than their older counterparts. Sitting in her office, her two-year-old son’s face beaming by her computer, Keyes gets specific: “Those born between 1978 and 1983 are the weekend warriors, drinking to black out. In that age group, there is a reduction in male drinking, and a sharp increase for women.” Meanwhile, women who are in their forties and fifties have a very high risk in terms of heavy drinking and weekly drinking. “We’re not saying, ‘Put down the sherry and go back to the kitchen,’” says Keyes. “But when we see these steep increases, you wonder if we are going to see a larger burden of disease for women.” In many countries, the answer is yes. Take Britain, for instance, the Lindsay Lohan of the international set. Most important, Keyes’s study points to the critical role of societal elements in creating a drinking culture. “Traditionally, individual biological factors have been the major focus when it comes to understanding alcohol risk,” says Keyes. “However, this ignores the impact of policy and environment.” The environment is challenging: witness the rise in alcohol marketing, the feminization of the drinking culture. Women need a break. They feel they deserve a break. And if drinking is about escape, it is also about entitlement and empowerment. Says Keyes: “Those in high-status occupations, working in male-dominated environments, have an increased risk of alcohol use disorders.” In fact, the one protective factor for women is what Keyes calls “low-status occupations.” She puts on her coat, getting ready to head home for the evening. “As gender role traditionality decreased, the gender gap in substance abuse decreased as well. And the trajectory for female alcohol abuse now outpaces that of men.” In fact, women with a university degree are almost twice as likely to drink daily as those without. “I ask myself every day if I’m an alcoholic,” says one rising corporate star, a graduate of Queen’s University, who wishes to go unnamed. “I’m thirty-two, and I drink every night. All my friends drink every night. We wouldn’t dream of skipping a day. We haven’t had our kids yet, and we all drink the same way we did in university.” Says Katherine Brown, director of policy at Britain’s Institute of Alcohol Studies: “Young professional women drink a lot more than women in manual and routine jobs—what you call blue collar. Is it marketing, keeping up with the machismo, children?” Brown believes that a crucial driver is the norms of the university years. “It’s an alcohol-soaked environment,” she says. “At the university I went to—Exeter—Carlsberg was a sponsor of events held on campus. The focus was on getting really, really drunk and the most horrendous things used to happen. It was an alcogenic environment—sporting events, pub crawls, often carrying a bucket around for those being sick. All social events revolved around drinking, and acting the fool was celebrated. Now, it’s the ‘done’ thing for a city woman to come home after a stressful day and open a bottle of wine. Is it the Sex and the City generation? Who knows. Nobody questions it.” Walk into most social gatherings and the first thing you’re asked is “Red or white?” In fact, we live in a culture where knowing your wines is a mark of sophistication. And thanks to media reports of the past several years, we have happily absorbed the news that drinking has its health benefits. For many, red wine ranks up there with vitamin D, omega-3s, and dark chocolate. If one glass is good for you, a double dose can’t do much harm, can it? Actually, a double dose has its drawbacks. The largest health benefit comes from one drink every two days. Which raises a simple question: why are we aware of the dangers related to trans fats and tanning beds, and blissfully unaware of the more serious side effects associated with our favorite drug? It’s a headscratcher, to say the least. Last year, a study in the respected journal Addiction challenged the broadly accepted assumption that a daily glass of red wine offers protection against heart disease. Says J?rgen Rehm, director of social and epidemiological research at Toronto’s Centre for Addiction and Mental Health and coauthor of the paper: “While a cardioprotective association between alcohol use and ischemic heart disease exists, it cannot be assumed for all drinkers, even at low levels of average intake. And, the protective association varies by gender—with higher risk for morbidity and mortality in women.” Alcohol is a carcinogen, and the risks of drinking far outweigh the protective factors. For some time there has been a clear causal link between alcohol and a wide variety of cancers, including two of the most frequently diagnosed: breast and colorectal. Rehm asks a simple question: “What would the breast cancer rate be without alcohol?” Women have many other physical vulnerabilities when it comes to drinking. “Politically, we are equal,” says