before the house oversight and reform committee. watch live coverage of the hearings friday on c-span and monday on c-span2, on demand at c-span.org or listen live wherever you are with the free c-span radio app. >> and we thank you all for tuning in. finish in what we can only describe as interesting times, we're grateful for the opportunity to invite virtual audiences together in dialogue each when we're not exactly, you know, together in space. i'd especially like to thank erica and claire. tonight's presentation will like lu run about 40 minutes followed by audience q&a. you can view the event on crowd cast, facebook or youtube directly using the ask a question button on crowd cast. keep it succinct. if you need closed captioning, youtube is your best bet, and you can click the cc button in

the bottom right corner. we're adding new events and podcasts every day. upcoming on tuesday, nicole anna jones discussing race in journalist, congresswoman pramila jayapal offering a blueprint to political action for next generation women and people of color and a live stream reporting of life on the margins, this week featuring -- [inaudible] also make sure to visit town hall's media library for both the recent and pre-covid past which is, frankly, also pretty recent. anyway, town hall is made possible through your support and the support of our sponsors, supported by the real network foundation can, the true ground foundation and the wincoast foundation northwest. as most of you know, town hall is is a minute-supported organization first and foremost, and i want to thank all of our members tonight. on that note, like nonprofits generally, it's been hit hard but the economic impacts of the pandemic.

we hope you'll consider making a donation but licking on -- clicking on the button at the bottom of crowd cast. one final point on the economy, i i promise, let's be honest, if we were all gathered together tonight, many of you would visit the book signing table, so we hope you'll use the link to purchase your copy of erica's book -- you should say preorder -- through our terrific partners. local author, local book shop, big, big launch book of the book night. keep it local, and maybe some of the things we loved about this city pre-epidemic might make it to the other side. all right. erica bar is an award-winning political reporter beginning her career as the texas observer. she worked for the austin chronicle, seattle weekly and the stranger. huffington post, seattle magazine and grist, and she was

a cofounding editor of the beloved and feisty blog -- [inaudible] sorry for the air quotes. she now covers awe diction, housing policy, and virtually every topic. a seattle nailive and the author of two critically acclaimed memoirs and a forthcoming nonfiction book, her work has appeared in "the new york times," the paris review, the atlantic and other publications. she's also an ecker and has taught -- educator and has taught at the university of washington and other universities across the country. erica barnett's first book is called quitter, a memoir of drinking, relapse and recovery, and it's the subject of tonight's talk. please join me in welcoming them. >> hello. >> hello! i'm so excited to be here with you. >> you too.

>> yeah. i'll jump in and say congratulations. the book is an incredibly impressive achievement. it reads like a house on fire, and as a reader, a longtime fan of your work and a sober person, i am so glad this book exists. i'm honored to be here as part of your haunch. of your launch. [audio difficulty] >> hello, everyone. this is josh with town hall. we're running into some tech issues right now. we will try and get the show back on track as soon as we can. give us one sec. claire, are you still there? >> i just rearrived. >> okay. and erica? >> i think i'm here. >> okay, great. >> yep. >> great. >> all righty, go ahead.

>> all right. erica, i'm going to kick it over to you for a reading. >> great. thanks, claire. it's really -- it's such an honor that you agreed to do this and that you're going to be my interlocutor tonight. i'm such a big fan of yours as well. this is a reading from my first book, "quitter: a memoir of drinking, relapse and recovery." let me tell you what it's like to be sober, really sober, for the first time in years. it feels like seeing color for the first time. it feels like you've been looking at the world through someone else's glasses and suddenly you can make out every individual blade of grass. it feels like you have a secret superpower that nobody can see, a claire few of mind that allows you to leech insights. your body feels stronger than it's the ever been. food tastes better. desire returns. at the same time, everything has

an intensity that scares you a little. when you feel the feeling, oh, my god, how am i ever going to start paying back my debt, you just have to sit with it, figure it out, wait for it to pass. when you've dampened every experience with the white noise of alcohol for a decade or more, experiencing the world at full blast can be whenning. who -- overwhelming. how am i ever going to make time for nine hour of outpatient treatment every week? do i really are the go to an aa meeting every single day? the why is my boss looking at me like that? it has been less than a month since i graduated sober and hopeful and excited to get back to work. my stay at rest 12 felt like a wake-up call, an important pause in a life that had been hurtling forward with no steering. when i ran through that gauntlet of upraised arms, i felt the way i imagine christians feel when they merge from baptismal

