separation policy at the u.s./mexico border. most of these authors is have appeared on booktv, and you can watch them online at booktv.org. .. especially like to thank erica and claire. and followed by audience q and a. and using the apps question but none crowd cast so we can get to as many as possible. for closed captioning youtube is your best bet, click the cc

buxton in the right corner. we are discussing race and journalism, and a blueprint for political actions for the next generation of people of color and live stream reporting of life on the margins. visit townhall's media library for what is pretty recent. thank you for the support of our concerts by the realnetworks foundation, ko w and northwest, most of you know townhall is a member of a support organization and i want to thank all members. people hit hard by the

pandemic, the event is free but we hope you will consider making a donation by clicking a button at the bottom or use the url on the other platforms. a final point on the economy. if we were all gathered together many of you would visit the book signing table and link on this wide stream page to purchase or preorder that copy of erica barnett's book directly with traders pick partners at la but companies, local otter, local bookshop, big launch book of the book night. some of the things we love the about the city pre-epidemic might get to the other side. erica barnett is an award-winning reporter beginning her career at the texas magazine, she went to work as a reporter and news editor for the seattle weekly and the stranger. she has written for a variety of local and national publications including having to impose, seattle magazine and

grit and cofounding editor, must make you cringe. and drug policy, virtually every other matter you can think of at a regular guest on the friday news roundup. claire dederer wrote a forthcoming nonfiction book investigating relationship to good art made by terrible people. the paris review and other publications and an educator in new york and washington and other universities across the country. erica barnett's first book is "quitter: a memoir of drinking, relapse, and recovery" and is the subject of tonight's talk. please join me in welcoming claire dederer and erica barnett. >> hello! so excited to be here with you.

i will jump in and say congratulations, the book is an impressive achievement that reads like a house on fire and i am a longtime fan of your work and sober person, so glad this book exists. i'm honored to be here as part of your launch. >> hello, everyone, josh from townhall, we are running into some tech issues, we will try to get the show back on track as soon as we can. are you still there? >> i just arrived. >> erica barnett? >> i think i am here. go ahead.

>> all right. i am going to kick it over to erica barnett. >> it is such an honor you agreed to do this and you will be my interlocutor tonight. i'm a big fan of yours. this is a reading from my first book "quitter: a memoir of drinking, relapse, and recovery". let me tell you what it is like to be sober, really sober for the first time in years. it feels like seeing color for the first time. feels like you've been looking at the world through someone else's glasses and suddenly you

can make out every individual. feels like you have a secret superpower nobody can see. the clarity of mind that allows you to reach insights out of the most phenomenal moments. your body feel stronger than it has ever been, desire returns. at the same time everything has an intensity that scares you a little. when you file feeling, how am i ever going to pay back my debts you just have to sit with it, figure it out, wait for it to pass. with every experience as the white now noise of alcohol for a decade or more experiencing the world full blast can be overwhelming. who do i need to apologize to first? how will i make time for 9 part hours of outpatient treatment every week? do i need to go to a meeting every single day? why is my boss looking at me like that? does he think i have been drinking. it has been less than a month since i graduated from residence 12, sober, excited to get back to work. it felt like a wake-up call. an important cause of the life that had been hurtling forward. when iran to the gauntlet of upraised arms i felt the way born-again christians feel when they emerge from baptismal waters, not just in my life was

new but it was finally mine. almost everyone had high hopes, mom, who was so worried when she showed up two weeks into my stay told me "after words" i'm proud of you. i know you can do this with my coworkers, melissa and emily both also in recovery initiated me into those secret rituals of driving across town to obtain a new meeting once a weekend for almost almost as good as being invited to a secret after party. friends asked me out for saltwater and coffee telling me i was brave. when we talk about some bridal recovery of the words are shorthand for not drinking or using drugs but the really overwhelming part is not saying no to drinks or learning to avoid people, places and situations that induce temptation. is figuring out how to live in unfiltered life. hard enough when things are going pretty much okay. what you really mean is stay with moderately annoying. it can be impossible when there is wreckage in every direction.