Dr. Joseph Lee, medical director of the renowned Hazelden Center for Youth and Families in Plymouth, Minnesota. “But hormonally, metabolically, men and women are different—and this has implications for tolerance and physical impacts over the long run.” Women’s vulnerabilities start with the simple fact that, on average, they have more body fat than men. Since body fat contains little water, there is less to dilute the alcohol consumed. In addition, women have a lower level of a key metabolizing enzyme, alcohol dehydrogenase, which helps the body break down and eliminate alcohol. As a result, a larger proportion of what women drink enters the bloodstream. Furthermore, fluctuating hormone levels mean that the intoxicating effects of alcohol set in faster when estrogen levels are high. The list goes on. Women’s chemistry means they become dependent on alcohol much faster than men. Other consequences—including cognitive deficits and liver disease—all occur earlier in women, with significantly shorter exposure to alcohol. Women who consume four or more alcoholic beverages a day quadruple their risk of dying from heart disease. Heavy drinkers of both genders run the risk of a fatal hemorrhagic stroke, but the odds are five times higher for women. Gender is a strong predictor of alcohol use. One groundbreaking project is GENACIS—Gender, Alcohol and Culture: An International Study. With forty-one participating countries, this project offers an extraordinary opportunity to improve our understanding of how gender and culture combine to affect how women and men drink. Sharon Wilsnack, who oversees the GENACIS project, is also the lead author of the world’s longest-running study of women and drinking, the National Study of Life and Health Experiences of Women. Between 1981 and 2001, she and her team interviewed the same women every five years. One of their findings: the strongest predictor of late-onset drinking is childhood sexual abuse. Says Wilsnack, “It has an increasingly adverse pattern over the course of women’s lives.” Depending on a woman’s stage in life, there are specific considerations of which to be aware. If you’re female and adolescent, this is your brain on alcohol: consume four drinks and you will leave yourself vulnerable to compromising your spatial working memory. Binge drinking in adolescence can interrupt normal brain cell growth, particularly in the frontal brain regions critical to logical thinking and reasoning. In short, it damages cognitive abilities—especially in female teens. Says researcher Lindsay Squeglia, lead author of a study in Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research: “Throughout adolescence, the brain is becoming more efficient, pruning. In female drinkers, we found that the pre-frontal cortex was not thinning properly. This affects executive functioning.” “Are the girls trying to keep up with the boys?” asks Edith Sullivan, a researcher at the Stanford University School of Medicine. “Quantity and frequency can be a killer for novice drinkers. Adding alcohol to the mix of the developing brain will likely complicate the normal developmental trajectory. Long after a young person recovers from a hangover, risk to cognitive and brain functions endures.” Sullivan, who has done a lot of work with the brain structure of alcoholics, is certain that what is known as “telescoping” is real: “As they develop alcoholism, women seem to develop dependence sooner than men. Drink for drink, it is worse for females.” “It is the issue affecting girls’ health—and it’s going sideways, especially for those thirteen to fifteen.” This is the voice of Nancy Poole, director of research and knowledge translation at the British Columbia Centre of Excellence for Women’s Health. “And the saddest thing,” says Poole, “is alcohol is being marketed as girls’ liberation.” Perhaps we’re told too many fairy tales when we’re children. From the time we’re very young, we’re drip-fed popular culture’s notions of what will bring us happiness: being thin, being beautiful, being sexy—all these, we are told, will lead to love and success and acceptance. We already know that unrealistic images of slimness have damaged a generation. Now the alcohol industry is conspiring to drip-feed us the notion that cocktails will deliver us happy endings, rescuing us from the great modern scourges of loneliness, exhaustion, and boredom. We need a wake-up call. For now, the first job must be jump-starting a dialogue, a fact-sharing mission. Three years ago, when I won a journalism fellowship to investigate the issue of women and alcohol, I was invited to describe my project at a media night at the University of Toronto. “I can only presume that Ann will be taking a look at First Nations women,” said the worldly man introducing me. His intentions were good, but his comment was off the mark. Last June, I had what looked to be a golden opportunity