waters. my life was finally mine. almost everyone had high hopes. mom, who had been so worried when she showed up two weeks into my stay told me afterwards, i'm proud of you. i know you can do this. my coworkers melissa and emily initiated me into their secret lunchtime ritual of attending a new meeting once a week, and it felt almost as good as being invited to a secret after-party. friends sent cards telling me i was brave. when we talk about sobriety or even recovery, the words are often shorthand for not drinking or not using drugs, but the really overwhelming part of staying sober isn't saying no or learning to avoid the proverbial people, places and sungs that induce temptation, it's figuring out how to live an unfiltered life. it's hard enough when things are going pretty much okay. how many times have you said i need a drink when what you really mean is this day was

moderate9ly annoying. it can be damn near impossible when there's wreckage stretching out in every direction. so to recap, over the past few years of drinking, i had broken my mom's heart, driven away by best friend, alienated my other friends, nearly lost my job and accumulateed tens of thousands of dollars in medical debt through emergency rooms and detoxes. i was ashamed to show few face at work, overwhelmed by the amends i felt i needed to make right away and scared to death that josh would continue to doubt my commitment to sobriety or that he'd be watchingover my shoulder every minutement i had wasted so much time. i i had to fix everything right away, but i had absolutely no idea how to start. so i froze. i was true to my comfort zone. i workedded and went to the gym, lifted weights and worked the phones, and before long i was too exhausted to keep going to

outpatient therapy, too exhausted to make it to ark a every day, too exhausted for anything. aa meetings, which i'd attended sporadically for the past seven years, bummed me out. everybody seemed to relentlessly happy all the time, and i found the three-hour intensive outpatient systems that i had agreed to do repetitive and depressing. a fewed sad sack losers in a career true downtown office building watching videos about relapse prevention and bitching about how much sobriety sucks before driving home. not more than a month went by before i fell back into drinking. not just fell, the way you fall into bed with an ex-lover 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 a slide from not drinking to drinking. i was a nondrinker, then i was a

drinker again. simple as thatment i passed the liquor aisle in the grocery store, doubled back and dropped a bottle of smirnoff in my basket casually. i bush i had a better story to tell you -- wish i had a better story. maybe if a close relative had died or i had lost my job or been evicted my relapse would have been justified. some alcoholics refer to this as reservation. if my mom dies, i'll drink. if my husband leaves me. but i don't have a reason. normal people who are alcoholics relapse the way i did and wonder what made you take that first true. for me, the answer was always nothing in particular. one minute you're a sober person in recovery, the next you're telling yourself everybody else does it, why can't i? i've learned so much, i'll manage it this time. the collective amnesia of the chronic relapser is a force of nature.

no matter how many times we say never again and mean it, we forget all of it the instant we happen to look up as we walk past a liquor store. it was more an act of not deciding. it is true as manaddiction researchers have argued that people who suffer from the addiction have several developing higher ordering cognitive assumptions like impulse control. but i left rehab with the emotion almaturety of a 13-year-old. not that i didn't remember what happened the last time i drank or hear the warning i learned to repeat in rehab. before you take the first drink, play the tape forward. i did. it's just that there's a louder voice in my head saying you know how to handle it. it'll be different this time. rehab equips you with mantras. what it can't do is force you to hear them. the voice of someone at a meeting, alcoholism is cunning, baffling, powerful and patient.

in the morning after buying that first almost celebratory model, look at me, i beat this thing, i woke up with my hands shocking and race ford for the bathroom o retch in the toilet bowl. on the way to work i grabbed another bottle. and by three in the afternoon i was peering over the edge of the same familiar pit. old-timers say you don't have to drink even if you want to, but the fact is most of us do drink again. our brains make relapse practically inevitable. even after physical withdrawal and the fuzzy thinking of early sobriety has subsided, but brain wouldn't stop saying, wouldn't this be better with a drink? each maintaining equilibrium without a steady supply of spirits. out also creates long-lasting pathways between neurons that cause the brain to strongly associate depression, loneliness, excitement, guilt or

experiences with an overwhelming urge to drink. every time i relapsed and went through withdrawals, those links got stronger and stronger making out more likely that i would relapse again. failure in this case meaning that people don't stay sober after they leave, but that rate is important, and it's something people should be armed with before they decide to spend tens of thousands of or dollars on what may be little more than a 28-day dryout. here are the numbers. four in six alcohol you cans stick it out until the end, and of those, about half will 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 yet treatment centers focus 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, four

conditions that can precede relapse x they teach you to practice dream; diet, rest, exercise -- and meditation. a cognitive behavioral therapy or cbc. if you're having trouble keeping track of all these acronyms, imagine how hard ifs for an alcoholic in early society. i carried a card in my wallet for months to keep them all straight. in early sobriety your brain is still putting itself back together during a process called post acute withdrawal dream. it can -- syndrome. it can last for more two years. my first two weeks i pictured my brain as a soft, pliable sponge. i never found out how long it would take me to get through this phase because before i could get there, i went back through the reinvolving door. revolving door. >> thank you.