to recap, over the past few years of drinking i had broken my mom's, driven away my best friend, alienated all my other friends with erratic behavior, nearly lost my job and accumulated tens of thousands of dollars in medical debt through emergency room visits which i was ashamed to show my face at work, overwhelmed by all the amends i needed to make right away. too rot have a heartfelt conversation with my parents, and my commitment to sobriety or would be watching over my shoulder every minute ready to pounce on any sign, i had wasted so much time. i had to 6 everything right away but i had no idea how to start so i froze. i was true to my comfort zone. i worked, went to the gym, lifted weights and worked the phones and before long i was too exhausted to go to outpatient therapy 3 nights a week.

doing the exhausted to do anything but go to work, gym and home in bed. a meetings which i attended sporadically for the past 7 years bummed me out. everyone seemed so in love all the time and i found a 3-hour outpatient session i agreed to as part of my post rehab treatment repetitive and depressing. loses gathered on couches in a dream downtown office building watching videos about relapse prevention and pitching about how much sobriety sucks with interlocking devices. not more than a month went by before i fell back into drinking, the way you fall into bed with the next lever because you don't have anything better going on. i can't pinpoint an exact moment when i said screw it, this is too hard. it was more like an indestructible slide from not drinking to drinking, from militancy to bottoms up. i was a nondrinker, then i was

a drinker again. i doubled back, dropped a bottle in the basket casually like a vegetarian popping ground beef on top of granola bars. i wish i had a better story to tell you, when it makes sense. maybe if a close relative had died i lost my job or been evicted my relapse would have been justified. some alcoholics refer to events like this has reservations. of my mom dies i will drink, if my husband leaves me but i don't have a good reason or any reason at all. normal people look at alcoholics truly relapse the way i didn't wonder what made you take the first drink? for me the answer was always nothing in particular. one minute you are in recovery, the next you tell yourself everybody else does it why can't i? i learned so much. maybe you don't think of it at all. the selective amnesia is a force of nature, no matter how many bad things happen or how

many times you say never again and mean it you forget all of it the instant we look up as we walked past the liquor store. relapse is never a conscious decision. more in active not deciding. as many addiction researchers have argued it is true people who suffer from addiction, when they first use substances have trouble developing higher order cognitive functions like impulse control and ability to weigh actions and consequences but i left rehab with the emotional maturity of a 13-year-old in the same sense of invulnerability. not that i didn't remember what happened last time i drank but i learned to repeat in rehab before you take the first drink take a face forward. i did just that there was a lot of voice and my head saying you know how to handle it. it will be different this time. i can't force you to hear them. astonishing how quickly the compulsion returns. the voice of someone at a meeting, alcoholism is cunning, powerful.

in the morning after that first bottle, i woke up with my hands shaking and raced to the bathroom. right away magical thinking set in. i grabbed another bottle to get rid of the tremors i thought and by 3:00 in the afternoon i was peering over the edge. in meetings old-timers say you don't have to drink even if you want to. our brains make relapse inevitable. even after physical withdrawal and the thinking over lisa brian eddie, our brain wouldn't stop with a drink. it would be better with a drink. dependence doesn't just make an alcoholic more capable of experiencing pleasure or maintaining delivery with a steady supply but also creates long-lasting pathways between

neurons that cause the brain to associate mental state with depression, loneliness, excitement, guilt or experiences with an overwhelming urge to drink. every time i relapse i go through withdrawal, it went stronger and stronger making it more likely i would relapse again. they don't talk about the high failure rate of residential treatment. failure in this case meaning people don't stay sober after they leave but that link is important and something people should be armed with before they decide to send tens of thousands of dollars on what may be little more than a 28 day drug out. here at the numbers, 4 and 6 alcoholics who enter residential treatment stick it out until the end and half relapse within the first year of leaving treatment. over four years 90% of people who go to treatment will start drinking again, although many of them will eventually quit and treatment centers focused almost entirely on relapse prevention while teaching patients almost nothing about what to do about relapse when it occurs. they teach you to halt when you feel like drinking and monarchs stand strongly, lonely or tired, conditions that can

precede relapse and they teach you diet, rest, exercise, acceptance, medication and schedule. they teach you this tools of rational emotive therapy which is itself a subset of cognitive behavioral therapy or cdc. having trouble keeping track of all these acronyms, imagine how hard it is for a buzz brain alcoholic in early sobriety. i created a card in my wallet, carried a card in my wallet for months to keep them all straight. and early sobriety your brain is still putting itself back together in a process called withdrawal syndrome that are known by its own acronym cause that can last more than two years. my first 2 weeks of sobriety when i can barely remember to brush my teeth twice a day, my thoughts were sponge fool of holes big enough to stick a finger through. never figured out how long would take to get through this phase because i went back to the revolving door.