to pose some questions to Gloria Steinem. The event: a fortieth birthday party for Ms. magazine. I waited in line for my chance, but my audience was short. “Alcohol?” Steinem looked dismissive. “Alcohol is not a women’s issue.” Perhaps not in the past—but times have changed. Whether it’s a matter of escape, empowerment, or entitlement, alcohol has become a women’s issue. When it comes to risk, environment and policy are key drivers of our behavior. For now, our only choice is to take a hard look at both, and face the facts. The alcohol business, like the tobacco business beforehand, has taken aim at the female market, and scored. Risky drinking has become normalized, and not all young women will mature out of it. In fact, many—like myself—may mature into it. Here are the questions we need to be asking. Has alcohol become the modern woman’s steroid, enabling her to do the heavy lifting necessary in an endlessly complex world? Is it the escape valve women need, in the midst of a major social revolution still unfolding? How much of this is marketing, and how much is the need to numb? As a culture, we’re living in major denial. It’s time for an adult conversation. It’s time for the dialogue to begin. 4. (#ulink_f356e8a6-60d4-505f-803e-9873ff6db220) The Future Is Pink (#ulink_f356e8a6-60d4-505f-803e-9873ff6db220) THE ALCOHOL INDUSTRY TAKES AIM AT THE FEMALE CONSUMER Ingredients in Bitch Fuel: vodka, gin, rum, peach schnapps, and lemon-lime soda. —SERVED AT RULLOFF’S, ITHACA, NEW YORK For me, drinking was always deeply sensual. From the very beginning, I loved it all. The sound of a cork sliding from the neck of a bottle, the glug-glug-glug of the first glass being poured, the tingle on the tongue, and the feeling of my shoulders relaxing as the universe seemed to say: unwind. I loved the peaty earthiness of Irish whiskey under moonlight, the sharp nip of Pinot Grigio at day’s end. I have a particularly fond memory of sipping scotch in the Oak Bar of the Plaza hotel in New York on a snowy evening with Jake. Another: drinking a flute of champagne in the lobby bar of the One Aldwych hotel in London. More than once I sat in a Boston Whaler at sunset, dressed in lumberjack plaid, toasting the beauty of a day’s end, supremely happy as the world evolved as it should. It is no coincidence that my favorite drinking memoir is the late Caroline Knapp’s Drinking: A Love Story—a book I read and reread as my own drinking escalated. Wrote Knapp: “For a long time, when it’s working, the drink feels like a path to a kind of self-enlightenment, something that turns us into the person we wish to be, or the person we think we are. In some ways the dynamic is this simple: alcohol makes everything better until it makes everything worse.” For more than two decades, I more or less forgot that this substance—let’s name it by its clinical name, ethanol—had caused me endless sorrow and heartache in my younger years. For years, I rarely abused the privilege of drinking—and yes, I saw it as a privilege. And when my drinking caught up with me, I was as surprised and sorry as anybody could possibly be. I had promised myself I would never be outfoxed by drink. I loved Knapp’s book for many reasons, but one of the most practical was the little questionnaire halfway through the book, the twenty-six questions put together by the National Council on Alcoholism and Drug Dependence to help you decide whether you’re in trouble. Knapp published her own answers, which I always thought was exceptionally generous—I felt such solidarity with her when I saw her answering “yes” to such tough questions as “Have you often failed to keep the promises you have made to yourself about controlling or cutting down on your drinking?” and “Have you tried switching brands or following different plans for controlling your drinking?” Most of all, I liked that she included the following helpful tip: if you answer yes to questions one through eight, you are in the early stages of alcoholism, which typically lasts ten to fifteen years; if you answer yes to nine through twenty-one, you are in the middle stages of alcoholism, which typically lasts two to five years. I have a dog-eared, annotated copy of her book, with my own answers marked in the margins—the early stages in 2002, and the middle stages up until my sobriety date in 2008. I am eternally grateful that I didn’t make it to the third and final stage, where the questions run this way: “Sometimes after periods of drinking, do you see or hear things that aren’t there?” and “Do you sometimes stay drunk for several days at a time?” I often turned to the questionnaire in Montreal, and near the end of my stay, to the underlined portion of page 33 in my copy of the “Big Book” of Alcoholics Anonymous: “To be gravely affected, one does not necessarily have to drink for a long time nor take the quantities some of us have. This is particularly