that should give people some idea of the nature of this book, the quality of clarity the, honesty the, immediacy and the way that erica weaves reporting and research in with her own personal story. it's quite astonishing. she makes it seem easy e and it's not. so thank you. i wanted to start but just asking if you could give the people in the audience, since the book is not out yet and will be out on july 7 and you can buy it, preorder, but since the book is not out yet, i was wondering if you could give the audience just sort of an overview or macro -- sort of a funny word -- idea of your drinking story. just what that looked like, what the time frame was. >> sure. i started drinking pretty young, like i think a lot of, a lot of

people who become heavy drinkers later in life do. but i didn't really drink much, you know, when i was in college. i was a good kid, quote-unquote. i didn't want drink in -- i didn't drink in early adulthood. the period i talk about in the book is really a period of about ten or so years from, basically, my early 30s to my late are 30s. so i was here in seattle, i was working and, you know, you sort of described a lot of the places that wife work ad. -- that i've worked. of course, i didn't mention this in that particular excerpt because it was about the first time i went to rehab, but i got fired from my job and then got sobber shortly after that. so that was about five and a half years ago. so we're talking about a decade of time. >> got it.

that's -- okay, that's helpful just to sort of have that out there about what happened. and i think that one of the things that's astonishing about this book and we talked about this a little bit before is that it's a so-called ugly drunk story. >> yes. it's very warts and all, and the warts are warty. these are some tough stories in here, and i feel like that's really in contrast with most recovery stories we see from women. women's memoirs of alcoholism tend to -- the whole idea of i'm high functioning, i'm keeping out together but i'm a drunk, and i can only think of a couple of exceptions to this rule. .. >> i think there is -- it's

taboo admitting that you're a messy drunk, a problematic person or a piece of crap and i thought of myself even when i was still drinking, kind of a dirtbag drunk. because there's some early discussion of the book's cover being a glass of wine and my reaction to that was like, i never drank from a glass. i drank from the bottle and that's just the kind of drinker i am. as a woman, i think it's very 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 on the bus drinking out of a paper bag. you know, the stereotypes and even like the sort of-- the ones that we adulate,

hunter thompson. and i think that women are supposed to be tidy and we're supposed to be careful and i think we're supposed to keep our problems secret and small and my problem was not small and it certainly by the end was not secret either. >> i think that one thing that's happening, we'll talk more about this later, but in the dialog around women and drinking right now is this idea, and just going off what you just said, that this idea that we need to push against that stereo type of like the wino with the brown paper bag, right? because alcoholism can look a lot of different ways, the bottle of wine you drain after putting your kids to bed. it's important to tell that story, but that's not every woman's story and the fact that that's sort of getting represented as the face of female alcoholism, your story, your book pushes against that and says that there's, you know, this is where addiction can end up and it's scary and

raw and real. do you think that's fair? >> yeah, and i think -- i think that it's not just where it can end up, but that this is where it can end up for women, too. >> yes, yes. >> and i think there is, you know, a very, like upper middle class white aesthetic to the new acceptance of like a certain kind of woman drinker and you know, this is not a book about drinking per se, but cat marnell's book. and she wrote a wonderful, wonderful book about being an absolute mess and not in like a hot, fun way. like i didn't read her book and thing, oh, my god-- i did think she's cool because she's so much cooler than me, but i also was just like, wow, i relate to this and i haven't related to many addiction memoirs because they do tell kind of a story that takes an arc and then everything is okay.

and my story is like arc after arc after arc after arc. >> i think, this is just an aside that's popping into my head as i think about especially good or well-known books about drinking and women, including some of the people like tara or carolyn knapp and one thing that's unusual about your book, you stay with it at every step. often what happens with drinking books-- >> are you calling it relentless? >> i'm calling it relentless. let's jump ahead to the relentless question. the book, not only do you stay with it, you stay with it in theme. you don't start to generallylize -- generalize what happens, you take us moment to moment to moment. and i want to acknowledge the structure and writing of the book. it's completist, it's exhaustive and as i said at times here, exhausting and i mean that in a good way.