>> thank you. that should give people some idea of the nature of this book, the quality of clarity, honesty, immediacy, and the way that erica weaves reporting and research in with her own personal story. it is quite astonishing and artfully done. she makes it seem easy and it is not so thank you. i wanted to start by asking if you could give the people in the audience, since the book is not out yet and will be out on july 7th, you can preorder from elliott bay. since the book is not out yet i wonder if you could give the audience just sort of an overview, macro, kind of a funny word, idea of your drinking story, what it looked like, what the timeframe was? >> sure. i started drinking pretty young.

like a lot of people who become heavy drinkers later in life do, but i didn't really drink much when i was in college. i was a good kid, didn't drink in early adulthood and the period i talk about in the book is a period of 10 or so years from early 30s to late 30s. i was in seattle, and described a lot of places i worked, when i work as a stranger, i didn't mention it in this particular excerpt because it was the first time i went to rehab but i got fired from my job at coca-cola and got sober shortly after that, that was 5 and a half years ago. we are talking about a decade of time. >> that is helpful to have that

out there about what happened. one of the things that is astonishing about this book and we talked about this a little bit before, so-called ugly drunk story. >> the warts are warrior. tough stories in here and in contrast with most recovery stories we see from women, women's memoirs of alcoholism tend to have the idea i'm high functioning, keeping it together but i'm a drunken i can only think of a couple exceptions to this rule, notable one being corinne fail. my questions are to start with why do you think that is? why are those the stories that get told and or published? >> can i jump on that one and then go to this? i think there is such a taboo

about admitting that you are a messy drunk or ugly drunk or problematic person or piece of crap and i thought of myself even when i was still drinking, maybe especially then is kind of a dirt bag drunk because there are some early discussions, the book cover being a glass of my reaction to that was i never drink a glass, i drink from the bottle. that is the kind of drinker i am and as a woman i think it is uncomfortable for people to think about women being that way although we can think of all kinds of examples of men being that way, the guy drinking out of a paper bag. all the stereotypes, even the ones that add to late like hunter s thompson who was somebody i worshiped, that is also a messy drinker and drug

user but i think women are supposed to be tidy and careful and we are supposed to keep our problems secret and small. my problem was not small and by the end is not secret either. >> one thing that we will talk more about, the dialogue around women in drinking is this idea going off what you said that we need to push against the stereotype of the wino with the brown paper bag because alcoholism can look at different ways, like a bottled wine you drain after putting kids to bed. it is important to tell those stories but not everyone's story and the fact that that is represented as the face of female alcoholism your book pushes against that, this is

where addiction can end up and it is scary and wrong in real. is that fair? >> yes and i think not just this is where it can end up but this is where it can end up for women too. there is various upper-middle-class white aesthetic to the new acceptance of a certain kind of woman drinker. this is not a book about drinking per se but the other one, cat rose a wonderful book about being an absolute mess. not in a hot fun way. i didn't read her book and think -- she is so much cooler than me. i relate to this and i haven't related to many addiction memoirs. they tell a story that takes an art and everything is okay and

my story is arc after arc after arc. >> just an aside popping into my head as i think about especially good or well-known books about drinking and women including people like caroline knapp and one thing that is unusual about your book is you stay with that at every step. >> relentless. >> yes. let's jump ahead to the question, the book, not only do you stay with it but you stay with it in theme, you don't start to generalize what is happening, you take us through moment after moment after moment which for me writing point of view is pretty astonishing and we will talk about the content of the book but i want to acknowledge the structure and writing of the book. it is exhaustive and at times