true of women. Potential female alcoholics often turn into the real thing and are gone beyond recall in a few years.” New sobriety is a fingernail-on-the-blackboard experience: many things can set you off. Restaurants walled in wine, movies with up-close-and-personal drinking shots, driving by your favorite liquor store. Billboards. Magazine ads. Just about anything. Alcohol jumps out of cupboards, into your line of vision: it has no end of tricks. You reach for ice in a friend’s freezer, and there it is: a Tanqueray bottle, chilling for cocktails, taunting you. In my case, one thing bothered me more than most. It was summer. The summer of 2008, to be exact. I was fresh out of rehab. Driving the Boston Whaler across the water, loaded with our groceries and suitcases, Jake said one prophetic sentence: “I feel like we’ve been studying all winter for final exams, and they’ve finally arrived.” He was right: summer tested me in ways I had never imagined, sitting for thirty days in treatment. Days were easy—but for me, days had always been easy. It was the waning of the light, when the magic hour approached: this was when I wanted a drink. Summer meant parties; nights with friends and family; celebrations at sunset. How was I going to handle all this? Rehab had prepared me. I was to take a scorched-earth approach to our environment: remove all alcohol, hide all drinking paraphernalia—corkscrews, pretty glasses, ice buckets. I was to make sure my environment was alcohol-free. We asked Jake’s daughter to keep any wine discreet, but we stopped short of all else. It seemed extreme. I was wrong. Less than a week into our holiday, a phone call came late in the afternoon. A friend of my son had died tragically: an overturned canoe, a drowning, a search for the body. Jake’s brother had invited us to dinner, and we were on our way there when the news came. I promised to call as soon as we arrived. I placed the call in a small den, with a fridge. My son was distraught. I was distraught, too: he was thousands of miles away, and I felt helpless. Without thinking, I reached in the fridge for a drink, and stumbled on something new—or new to me: Mike’s Hard Lemonade. Perfect: a ready-made cocktail. How convenient: vodka premixed with lemonade. I’d like to say I paused, but I didn’t. I downed it quickly, without remorse, like a thief. It brought instant relief. I placed the can in the wastebasket and joined the others for dinner. I didn’t say a word to Jake. I was too scared. I snuck the occasional drink that summer: maybe twelve in total, from July to Labor Day, two on my birthday while I saut?ed onions. It took the anxiety of new sobriety down a notch, and added a new worry. I knew it didn’t matter that the volume was small: I had blown my sobriety. I had to go back to zero, come fall. And by fall, I did. I gave up drinking, and stuck with it. I started going to recovery meetings regularly, and I began a new hobby: I started clipping, in earnest, the news stories that were starting to appear on women and drinking. I bought a bright yellow box and tossed in anything that caught my eye. There was not much to clip, but three stories drew my attention. First, New York magazine ran an excellent feature called “Gender Bender,” in December 2008. The deck read: “More women are drinking, and the women who drink are drinking more, in some cases matching their male peers. This is the kind of equality nobody was fighting for.” I was one month sober. For the first time I began to think: I am not alone. Then, in July 2009, Diane Schuler made headlines when she drove her minivan the wrong way on the Taconic Parkway, northwest of New York City. Schuler’s vehicle collided with an oncoming SUV and eight people were killed, including Schuler’s five-year-old daughter and three nieces, all under ten. A successful account executive and married mother of two, Schuler died with undigested alcohol in her stomach; her blood alcohol was more than twice the legal limit. Police found a jumbo bottle of Absolut vodka in the crushed metal wreck of her vehicle. Schuler’s story was horrific. I clipped it, but it wasn’t the one that hit home the hardest: I never drove when I was drinking. No, the story that got under my rib cage was one that ran less than a month later, in the Sunday Styles section of the New York Times,under the headline “A Heroine of Cocktail Moms Sobers Up.” Stefanie Wilder-Taylor, author of Naptime Is the New Happy Hour and Sippy Cups Are Not for Chardonnay, had quit drinking. The California mother of three—best known for her popular online column “Make Mine a Double: Tales of Twins and Tequila”—had retired her corkscrew. Wilder-Taylor had announced her news on her popular mommy blog, Babyonbored, with this simple statement: “I drink too much. It became a nightly compulsion and I’m outing myself to you … I quit on Friday.” What got me was this line: “Whenever