we feel your weariness and inability to escape and you hold us to the story in a way that's quite unusual. can you talk about how you structured the book and especially the length of the book. it quite big. it's funny that you say that because the original manuscript that i turned in. i don't know what we eventually got to, but i think it's under 100,000 now. i think the manuscript it was 125, 135. we cut so much from this book and i think that was-- i had this amazing editor who just was able to get to the heart of like when i was being repetitive and when i was being a little too relentless and i needed to kind of let the reader take a breath. i wanted to -- i wanted to be, you know, very thorough about telling the various points when i had what you would consider to be in a traditional narrative, a rock bottom. and the book kind of starts with one of those and then

comes back to it later. but there are many in between and it just, it happens over and over again because that's what it was like. i mean, it was just like, there's no such thing as a wake-up call. maybe there is for some people, but for me, it was important to tell that story of like, look, you don't just hit a rock bottom and then get it. there's no -- there's no -- it's not like -- there's no cause and effect that you can find in any alcoholic who stays sober. if you want to tell that story after the fact and say, i quit and therefore, the worst thing that happens before a quit was my rock bottom. that's fine, you do you. but i think that's like an exfacto justification or way of creating a narrative and explaining to yourself why -- how you were able to get sober. for me, this is my way of explaining it to myself. which is why i didn't get it

until i just did. >> yeah, okay, that's really helpful. i think that first, i want to acknowledge still on the writing part of it. i want to acknowledge what you said about repetitions. and i think that this is something really interesting in writing life stories, writing memoirs, when you're really getting at honestly with the experience, repetition is kind of both bug and feature. like when we make bad decisions, it doesn't matter if you make one bad decision, but if you make them 14 going to 44. that's to me what is interesting, but it creates a narrative problem because how do you represent that honestly and yet not, you know, not make it inert for the reader, which i feel like you really achieved. >> well, thank you. [laughter] >> i wanted-- since you brought up rock bottom. i really want to talk about this. it's kind of at the heart of

what's going on in this book content-wise. you're 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 that you're working with, but a lot of what you're dealing with is this idea that rock bottom needs to be kind of interrogated. so, can you talk a little bit more about that and how you've seen it work for other people as well? >> well, i think that when you think of yourself as having hit rock bottom and you think of yourself as, you know, as having learned a lesson from that, it makes it really, really impossible to then relapse and feel-- i mean, not, i'm not saying you should feel okay about relapsing, but i think it makes it really impossible to look at that experience and fit it into the story that you've told yourself about what, what the

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

i thought that when i left rehab the first time. i thought well, i know that none of these are going to get it, but i am. and i could not have been further from the truth. >> so many questions. what's interesting is i just opened the book and was leafing through it while we were having all of tease these technical issues and i happened to open it to the page germane. and you were talking about your friend, our friend josh. >> hi, josh. >> he knew something about me that 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 your intelligence kept you stuck in your loop? thinking that you had this figured out? >> i think one. things, 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 that, this is kind of a universal truth that i found with people who relapse a lot, is like they overintellectualize everything. and i thought especially when i was in treatment, doing outpatient and all of these different things and going to therapy, i thought i could talk myself through it and i thought if i just fully and thoroughly understand every aspect of this, i can do the things that are required. here are the things according to me that are not required because i'm smarter and better than that. and the work, and i mean, the funny thing is the thing that ended up working was a combination of everything i had done up to this point, but the last thing i tried was aa, and it is-- i mean, it's not a dumb system, but it's a system that literally anybody can just do, and it's kind of like, you plug

yourself in and you decide not to reject things. and i-- it could have been something in aa that did it, but i just decided to stop rejecting things and stop making intellectual arguments about why i didn't need to do things. i feel like that's the theme obviously touched on at length in the leslie jamieson book, the idea of a certain kind of alcoholic who is very, very special. >> yeah. >> who's preoccupied with their own specialness and aa with a really structured approach pushes -- it brings you to your own ordinariness. >> yes, and i think one of the things when i was in treatment, i got a bunch of my -- i got basically my entire medical file as part of the reporting process for writing this book, and one of the things that just kept coming up over and over again was intellectualizing.

intellectualizing. and i think that's just like-- it was almost like they could have checked a box because it's so common. and so i think it is just -- i think in intellectualizing unfortunately, because i love it and i want to do it around everything, and it doesn't work for sobriety. i never saw anybody get sober, but talking themselves out of drinking. [laughter] >> so is aa a part of your life now? >> to an extent. to a much lesser extent than it was at first. i think aa is like, you know, it's like a -- it was really like a lifeboat for me so i think as you-- or as i got a little more sobriety under my belt and you know, was not as -- just didn't need that kind of day-to-day like going to a meeting every

single day. that's something i did at first, but i will say, you know, even when i'm not going to things like meetings and just, and like working the steps of aa, there's just, there's so much of it that i just integrated into my life. like just kind of pausing and being grateful and doing all of that cheese y cheesy sh-- i was told i could swear, sorry if my parents are watching. all the cheesy stuff that they told we could do, i integrated into my life as organic and i have a much-- just a completely different attitude and outlook on life now, even when i was first getting sober. >> i'm going to kind of take it down to basics for a second because i don't know how many questions we're going to end up getting and i feel there's a couple of important things to say. one is there's 150 people listening right here and if

some of those people are maybe, i want to start by thinking some of them might be trying to quit drinking or relapsing or considering it. and i guess, just on a basic human level, is there anything that you can say to people in early sobriety? i know i clung to any word i could get when i was in the earliest sobriety. >> as did i. i mean, i think the thing that helped me was just knowing -- i mean, of course, there's a million aa things are coming to me which is one day at a time. which is that's one of the things i clung to when i was very early in it. and the other thing is, what i found over time is that things -- and this is not universal necessarily for everyone, but my own experience is that things got different very fast. and for me they actually got better very fast, but i don't think you can guarantee that your life's going to get better. it's just going to get different.