exhausting and i mean that in a good way. we feel your weariness and inability to escape. we can't escape with you. you hold us in the story in a way that is quite unusual and can you talk about decisions made about how to structure the book and especially the length of the book? >> it is quite big. funny that you say that because the original manuscript i turned in was i don't know what we eventually got to but under 100,000 now. we cut so much from this book and it is an amazing editor who was able to get to the heart of when i was being repetitive and too relentless and needed to let the reader take a breath but i wanted to be very thorough about telling the various points i had what you would consider to be rock-bottom. the book starts with one of those and then comes back to it

later but there are many in between and it happens over and over again. that is what it was like, no such thing as a wake-up call. may be there is for some people but for me it was important to tell that story of you don't just hit rock bottom and then get it. there is no -- there is no cause and effect in any alcoholics to stay sober. if you want to tell that story after the fact and say i quit and the worst thing that happened before i quit was my rock-bottom that is fine but i think that is like an ex post facto justification a way of creating narrative to explain to yourself how you were able to get sober. for me this is my ex post facto way of explaining it which is i didn't get it until i just did.

>> that's really helpful. i want to acknowledge the writing part of it what you said about repetition and this is something really interesting in writing life stories, writing memoirs when you are getting honestly lived experienced repetition is a feature. when we make bad decisions it doesn't matter if you make one bad decision, what matters is if you make bad decisions starting at 14 and going to 44, whatever it is and that is interesting but it creates a narrative problem because how do you represent that honestly and yet not make it inert for the reader which i feel like you really achieved. >> since you brought up rock-bottom i want to talk about this.

it is the heart of what is going on content wise. pushing against certain perceived narratives in drinking stories like rock-bottom, how the rehabilitation industry works and what it means to relapse, these are all ideas you are working with but a lot of what you are dealing with is the idea that rock-bottom needs to be interrogated. can you talk more about that and how it works for other people as well? >> when you think of yourself as having hit rock bottom and having learned a lesson from that it makes it really impossible to then relapse -- not saying you should feel okay about relapsing but makes it possible to look at that experience that fit it into the story you told yourself about what the alcoholic or drug

addict is so if i got fired from my job and evicted from my house i would probably think -- and my husband left me, i don't have a husband, this is hypothetical but all these terrible milestones we think of for ourselves, if all that happened and then i got sober and then relapsed, what is my problem, must be a me problem, i am failing to fit into the story as opposed to the story doesn't fit. that does damage to people and because relapse is so incredibly common as i was describing in that excerpt it sets us up for disappointment but also for failure because you don't have the tools we need because we don't think we will need the tools, we think we will be the exception that just gets it and i thought that when i left rehab the first

time. i thought i know that none of these bitches are going to get it but i am. i could not have been further from the truth. >> i opened the book and was leaving through it when we were having technical issues and i opened to this page which is really germane to what you just said. you talk about our friend josh. >> hi, josh! >> he knew something about me i wasn't willing to acknowledge about myself. i will turn anything into an intellectual exercise, even my own life. do you think your intellectualism and intelligence kept you stuck in your loop thinking you had this figured out? >> one of the characteristics, i don't want to talk about

myself on that front so i'm trying to deflect a little bit to say this is kind of a universal truth that i found people who relapse a lot over intellectualize everything. for me i thought especially when i was in treatment, doing outpatient, all these things, going to therapy i thought i could talk myself through it, if i thoroughly understand every aspect of this i can do the things that are required. i am smarter and better than that and it will work. the funny thing is the thing that ended up working was a combination of everything i had done to this point but the last thing i tried was a a and it is not a dumb system but is a system that literally anybody can do. it is kind of like you just plug yourself in and decide not

to reject things. could have been something other than aa that did it but i decided to stop projecting things and making intellectual arguments for why i didn't need to do things. >> that is the theme that is touched on at length in the leslie jamison book, the idea of certain kinds of alcoholic who is very very special, preoccupied with their own specialness and aa with its structured approach brings you to your own ordinariness. >> one of the things when i was in treatment i got a bunch -- i got my entire medical file after the fact as part of the reporting process and one of the things that came up over over was intellectualizing and

i think that is just almost like they could have checked a box because it is so common and so i think -- i think intellectualizing unfortunately because i love it and wants to do it to everything, i want to start an argument around everything but it doesn't work for sobriety. i've never seen anybody get sober i talking themselves out of the drinking. >> is a a part of your life now? >> to an extent. to a much lesser extent than it was at first. it is like, it was like a lifeboat for me. so i think as -- as i got a little more sobriety under my belt, and didn't need that kind of day today going to a meeting

every day but i will say even when i'm not doing things like going to meetings and working the steps of aa, there is so much of it that i just integrated into my life like pausing and being grateful and doing all of that that i was told we could swear. sorry if my parents are watching but all the cheesy stuff they tell you to do i really integrated into my life in a way that is really organic. i have a completely different outlook on life than i did even when i was first getting sober. >> i will take it down to basics because i don't know how many questions we will get. there are 150 people listening to this.