her husband questioned her nightly routine, she would retort, ‘I’m fine.’” My words exactly. Whenever I had too much to drink, this was my mantra: “I’m fine.” Teetering across pink granite in lake country, late at night: “I’m fine.” Tossing off my high heels, after a gala awards night: “I’m fine.” It was easy to say without slurring, and it was defiant. It never changed. Except I wasn’t fine. Not even close. And it was beginning to look like I was not alone. As Wilder-Taylor said, when I finally interviewed her: “Alcohol is glamorized in our society, and it’s everywhere. You’d be surprised how many people are drinking during the day. And then we’re shocked when some mother crashes her car with her kids in it?” If my drinking makes me a statistic in a growing trend, it also makes me unremarkable. I drank, for the most part, what others drank. In fact, I have no trouble charting the decades between university and 2008, using not my jobs as markers, but the wines we consumed. In the beginning, there were those thin Italian Chiantis—cheap, astringent, and gravelly (think unreliable candleholders in walk-up apartments); plus the ubiquitous Germans (think Blue Nun). These were the wines of our university years, when we ate cheese fondue without guilt. Of course, there was a brief stint when I—freshly graduated from university—perched for a few months in a flat in Notting Hill with the man who would become my husband. He was at film school; I was trying to become a writer. Our landlord, who played polo on Sundays with Prince Charles, had swish parties to which we were invited. There were fancy film parties, too. I remember these days with a phrase: “Mink coat, no underwear.” Champagne cocktails with Helen Mirren on a Saturday night, followed by dates at Hamburger Heaven, drinking plonk. Upstairs, Veuve Clicquot; downstairs, Szekszardi. Back home in Canada, newly employed as interns, we moved to Burgundies: easy-to-parse reds that matured quickly, just like we did. What came next? The 1980s: travel in Europe with my filmmaker husband: fruity ros?s at lunch at the Cannes Film Festival; Saint-?milion at dinner; learning about port and the cheese tray. On my return, the Californians had arrived: Cabernet Sauvignon, Pinot Noir. The 1990s opened with my separation and a new love affair, toasted with Australian reds, full of gusto, and golden whites. A new century brought new affluence for so many of us, and endless choice. And then? Back to the Italians: my nightly glasses of Pinot Grigio. Full circle, or almost. Where I ended was very different from where I began. By the time this decade opened, I had stopped drinking—but I hadn’t stopped watching what was going on. In fact, my bright yellow box was filling up, not just with news stories but with glossy inserts as well. What came next were the girly names: French Rabbit, Girls’ Night Out, Stepping up to the Plate (label sporting a stiletto heel), and yes, MommyJuice. Wines in pretty little purse-size Tetra Paks, in picnic-perfect six-packs, ready to go. I have at my desk three different promotional inserts from 2011. Item number one features a come-hither blonde in a sexy gold dress, balancing a martini between polished red nails, painted just a shade darker than the swizzle stick poking through the o in “Classic Cocktails” above her head. Call her Miss February. She’s a Betty Draper lookalike posed on the front of a shiny celebration of the sixties. “You’re swingin’, baby!” it reads. “Do it up right like they did when after-work martinis were de rigueur …” For several weeks, Ms. February was the hottest girl in town, her image stuffed into every newspaper, towering tall from storefronts. By March she was toast, supplanted by a lanky brunette in a fuchsia minidress. By April? The cover girl was no girl at all. Instead? An egg: peach-toned, hand-painted, inscribed with the name “Lily.” Martha Stewart picked up where Mad Men left off, and a bottle of Girls’ Night Out had replaced the martini. When did the alcohol market become so pink, so female-focused, so squishy and sweet? I wondered. When did booze bags turn pastel? When did my gender become such a focus of the alcohol industry? In 2011, I clipped a story from the New York Times: Clos LaChance, makers of a wine called MommyJuice, tried to get a California court to declare that they were not infringing on the trademark of a rival wine called “Mommy’s Time Out.” Clos LaChance argued that the word mommy was generic, one that no company could monopolize. Eventually, the two companies settled out of court, agreeing that both could use the “mommy” moniker. As you might expect, Mommy’s Time Out features a chair facing the corner, with a wineglass and a bottle on a table nearby. The MommyJuice label features a supple woman juggling a computer, a teddy bear, a saucepan, and a house. “Moms everywhere deserve a break,” coos the back label. “So tuck your kids into bed and have a glass of MommyJuice—because you deserve it.” I called Cheryl Murphy Durzy, so-called Mom in Charge and founder of the label, at her home in San Martin, California. Why MommyJuice? “My kids call my wine ‘Mommy’s juice.’ Lots of kids I know do this. Moms love talking about why they need MommyJuice, things like their kids wetting the bed. ‘Can’t wait for MommyJuice!’” What are her thoughts about playdates with wine, about the fact that risky drinking is on the rise for women? Says Murphy Durzy: “For years, men have been relaxing at the end of the day. Does anyone ever say anything about a dad who has a beer at the ball game? No. I think it’s sexist.” In Canada, the makers of Girls’ Night Out wines—featuring what they call “aspirational” cocktail dresses on their labels—went to the trouble of registering their hot title in the United States, Australia, and New Zealand. Doug Beatty, vice president of marketing for Colio Estate Wines and originator of the Girls’ Night Out name, says: “Eighty-five percent of the purchase decisions in the twelve- to fifteen-dollar range are ‘female-driven.’” For that reason, he was “just shocked” when he learned that the name “Girls’ Night Out” was up for grabs. Having expanded into wine-flavored beverages—Strawberry Samba and Tropical Tango being two—he says the future of his successful label looks “terrifyingly fun.” Says Beatty, “Those of the female gender are those who have done all the hard work.” And what about Skinnygirl Cocktail line products, reported to be the fastest-growing spirit brand of 2012? Founded in 2009 by reality star Bethenny Frankel (Real Housewives of New York), the Skinnygirl line was the fastest-growing spirits line in the United States two years ago. Last year, Skinnygirl Cocktails—“the brand that has re-energized the way women cocktail and define themselves”—launched an advertising campaign called “Drink Like a Lady,” including its first-ever national television commercial: “The lady knows how to cocktail! Skinnygirl now has all the wine, vodka, and ready-to-serve cocktails you need—without the calories you don’t! Drink like a lady!” The campaign coincided with the brand’s expanded product offerings, including Skinnygirl Vodka with Natural Flavors (White Cranberry Cosmo being an example) and Skinnygirl The Wine Collection. Imbibing, without the extra calories: this is key. Last year, even the musician Fergie of the Black Eyed Peas got into the act, launching Voli, a new low-calorie vodka. It comes in six flavors, including “Original Lyte,” raspberry cocoa, and pear vanilla. She was reported to have said, “I think a lot of people with healthy lifestyles like me, who love to work out, work hard, socialize, and have a drink at the end of the day, have been craving something like this,” adding: “There are no extra sugars.” In other words, girlie spirits, with up to 40 percent fewer calories than leading brands. Meanwhile, beer companies have started pushing their product as diet-friendly: lime-infused beverages, low-carb alternatives, lower-calorie options. What’s surprising about all this? We are used to a drinking culture pitched at men—a great example being German liquor company G-Spirits, which promises that every single drop of its alcoholic beverages has been poured on the naked breasts of a female model. Its whiskey, for instance, has dampened the breasts of Alexa Varga, Hungary’s 2012 Playboy Playmate of the Year. All bottles come with nude photos of the model involved in the process. This example is bizarre, yet somehow predictable. So too is an ad for Belvedere Vodka, in which a beautiful model uses the reflection from a guy’s shiny belt buckle as a mirror in which to apply her lipstick: her mouth is close to his crotch. But Skinnygirl Vodka? MommyJuice? When did the female drinker become the focus of the spirits market? I flew to Baltimore to find out. I knew that David Jernigan, the savvy, boyish-looking director of CAMY, would be willing to ballpark a date. Based in his spacious office at Johns Hopkins University, Jernigan has spent his career watching the industry. When, I want to know, did the world begin to change? Apparently, in the late 1960s: Philip Morris, the tobacco giant, bought Miller Beer, and brought the techniques of market segmentation and lifestyle advertising to the marketing of Miller. They took a relatively regional beer and turned it into the number two brand in the United States—and they did this by using the tobacco marketing playbook. “In response,” says Jernigan, “August Busch III, who was head of Anheuser-Busch, took the thick book of sporting events in the U.S. and threw it at his marketing people, saying, ‘Buy this!’ And they did, everything from tiddlywinks to baseball.” At one point, they were sponsoring twenty-three out of twenty-four major-league baseball teams. It was a sea change: they bought into all the lifestyle marketing that had been pioneered by tobacco. Says Jernigan, “The wine and spirits folks were left in the dust.” Beer ruled North America in the 1980s and early ’90s. Beer was fun, beer was sport. The spirits industry was seen as stodgy and boring. Suddenly, says Jernigan, it decided to play catch-up: it did market segmentation, looked at who was underperforming, and of course, it saw women. “For the spirits industry, this was a global opportunity. This was conscious: they understood they had to shoot younger and they had to shoot harder.” Thus was born the alcopop. Also known as the cooler, “chick beer,” or “starter drinks”—sweet, brightly colored vodka- or rum-flavored concoctions in ready-to-drink format. Jernigan calls them “the anti-beer,” “drinks of initiation”—and my favorite: “cocktails with training wheels.” “They’re the transitional drinks,” he says, “particularly for young women, pulling them away from beer and towards distilled spirits. Getting brand loyalty to the spirits brand names in adolescence, so that you get that annuity for a lifetime. An obvious product for reaching this wonderful and not yet sufficiently tapped market of young women.” According to 2010 data, 68 percent of eighth-grade drinkers reported having had an alcopop in the past month, 67 percent of tenth-grade drinkers, and 58 percent of twelfth-grade drinkers. But in the 19–28 category, fewer than half had had an alcopop in the past month. Broken down by gender, the data showed alcopops were more popular with girls and women in every age group. The height of the craze for alcopops was 2004. By then they had done what the industry needed them to do—reach out to females, and establish a bridge to the parent brands like Smirnoff vodka and Bacardi rum. And of course, none of the marketing shows the consequences of drinking. Let’s take a second and look at the Smirnoff brand. In 1997, two major alcohol firms merged to form Diageo, the largest distilled spirits producer in the world—both then and now. This British-based multinational developed a sophisticated strategy to reenergize Smirnoff vodka: in 1999 it launched Smirnoff Ice, which became the number one beverage in the alcopop category. With a hefty marketing push, Smirnoff vodka sales grew 61 percent between 2000 and 2008—a sharp contrast to the 1990s, when this brand saw a dip in sales. “Smirnoff is the girls’ vodka,” says Kate Simmie. At twenty-nine, she has long matured out of her Smirnoff phase: her new love is Blueberi Stolichnaya. But the McGill grad, now a Toronto marketing professional, has a firm handle on her own limits. “I’m five foot two,” she says with a grin. While she has many friends who do shots, she thinks twice before joining them, or having a martini. “I can’t imagine dating without drinking, but I tend to stick to wine,” she says. “I can’t handle shots.” Shots make a difference. Compared with distilled spirits, it takes a lot more beer or wine to produce alcohol poisoning or impairment, to compromise judgment around risky sex, which is why distilled spirits, in most cultures, are treated differently. And there’s an additional health issue for women. Not only are young women experimenting with the strongest beverage, but they’re more vulnerable because of the way alcohol metabolizes in female bodies. “If you’re female and you’re drinking spirits, and the guy’s drinking beer, you’re at a complete disadvantage,” says Jernigan. “He’s drinking a weaker beverage, he’s metabolizing it more efficiently, and you’re trying to keep up. And you’ve got Carrie Bradshaw saying that this is the image of the powerful woman—a woman with a cocktail in her hand virtually every moment that you see her, except when she’s trying on shoes!” Can we really blame Carrie Bradshaw for the martini-shots-vodka culture? Can it all be laid at her Jimmy Choos? “Let’s put it this way,” says Jernigan. “We cannot discount Carrie Bradshaw. But if Carrie Bradshaw hadn’t been accompanied by a push by the spirits industry, she would have been a pebble in the pond. As it was, she was a boulder. Women had never been targeted before in the way they were targeted: after alcopops came distilled spirits line extensions—flavored vodkas, absolutely every fruit you could imagine.” In recent years, several countries, including Germany, France, Switzerland, and Australia, have imposed special taxes on alcopops, addressing widespread concerns about their popularity as a drink of initiation. Germany nearly doubled the tax; Australia boosted it by 70 percent. Many countries found substantial reductions in the consumption of these beverages. And many other countries haven’t done a thing. “In the past twenty-five years, there has been tremendous pressure on females to keep up with the guys,” says Jernigan. “Now the industry’s right there to help them. They’ve got their very own beverages, tailored to women. They’ve got