and if you just kind of wait a little bit and just say, you know, i'm going to make it to this point, and i'm not going to drink until this point and we'll see what happens. and then keep seeing what happens. i think what you will find is that in addition to just kind of all the health benefits of not drinking, especially if you're a heavy drinker like i was, just, your brain will come back, and that's such a gift. and for me, like i talked about pause. i can't remember -- it's totalstotals ly-- totally true. it took my brain a year to mend itself and i felt i was back at baseline. it's such a gift to have that happen. if you don't stick with it, you're robbing yourself of that experience. yeah, i mean, that's early so

bright. early sobriety is getting through the first 60 days and feeling better every day and it's, man, i mean, i couldn't do it for a long time and the other thing is, if you relapse, you know, i do think that counting days is pernicious and i think that it makes a lot of people feel like failure because you feel this compulsion to crawl back into whatever program you're in and say, i messed up. i was at 37 days, now i'm at zero and i think it's a problematic and sometimes toxic way of thinking about that. because you didn't lose that time. you know, you had whatever experiences you had during that time and you learned something from it. whether you realize it now or not. you absolutely learned from however many days you were able to make it and then, you know, you can just start over. it's a new day. >> yeah. >> thank you for speaking to that. while we're talking about things that are pernicious and problemat problematic, can you talk about

some of your thoughts about the rehab industry? i think you call it the alcoholism industry? >> i would get this treatment industrial complex. i went to treatment twice, i went to detox a bunch of times. i went to, you know, various therapists and i think i'll confine this to i guess rehab because that's what most people think of with treatment. i went to 28-day treatment twice and i think ultimately was good i went both times, but i'm saying that from the perspective of someone who had health insurance so my debt from that ended up being like less than $10,000, which is a lot, but it wasn't, you know, ultimately the end of the world. i paid it off. you know, but the thing is, i mean, what they teach you, i mean, just going into treatment, i mean, one of the things they teach you in every single aspect of it is you

don't know how to manage your own life and that yessentially need to be helpless. they take away your phone, can't have the outside world. can't bring in any outside reading materials and so, it's very -- they make you do chores. and it's like, and what they tell you about that, it's because you don't know how to be responsible for anything. and i don't think that's fair. i don't think that's fair to tell people that and i especially don't think it's fair to tell women that. women, no matter how screwed up we are or how little we're taken care of our own lives, we tend to feel responsible for other people and we tend to feel this tremendous weight of guilt and shame when we are not able to be there for other people. i mean, even i'm not-- i don't have kids and so i can't imagine what that kind of burden feels like when you feel like you're failing, but i

definitely felt like i went into rehab both times with this amazing weight of shame. all they did was compound it, but telling me that i didn't know how to do anything. and also, i think, you know, if you go to rehab more than twice, like you're just giving them money. i mean, you know, it did in one case definitely saved my life in the immediate sense because i was able to detox there, alcohol withdrawal is going to be deadly and detox was incredibly important. so that was very important to me, but i don't know that taking you out of the world for 28 days and then just dropping you back in the world is a very effective way and not teaching you anything what to do when you relapse because i didn't learn any of that, i just don't think it's an effective way of dealing with a deadly brain

disease. >> you brought up in your remarks just now, the idea of shame, that they-- that sort of compounding guilt and shame that's created in rehab is something you experienced. and when we were speaking on the phone earlier this week, you mentioned-- you were talking about the experience of putting what you had called an ugly drunk book out in the world and you said you don't feel shame though you do feel guilt about your story. and can you talk about shame and putting shame behind you and your relationship to that word, i guess, is what-- >> yeah, i think that i wanted to distinguish between guilt and shame because shame is something-- guilt is something you feel because of other people, you feel an obligation to make things right and i think that guilt is a healthy emotion. it causes us to behave better and causes us to make amends for people and shame is something that you do to yourself and you know, it's

