![]() The book was so upsetting to her sister Charlotte that, after Anne’s death she passed on the chance to have it reprinted, and the book was neglected for a really long time. The book’s most shocking moments are the ones which depict Arthur’s abusive attempts to get the young child drunk, seemingly to spite and hurt his wife, and it’s clear from the narrative that Brontë had a lot of first-hand experience in dealing with and subduing drunk men. Helen ultimately escapes her marriage and pretends to be a widow, earning a living as an artist to care for herself and her young son. Its subject-matter at the time was so shocking that one reviewer declared it “utterly unfit to be put into the hands of girls.” The novel is vast but primarily tells the story of Helen, whose husband is abusive and dissipated, and the landscape is populated with various forms of alcoholic men. Probably the least-known work of the Brontë sisters, by the least-known sister, Anne’s second and last novel was published to great success in 1848. Though the flashbacks to high school and Cat’s short but intense relationship with Marlena form the bulk of the book, the framing of present-day Cat, who now struggles with alcohol alone and often in secret, guides us through the ways in which our adult selves are so often informed by things that happened long ago. Though the titular character is the fascinating, sexy, troubled star of the book, it is the narrator, Cat’s relationship with alcohol, beginning in her teenage years and roughly coinciding with her meeting Marlena, that frames the entire narrative. I am, probably, by way of my history, more attuned to picking up on it than others.Ī stunning debut novel about a short but intense friendship between two girls that ends in tragedy, Marlena pinpoints both what it feels like to be the addict and what it’s like to be the friend of one. The books which do it best, in my opinion, are often not consciously “about” addiction at all, but show its effects lingering in the corners of every page. It is easy to use addiction as a crutch, a way to build plot or signal “here’s a bad dude,” but it is much harder to accurately and humanely depict the life-warping pain of struggling with alcoholism. Today, some of my favorite works of fiction are those which manage to portray the complex multitudes of ways in which alcoholism affects people-not just the addicts themselves, but their friends, family, and co-workers. Before I was old enough to simply walk out of the house and literally escape, I hid inside my room and read entire afternoons away, happily lost. ![]() There are also the self-help books, the AA manuals, the well-meaning but often dry (no pun, and so on) tomes to help one acquire clarity and consistency in a life where addiction often creates chaos and disorder.īut, growing up with an alcoholic mother, my most common mode of escape as a child was in fiction. ![]() Memoirs like Sarah Hepola’s Blackout, Augusten Burroughs’ Dry, and Drunk Mom by Jowita Bydlowska are recent, searing examples of first person accounts of being drunk and then, eventually, being sober. ![]() Often, when we think of books about addiction and specifically alcoholism (in my case), we think of important, tell-all works of nonfiction.
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