their own individualized, feminized drinking culture. I’m not sure that this was what Gloria Steinem had in mind.” In the past decade, there has been a huge amount of effort to stop underage drinking in the United States. Says Jernigan: “It’s made some impact with the boys. We are not getting anywhere with the girls.” The more marketing kids see, the more likely they are to initiate drinking at an early age. This is 360-degree marketing, embedded in Facebook, on Twitter, on YouTube, on television, and in the movies. Last year, the Australian Medical Association censured Facebook for allowing alcohol companies to target children: “Social networking sites … are honing a more aggressive and insidious form of marketing that tracks online and profiles, and tailors specific marketing accordingly.” More than three-quarters of twelve- to seventeen-year-olds in the United States own cell phones; and of Facebook’s one billion users, 600 million visit the social media site primarily through mobile devices. “This is the ultimate extension of lifestyle advertising,” says Jernigan. “The brand is now a human being. It’s interacting with you in real time. It’s talking to you on Facebook. These are worlds that are being created by the brand in conjunction with, in cooperation and collaboration with, their user base. It is a marvelous innovation in marketing, and it’s a disaster for us.” Brands mounting their ads on YouTube, launching their own channels: this is known as pull marketing. The consumer is seeking out the ad, rather than tuning out a commercial. They’re focused. The granddaddy of this genre, Tea Partay by Smirnoff—a two-and-a-half-minute ad—has had more than six million YouTube viewers. “This is all about engagement,” says Jernigan. “It’s the future of marketing, and it’s virtually unregulated.” There’s a strong public health interest in delaying the onset of drinking: the brain is still in its plasticity state during adolescence. Every day in the United States, 4,750 kids under the age of sixteen start their drinking careers. As Jernigan says, “This is a human capital development issue.” When it comes to deconstructing advertising and the role it plays in our lives, few do a better job than Jernigan and Jean Kilbourne, the woman behind the film Killing Us Softly: Advertising’s Image of Women. I became intrigued with Kilbourne, reading her brilliant book Can’t Buy My Love: How Advertising Changes the Way We Think and Feel. In the opening pages, she tells the story of her own early experimenting with alcohol, which taught her that “alcohol could erase pain. From then on, for almost 20 years, my most important relationship was with alcohol.” She saw a doctor about her drinking. His response: she was too young, too well educated, and too good-looking to be an alcoholic. Eventually, Kilbourne says drinking ended up “burying me alive”: “I used to joke that Jack Daniel’s was my most constant lover.” She writes of her perfect verbal score on the SAT, dating Ringo Starr, being in love with Polish writer Jerzy Kosinski, partying at Roman Polanski’s apartment—and confronting her eventual addiction in 1976. Like me, she was in the middle stages of the disease. Astutely, Kilbourne warns us: “Advertising encourages us not only to objectify each other but also to feel that our most significant relationships are with the products that we buy. It turns lovers into things and things into lovers.” Two years ago, I wanted to meet Kilbourne, having had a spirited and bracing conversation with her on the phone. I was intrigued. Learning that she was flying to Toronto to give a speech in a nearby city, I offered to pick her up and ferry her to her destination. It was a smart idea. Kilbourne is incisive, savvy, and thoughtful. We had a long drive—good for getting to know someone, poor for taking notes: my hands were on the wheel. The next time I spoke to her, Kilbourne was laid up at home outside of Boston, having broken her leg skydiving. I wanted to know: why are we so oblivious to the effect advertising has on us? “Ads are so trivial and silly that people feel above them,” says Kilbourne. “And for that reason, they don’t pay conscious attention. The advertisers love it: our radar is not on. We’re not on guard; it gets into our subconscious and affects us very deeply.” Kilbourne quotes the chairman of an ad agency saying, “If you want to get into people’s wallets, first you have to get into their lives.” And there’s no doubt: the spirits industry has infiltrated the female world. Which makes me want to say: Is alcohol the new tobacco? Конец ознакомительного фрагмента. Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес». Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию (https://www.litres.ru/ann-johnston-dowsett/drink-the-deadly-relationship-between-women-and-alcoh/?lfrom=688855901) на ЛитРес. Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.