just -- it's all inside your own head. and so by the time i wrote this book i had, i think, gotten beyond a lot of the shame. so one of the questions that i've heard a lot is, you know, was it really hard to talk about this or that episode. and it was and it wasn't. it wasn't as hard as you would think because i had already talked about it so much with my aa sponsor, with others in my life. i had talked to my parents and you know, apologized and started that process of like trying to assuage the guilt and through that, i was able to not feel pain about a lot of the stuff and it's funny because like some of the stuff was fairly public and fairly well-known locally. probably not to the extent that i thought it was, because i just thought, like i was going to just be buried in shame for the rest of my life and it was very terrifying and horrible at the time when, you know, when

things would become public about my behavior, but, yeah, now i feel absolutely unafraid of talking about the experiences that i went through because, first of all, you know, i have a disease and i do believe that addiction is a type of disease. and second, like i have made my peace and my amends with the people that i owe that to. you know, to an extent. it's an ongoing process for your whole life because you're always screwing up. everybody is always screwing up and having to say i'm sorry. but, yeah, there's nothing -- there's no room i can't walk into and talk about what i have done and say, yes, i did that. that was me. >> that seems very free. >> it's like the biggest gift of sobriety that i can even -- i mean, that i can fathom. you talk about early sobriety, hit three years, four years, and start doing some of the

internal work you need to do, you feel great. shame is the worst emotion. i can be angry and i get over it. but shame just, you know, it gets into your dreams, it gets into your relationships with people, and it's just, it's so toxic and so part of writing this book was to say like, look, all of this happened. like, is what happened to you this bad? you know, oh, no? well, guess what? you can get over it. i got over-- i got past all this and i didn't have to like leave seatt seattle. i didn't have to go live in antarctica. and people are horrible to me on-line about my experiences with addiction even now and i just think that's very sad. and i don't take it personally anymore. and i did at first. >> right, right. so, i'm going to open it up to questions in just a minute here. i can see we have one question already. and go ahead and go to the ask a question button at the bottom

of the screen, everybody, type your question and i'll go through and ask them on your behalf once we gather a few more. going back to that idea, it's really interesting, you know, people weaponizing your struggles with addiction against you in this moment, right? like you do a lot of work that's politically adjacent and seeing people use that against you, it's just -- it's too bad, but it's definitely more about them than you. my question was, that i wanted to ask was, you've been doing such incredible work this last month. the reporting, i mean, you're always doing great reporting. this month it's been really visible. can you talk about what happened, what changed in your work once you stopped drinking? >> i mean, everything changed. immediately when i stopped drinking, i mean, i didn't have a job and so i had a lot of time to just kind of think about what i wanted to do next.

and i know this isn't exactly the question you asked me and i will get to that, but one other great gift of having a really -- a really bad addiction and a really bad addiction experience is that if you can get through it, and if you can go get sober, it frees you in a way that i think is totally-- it was totally unexpected for me because i had worked this job, essentially the same job from the time i was, you know, 19 years old until i was 37 or whenever it was that i got fired, you know, just that's all i ever wanted to do. it was the most important thing to do. i was my job and my job was me. and when i lost the job it was like i lost everything. i don't know who i am anymore. >> yeah. >> and i have no identity. and when i got -- so there's that.

i got past that, i realized i could do absolutely anything i wanted and that was an incredibly freeing feeling so i started my blog and now it's like a self-sustaining thing that i do full-time. so when i'm taking such -- it's definitely reader interest. if i was covering something that got no interest at all, it wouldn't be sustainable, but i cover addiction a lot. i cover homelessness a lot, and i cover, you know, issues that affect people that, you know, are vulnerable and for reasons that may not be immediately perceptib perceptible. particularly with homelessness. people have a lot of theories on what causes homelessness, quote, unquote. a lot of them are partly right and a lot of them are stupid. but for me, you know, when

you're talking about people who have really big mental health struggles and struggles with addiction, which is very prevalent among people who are homeless, i feel that it could have been me, but for a lot of privilege and a lot of luck. i mean, another thing that runs through my story is just an insane amount of luck. there's a story i tell in the book about driving down a freeway for, you know, something like 30 minutes and where i'm from, and in a complete blackout. like 12-lane freeways, complete blackout going too fast and waking up in a parking lot, i was headed to the airport, i was on the other side of town and it sprawls forever and the era before smart phones, i had no idea where i was. why am i alive? i don't know. so when i look at somebody who is living in a tent and is addicted to, say, alcohol or heroin, i just think, if i