some of those people are maybe thinking some of them might be trying to quit drinking or considering it. on a basic human level is there anything you can say to people in early sobriety? >> i think the thing that helps me was knowing, 1 million aa things are coming to me, one thing is one day at a time, that is one of the things i clung to when i was very early in it. the other thing that i found over time is this is not universal for everyone but things got different very fast. for me they got better very fast but i don't think you can guarantee your life is going to get better. it's just going to get different and if you just kind of wait a little bit and say

i'm going to make it to this point and not going to drink until this point and we will see what happens and keep seeing what happens, what you will find is in addition to all the health benefits of not drinking especially if you are a heavy drinker like i was your brain will come back and that is such a gift. for me i talk about ties, it is totally true. it took my brain a good year to really mend itself and recuperate to the point of a baseline it is such a gift to feel that happening and if you don't stick with it you are robbing yourself of that experience.

that is early sobriety. early sobriety is getting through the first 60 days and feeling a little bit better every day. i couldn't to do it for a long time. the other thing is if you relapse, counting days is pernicious and makes a lot of people feel like failures because you feel the compulsion to crawl back into whatever program you are in and say i messed up, i was at 37 days and i am at 0 and that is a problematic toxic way of thinking because you didn't lose that time. you had whatever experiences you had during that time and learned something from it whether you realize it or not, you absolutely learned from however many days you make it. >> thank you for speaking to that. things that are problematic, can you talk about your

thoughts about the rehab industry, you call it the alcoholism industry. >> the treatment industrial complex. i went to treatment twice, detox a bunch of times, various therapists and that is what most people think of when they think of treatment. i went to 28 day treatment twice and it was good but i am saying from the perspective of someone with health insurance my debt from that ended up being less than 10,$000 which is a lot. it wasn't ultimately the end of the world. i paid it off but the thing is what they teach you just going into treatment, one of the things they teach you in every aspect of it is you don't know

how to manage your life and have to be made helpless. they take away your phone, your way to communicate with the outside world, you can't have a computer, you can't bring in any outside reading materials. they make you do chores and what they tell you is it is because you don't know how to be responsible for anything. i don't think that is fair to tell people that. i especially don't think it is fair to tell women that because no matter how screwed up we are or how we take care of our lives we can feel responsible for other people and tend to feel a tremendous weight of guilt and shame when we are not able to be there with other people. i can't imagine what the burden feels like when it feels like

you are failing but i definitely felt i went into rehab, and amazing weight of shame was compounded. i didn't know how to do anything. if you go to rehab more than twice. it saved my life in the immediate sense because i was able to detox, alcohol withdrawal can be deadly, detox was incredibly important, that was important to me but i don't know that taking you out of the world 28 days and then dropping you in the world is an effective way and not teaching you what to do when you relapse. i don't think it is an effective way of dealing with deadly brain disease.

>> you brought up the idea of shame, that is created in rehab, something we experienced and when we were speaking on the phone you were talking about the experience of quitting, and ugly drunk book, you don't feel shame though you do feel guilt about your story. can you talk about shame and putting shame behind you and your relationship to that word? >> between guilt and shame, because of other people, you feel an obligation to make things right. it causes us to make amends to people where shame is something you do to yourself but it is

all inside your own head. by the time i wrote this book i got beyond a lot of the shame. one of the questions i heard a lot, hard to talk about this or that episode. i had already talked about it so much, talked to my parents and apologized and started that process. some of this stuff was fairly public and well-known not to the extent that i thought it was, very terrifying and horrible at the time when

things become public about my behavior but now i feel afraid of talking about experiences i went through because i have a disease and i believe addiction is a type of disease. i made my peace with people i owe that to. it is an ongoing process because you are always screwing up and having to say i am sorry. there is no room i can't walk into and talk about what i have done and did that and that was me. the biggest gift of sobriety i can fathom. you talk about release of variety, really start doing that internal work you need to do and you will feel great.

