How Sober Should a Writer Be?

Summary

How Sober Should a Writer Be? F. Scott Fitzgerald and the ambivalence of American drinking culture the simplest way to begin writing about the drinking life, as opposed to the more common activity, drinking about the writing life, would be to offer up anecdotes that amuse (public streaking, embarrassing texting, chatting up a lamppost) or ones that sober (wretched confessions, trashed hotel rooms, a morning at the precinct). While I have left the house long enough to experience such trials, I’m at a loss to apply narrative significance to them. I have a scant supply of stories that center on drunkenness. Ever since my seventeenth birthday, when I attempted to do seventeen shots (one per minute, per year), making it to six before vomiting in an alleyway, I have been a moderate drinker. I’m using this description for lack of a better one: the current edition of the Dietary Guidelines for Americans defines moderate drinking, for women, as consuming “one drink or less in a day.” I don’t know what the government makes of someone who doesn’t drink for five days, then has two martinis and an order of french fries. Drinking in America has been on the decline. Myriad articles report this, some trendy, some clinical. My personal favorite, for timing, ran in the January 3, 2025, issue of The New York Times under the headline Surgeon General Calls for Cancer Warnings on Alcohol. As if someone in the surgeon general’s press office decided: Eh, let them have one last New Year’s. According to the latest Gallup poll, alcohol consumption is at a ninety-year low. And according to an informal poll of every middle-aged woman I know, what we mostly talk about when we talk about drinking is the hangover. The hangover that springs into action after two drinks, not four, denying us our youthful mettle. The hangover that pounces on our major organs in the wee hours and starts to whimper. The hangover that, because our blood alcohol concentrations increase as we age, is actually trying to ki...