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

and thinking it's like the greatest thing in the world and sitting and knocking back two whiskeys or whatever and then waking up in the morning and looking at it and just thinking, this makes no sense. or like, this isn't accurate. and so there's just that sort of very base level of, you know, it's just not -- it's not as good of writing or great journalism to be drunk, you can't write as well. and i think how else is it affected? i think i limited my ambitions. i think that writing a book would have been absolutely impossible. i told myself a story about myself, which is that i can't really write more than 500 words because i don't have that kind of attention span or i'm not literary. or i just don't have these capabilities, i'm not smart enough. i just don't have the focus, and there are so many stories that were partly true. i didn't have the focus, but i

also had the capability inside me somewhere. i just thought like, i'm such a piece of crap that there's no one wants to read, you know, anything more than 50 little items from me. and i really believed that. >> it's interesting because you do come from an industry that's soaked in alcohol. >> yeah. >> do you think that a lot of journalists maybe are operating with some of that? >> that's a really interesting question. and i never-- i've never asked that question of another journalist because that would be-- it wouldn't surprise me. because i think a lot of journalists, i do know that, you know, you tell stories about yourself based on what industry your is he in and what you've done and i also think if you're somebody barely hanging on because you're drinking every night, because you're hungover in the morning. because you're trying to get the facts straight in your story and make it make sense,

now, you're not going to be anything more ambitious thing necessarily. maybe this is a gender breakdown thing, too, i'm speaking as a woman. maybe guys are like, i'm going to write the next great american novel. perhaps that happens among people who think of themselves differently, but i can, yeah, i can totally see that just because that was so much my experience of just feeling like i'm not good at this. like i'm lucky that i'm here and that these people are fools into thinking i'm knowing what i'm doing, you know, that's what i believe. >> i do know. [laughter] >> everybody has a -- but it was something else. >> i'm going to jump to the next audience question from liz, a question after my own heart. what are some tools you used to get over the regret over the time you lost when you were drinking? >> i don't feel that i lost the time because, you know, this is

perhaps putting a positive spin on what those years were like. i mean, they were terrible, but the fact is, i wouldn't be where i am now had it not gone that way. so, i don't have any way of knowing what it would have been like had i not lost those 10 years or so. and i find that regret, like shame, is a very toxic emotion and it's -- but it's harder to expunge in a way because it's true. you look at that time and you think, oh, my god, i could have done this, this, this and this. an example i've heard and comports with my own age, and i never had kids, but i could have had kids or people who lost their kids and didn't have time with them growing up. the best way to get through the regret is the same with shame

with addiction and i think it's talking about it and it's finding out how-- if there's a way to make amends to the people that you've heard. and i don't mean just like apologizing, it means like saying, is there anything i can do now that would be helpful to you and not dictating what it is that you think you should do for them, but just asking. and for me, that helped expunge the regret and i also, i have this strong belief that you are who you are because of everything you've been through. and so i don't know what i would have been like, but i do know that i probably would have spent a lot longer that i was my job and just telling myself stories about myself that weren't true as it turned out. i mean, like, for example, you know, i lost my job as i mentioned, and i thought it was the worst thing that could ever happen to me. but it was actually one of the best things that ever happened to me which is like crazy to hear coming out of my mouth now given the way i felt when it

happened. i mean, i was just like crushed. so, yeah, i mean, it also just takes time and perspective. >> it's interesting that the answer to both, you know, these two really sticky emotions, i don't know if they're emotions, whatever, shame and regret, that your answer to both is the same, which has to do with amends, which takes the emphasis off the self, too. >> yeah, i mean, i think that a lot of dd-- a lot of recovery work is taking it off yourself and what you can do for other people. which is honestly, a great way to recover from all kinds of things, not just addiction. >> yeah, i think it's a big theme right now for all of us to talk about, really interesting to think about amends in that context. we've been-- do you feel like taking one more question? that's about right? >> yes. >> all right, let's do that. there's a couple more.

why don't we try to take two more and then wrap it up. >> sure. >> the first one is another great question from jean. what are your thoughts about the alcohol industry's influence on drinking in our culture and the lack of regulatory limits or outreach on alcohol-related issues? >> that's a great question. i think that part of the reason we don't talk about relapse and the reason we don't talk about alcohol addiction is because the industry is just pernicious in every single, you know, aspect of life, right? i mean, like i have a pile of magazines over here and every one is full of liquor ads and for drink, billboards and walk into the grocery store and they're screaming in your face. and i think it is -- i would policy-wise would like to see both more regulation on alcohol advertisements and higher taxes on alcohol because it does, in fact, reduce the amount that

people drink. and you know, i don't know that we're ever going to get to a point where you think of-- it's funny because we have these drugs that we make completely illegal like heroin, which i don't think should be illegal and we have drugs that we make extra, extra legal like you're really supposed to be consuming them and if you don't there's something wrong with you, like alcohol. it used to be cigarettes as well. and i think we can make a cultural shift, it is possible, but we're not headed in that direction right now especially in quarantine are the message is have happy hour with your friends, it's 4:00 somewhere. you know, it's 11:00 in the morning somewhere, and people just, i think, see all-- and i have picked up on this myself even as a sober person, this tremendous pressure to turn to drinking as this is the one way you can have fun at least while you're stuck inside. >> yeah, i did want to bring that up. you had mentioned earlier this idea of reservations, like