i can be angry and get over it but shame gets into your dreams, your relationships with people and it is so toxic. to say all this happened is like what happened to you this bad? guess what, you can get over it. i get past this and didn't have to leave seattle or live in antarctica. i am not - people talk to me about my experiences with addiction even now and i think that is very sad and i don't take it personally anymore. >> i will open it up to questions. we have one question already, go ahead and ask a question on the bottom of your screen and type in your question and i

will go through them and ask on your behalf once we gather a few more. going back to that idea, people weapon icing your struggles with addiction against you in this moment. you do a lot of work that is politically adjacent and seeing people use that against you is too bad but seems more about them than you. the question i wanted to ask, you have been doing such incredible work this past month. you are always doing great reporting and this month it has been very visible. what changed in your work once you stopped drinking? >> everything changed. when i stopped ringing i didn't have a job.

had a lot of time to think about what i wanted to do next. this is not exactly the question you asked me and i will get to that but one of the great gift for having a really bad addiction experience is that if you can get through it, in a way that is totally unexpected for me because i had worked the same job from the time i was 19 years old that i got fired, that is all i ever wanted to do. i was my job and my job was me and when i washed the job i had lost everything. i don't know who i am anymore. i have no identity. there is that and i realized i

could do anything i wanted. and incredibly freeing file and it is a self-sustaining thing that i do full time. when taking subjects to cover, it is reader interest, something that got no interest at all, i cover addiction a lot, i cover homelessness a lot and issues that affect people that are vulnerable and for reasons that may not be immediately perceptible with people experiencing homelessness people have a lot of theories what causes homelessness and i think a lot of them are partly right and a lot of them are stupid. but for me when you are talking about people with big mental

health struggles and struggles with addiction that are prevalent among people who are homeless, i feel that could have been me but for a lot of privilege and a lot of luck, another thing is an insane amount of luck, driving down the freeway for something like 30 minutes, 12 lane freeways, going who knows how fast, waking up in a parking lot i was on the other side of town, no idea where i was, it was the era before smart phones, why am i live? i don't know. i look at somebody who is addicted to alcohol or heroin,

if i hadn't been lucky or had a certain number of privileges, i feel and empathy for homeless people that i think a lot of reporters feel empathy for homeless people but i feel it in a different way, i truly feel like i could have been there in that tent. >> sobriety has changed my empathy level in a way that is not about how great i am. it just happened to me, the experience of imagining myself in the other position so much more. i'm going to move on to audience questions. peggy asked the opposite of my question. how do you feel like your writing was affected by your drinking when you were drinking? what was it you were held back from? >> this something i talk about in another chapter, thinking it is the greatest thing in the

world, knocking back a few and waking up in the morning thinking this makes no sense or this isn't accurate. there is that sort of base level, not great journalism to be drunk, you can't write as well. i think i really limited my ambition. the idea of writing a book is impossible. i can't write more than 500 words because i don't have that attention span or i am not literary or have these capabilities, i don't have focus and there are so many stories that were partly true but i also had the capability

inside me. no one wants to read anything more than little items for me. >> it is interesting because you do come from an industry soaked in alcohol. do you think a lot of journalists -- >> interesting question. i never asked that of another journalist. it would be a little invasive but it wouldn't surprise me, a lot of journalists, you tell stories based on what industry you are in, if you are somebody barely hanging on because your drinking every night since you are hung over in the morning because you are trying to get the facts straight, and

ambitious things. >> writing the next great american novel, perhaps that happens among people who think of themselves differently. i can totally see that because that is my experience. i am not good at this. i'm lucky i am here in these people are fools. that is what i believe. it is something else. >> i will jump to an audience question, a section after my own heart. what are some tools you use to get over the regret over the time you lost when you were drinking? >> i don't feel i lost the time.