people having certain reasons that they get to relapse, and i feel like in this moment in covid, that there's constantly people coming up with justified relapse, we're sort of surrounded by people talking, social media talking about how people need to be drinking and can you-- i mean, can you talk a little about how people use-- how we use situations to justify our drinking? >> well, i mean, i certainly did. when i was drinking, i mean, especially when i was still drinking publicly, most of my drinking was pretty shameful and private. and do you think there's a sense-- i mean, i was reading an advice column the other day and i did a tweet about this. the lead question was, somebody's having a dry wedding. how do i deal? and the answer was bring a flask. and it's just, it's so

everywhere. it's just everywhere. and you know, i wish i could make it stop and just let people make their own choices about things, because the on reasons that we think that drinking is the way to get through things and cope with things, instead of, i don't know, running or another substance, you know, weed or whatever. you know, is because it's just constantly pushed on us. connects right back to jean's question. this idea that you're freely drinking, that it's your own choice. of course you are, it's choices that you're making, there's this trillion dollar industry making sure that you're doing that and that you are, you know, subject to a capitalist or choosing to drink. >> you never choose our choices in a capitalist system. we just don't. it's not possible. like you think you have free will all you want, but there's still this animal of capitalism

over your head at all times that-- >> and nowhere more than with your evening glass of wine. we'll move on from there. one more question from deanne and you can do with this question what you'd like because it's open-ended. >> how long have you been clean, did you use other drugs and with your writing. that's our last question. >> i stopped-- >> i think i've lost you. am i air? >> this is josh. i can still hear you, erica, if you want to keep going with the answer and hopefully we can have -- go right ahead. >> josh, can you hear me? >> yes, yes, claire i can hear you. you're coming through fine and erica is going to respond. >> while we wait for claire to

reconnect. i started drinking when i was about 13 and then i-- i did a lot of other drugs then. it was the '90s, in high school, i did acid, smoked weed, pretty minor stuff in the scale of things and then i really didn't drink until i was in my-- heavily until i was in my 30's and i have been-- and i didn't really do a lot of other drugs either. i mean, drinking was really my main squeeze, once i really started and i've been sober for five and a half years. my sobriety date is february 4th, 2015 and i have been writing basically since forever. i started writing when i was-- i started writing professionally when i was about 18, 19 in college. i started taking internships back in the days when

internships that you did not get technically paid for and i've just been doing it ever since. as the interest that i started as an intern at texas observer and started writing there and been in alt weekly ever since and in 2009 went out completely on the on-line platforms and, yeah, so gosh, how many years has that been? more than 20. claire do we have you back? >> kind of. >> in and out. i'm going to step aside and let you two close this out because i'm dipping out. >> sounds good. >> all right, erica, any final words? >> just thank you so much for hosting this and i'm really glad we were able to get past our technical difficulties sort of. and thanks for everybody who is tuning in on youtube and podcast and facebook. >> all right, again, thank you

everybody. our apologies for starting late. thank you for bearing with us. new again for tuning in this evening and really big thanks to erica and claire for being here. if you enjoyed this event you can find many more just like it on our website, town hall seattle.org and we hope you'll consider making a donation to town hall as your support will allow us to continue having events just like this one. if you're interested in pre-ordering a copy of erica's book, quitter, memoir of relapse and recovery, out july 7th, use the link on this live stream page to purchase at our friends the elliott the bay book company. thank you for being here, we hope you have a great evening. >> you're watching book tv on c-span2. every weekend with the latest non-fiction books and authors. c-span2, created by america's cable television companies as a public service and brought to

you today by your television provid provider. >> week nights this months we're featuring book tv programs as a preview of what's available every weekend on c-span2. tonight, starting at 8 p.m. eastern, former defense secretaries robert gates and james mattis take a look at the u.s. of u.s. power around the world since the end of world war ii. then christian rose, former staff director of the senate armed services committee. he talks about the future of high-tech warfare. and later, former defense secretary william perry and plow shares fund director of policy,ton killeena talk about the nuclear arms race since world war ii and the nuclear threat today. enjoy book tv on c-span2. >> postmaster general louis dejoy testifies to congress on changes in service operations

and their impact on the upcoming elections. live friday, in front of the homeland security and governmental affairs. and postmaster general dejoy and the board of governors will testify before the house oversight and reform committee. watch live coverage of the hearings friday on c-span and monday on c-span2, on demand at c-span.org or listen live wherever you are with the free c-span radio app. in 2004, author tom wolfe spent a day in washington d.c. discussing his book "i am charlotte simmons," and he was then a guest on a radio show.