this is perhaps putting a positive spin on what those years were like but i wouldn't be where i am now, it has not gone that way. having lost 10 years or so, it is a toxic emotion, harder to explain in a way, it would have been this, this, this, and this. it comports with my own age though i never wanted to have kids, i could have kids or people who lost their kids or didn't get their time with them growing up. the best way to get through that regret is the same way you

get through shame with addiction and talking about it and finding out if there is a way to make amends to people you have hurt. it doesn't mean apologizing. it means is there anything that would be helpful to you, for me, that helps expunge the regret. i have a strong belief that you are who you are because of everything you have been through. i don't know what i have been like a but would spend longer thinking i lost my job and telling myself stories about myself that weren't true. for example i lost my job and thought it was the worst thing that could happen to me but it was one of the best things that ever happened to be. crazy to hear coming out of my mouth now because of the way i felt when it happens. i was crushed.

it takes time and perspective. >> the answer to both sticky emotions, shame and regret. your answer is the same which has to do with amends which takes the emphasis off. >> a lot of recovery and a lot of recovery work is about taking it off of your self. a great way to recover from all kinds of things, not just addiction. >> it is a big theme for all of us, to think about amends in that context. let's take one more question. there are a couple more, take two more and wrap it up.

a great question from jean, what are your thought about the industry of drinking in our culture, rigatoni limits for public outreach on alcohol-related issues. >> part of the reason we don't talk about relapse and alcohol addiction is just pernicious on every aspect. every -- liquor ads and things like that. you walk into the grocery store, screaming in your face and policy why i would like to see more regulation on alcohol advertisements because it

addresses the amount people drink. i don't know that we will ever get to the point - it is funny because we have drugs we may completely illegal like apps which i don't think should be illegal and drugs we make extralegal like you are really supposed to be consuming them and if you don't there is something wrong with you like alcohol. it used to be cigarettes as well. we make a cultural shift. it is possible but we are not headed in that direction especially in quarantine where the message is happy hour, it is 4:00 somewhere or 11:00 in the morning somewhere. i have picked up on this as a sober person this tremendous pressure to turn to drinking, the one way you can have fun.

>> this idea of reservations, certain reasons you get to relapse and in this moment there is constantly people coming up with justified relapse, surrounded with people talking off of social media all the time or people need to be drinking. can you talk about how we use situations to justify our drinking. >> i certainly did, when i was still drinking publicly, i do think there is a sense that i was reading an advice column the other day. the lead question, somebody having a dry wedding and my answer is bring a flask.

it is everywhere. i wish i could make it stop and let people make their own choices about things. the only reason we think drinking is the way to get through things and cope with things instead of running or weed or whatever is because it is pushed on us. >> connect back to jean's question, this idea that you are freely drinking, that it is your own choice, those are choices you are making but the trillion dollar industry making sure you are doing that and you are subject to a capitalist force. we never choose our choices in a capitalist system, it is not possible. you think you have free will all you want but there is this anvil of capitalism over your head at all times and nowhere

more than that. we will move on, one more question and you can do with the question what you like. diane just jumped in. how long have you been clean and how long have you been writing? go where you like with that. >> i was not -- >> a question. >> am i here? >> this is josh. i can still hear you. if you want to keep going and answering, go right ahead. >> can you hear me? >> yes, i can hear you. you are coming through fine but erica will go ahead and respond. >> >> i started drinking.

i did a lot of other drugs then. pretty minor stuff in the scale of things. and drinking was the main squeeze once i started and i have been sober for 5 and a half years. my sobriety date is february 4th, 2015, and i have been writing forever. i started writing professionally when i was 18 or 19, started taking internships when that was a thing you did

not get technically paid for and i have been doing it ever since. ever since, i went out completely on the online platforms, how many years is that? more than 20. do we have you back? >> kind of. >> i will step aside and let you close this out because i am dipping out. >> any final words? >> thank you for hosting this. i am glad we got past our technical difficulties and thanks to everybody for tuning in on youtube and facebook. >> thank you, everybody, thank

you for bearing with us. thank you for tuning in this evening and thanks to erica barnett and claire dederer for being here. you can find many more events just like this on our website townhallseattle.org and make a donation to townhall. .. thank you again for being here and we hope you have a great evening. >> now on cspan2 book tv more television for serious readers. so thank you for joining us today. i am the codirector at the center for international here at stanford i am also a senior