Good morning. Huge day today—ready?

For years, TSB readers have lobbied for a hardcover compilation of some of our best essays and stories. We’ve finally followed through, and the first volume of “The Small Book” will be available in bookstores on December 29th.

This compilation will feature early work from CLANCY MARTIN, LUKE O’NEIL, MEGAN KOESTER, CORD JEFFERSON, J WORTHAM, and many more. Plus, we have some new additions from MARY H.K. CHOI, EMILY GOULD, and ALAN HANSON. And, last but not least—some of our favorite anonymous Check-Ins from the past eight years written by the world-famous Small Bow Family Orchestra.

Here’s how you can help: Pre-order, obviously. Take your pick.

Second, do you have a favorite Indie bookstore in your city, town, or nucleated village? Let me know, and I’ll have our publishing squad at Author’s Equity send one over to that location.

EMAIL ME HERE: [email protected]

SUBJECT: MY INDIE

Below this note is the official Introduction I wrote, which should give you a better idea of what The Small Book is—and definitely what it is not. (Hint: a Big Book.)

Let me know if you have any questions, concerns, or brilliant ideas to help us get it to as many people as possible who are searching for stories like the ones you already know and love.

Off we go.

—AJD

In the summer of 2016, I left Williamsburg, Brooklyn, to sober up and rebuild my life in a different, less tempting (and more affordable) city. I chose a dreary, dirtbag part of South Florida near Burt Reynolds’s hometown, because it was close to the treatment center I’d spent close to two months in that fall. I had no job to speak of at that time—I was living on loans from friends and family.

I holed up in a beige, flimsy-walled condo with a noisy ceiling fan in Riviera Beach and enrolled in an intensive five-day-per-week outpatient program designed to help me reorient to civilian life as a person who no longer drank alcohol or did cocaine off house keys to start their day. And sobriety’s curse is that it forces liars and lunatics like me to be honest with everyone, especially themselves. It’s true that the first few months of new sobriety bring you clarity, but some of that lousy clarity is unwelcome, and now there’s awful new machinery in your brain that shits out forgotten ugly memories when you least expect it. I wanted help, but I also wanted to keep my secrets.

And even though I was a mostly unemployed writer, I was a snob about the types of “recovery” stories I was exposed to as part of the whole twelve-step hustle. The “personal stories” in the back of the book, the ones supposedly full of experience, strength, and hope—left me feeling disconnected. Too many stories about bleary-eyed salesmen brought to their knees by “the bottle” that were not mine nor typical of anyone I knew. 

I told a friend of mine—Pat, a former sportscaster who found his sobriety after an embarrassing public scandal—that I hadn’t found any of the literature particularly inspiring. He emailed me a piece called “The Drunk’s Club” that was published in Harper’s in 2011. The author of that story was a writer and philosophy professor named Clancy Martin, who hailed from Canada but had landed in Missouri. I thought I’d read everything about Alcoholics Anonymous (A.A.), sobriety, self-destruction, and the chaos that follows. His story, his style of writing—well, it blew everyone else out of the water.

His essay mixed academically rigorous research on the mythology and efficacy of A.A., but the throughline was the lurid and shocking details of his alcoholism and depression. This included stories of several failed suicide attempts and many DUIs and a stunning admission about assaulting his ex-wife during a blackout. His essay made me dizzy with several competing emotions—anger and remorse, mostly—but his spectacular writing also moved me to tears. And even though Clancy’s essay was mostly devoid of precious resources of hope, it had somehow provided warm comfort.

*****

By 2018, I had officially launched The Small Bow (TSB), as a site devoted to finding and publishing recovery writing that had the power of “The Drunk’s Club.” 

Naturally, Clancy Martin was the first writer I wanted as a contributor. It was a long shot, but he said yes almost immediately.

The essay he sent in was as brutal and beautiful as I hoped it’d be. It actually hit me harder than “The Drunk’s Club,” especially this scene:

In February of 2011, a little over a year later, I was coming toward the end of my second marriage. I didn’t know that yet. On a work trip to Boston, I had met a woman and, stone-cold sober, telling her “I’m happily married,” I went to bed with her in my hotel room.

She came to visit me in Kansas City. We had been talking on the phone all day every day, which, predictably, is how my wife-at-the-time, Rebecca, first found out, and we were sitting at the basement bar in her hotel. She asked me to drink with her. She had asked me to drink with her in the hotel in Boston, and I had asked her never to offer me a drink. Again, I explained my situation, and then we went to a jazz club in Kansas City that opens at midnight and closes when the musicians are done playing, often around sunrise. The whole city was frozen and the streets were covered in ice and the snow was high and the winter sky was black.

In the jazz club, she suggested “ just one,” and I said, “You’re right. Just one doesn’t hurt.” I ordered a bourbon and soda. I looked at it for a long time as one is supposed to do, and took the first sip expecting an explosion of magic, which wasn’t there at all. Nothing, really. So I downed it quickly and ordered a second, and my date—who would come to hate and fear my drinking, in the grisly suicidal year of relapses ahead—gave me a nervous look. I had three in the next hour, and I decided that was enough.

Then around four in the morning, we walked through the snow back to my car, and we had another drink in her hotel room, and I got home to Rebecca and our two tiny trusting children around five-thirty in the morning. And that was the end of that family and the beginning of my real education about relapsing.

When I first read that, my wife and I weren’t married yet, but we had a one-year-old son and a newborn daughter, and betraying them seemed unfathomable. I couldn’t imagine making that ride home to my own trusting babies, waiting for me to walk in and break their hearts. It hurt so much to imagine it. It also brought up memories of many of those dark, cold, early mornings with the birds chirping insanely, my brain still popping from all the amphetamines and the stink of the last lukewarm beer on my neck with a dead iPhone and a disappointed girlfriend out there somewhere. And yet—comfort.

*****

Almost nine years later, we’re finally able to pull together our first TSB compilation—kicking off with Clancy’s story. But in addition to stories about alcoholism and drugs, we also have some brutal, beautiful, and oftentimes hilarious essays about surviving the loneliness of sex and love addiction, the corrosive shame of financial debt, the vast wilderness of depression, and grief. We share suffering and sobriety, not labels.

When I’m asked why The Small Bow takes an expanded definition of recovery, I sometimes tell people, “I’m not being treated for drugs, or alcohol, or mental health, or my relationship with my parents. It’s all those things, and something beneath them: What I’m being treated for—and maybe you are too—is the fact that the chances of me killing myself are higher than they are for others.” I’ve experienced joy, and I don’t want to exit early. But some days I’m also in so much pain that I feel like it’s an inevitability.

Was that too much? No.

The goal of this book isn’t hope—it’s the gasp. And the feeling of connection you get when you realize you and a close friend share the same secrets.

Whatever brought you here, we want you to feel like The Small Book is both the dark companion and the guiding light you’ve spent your entire life searching for. Think of it as Chicken Soup for the Dark Night of the Soul. So welcome home.

PREORDER HERE:

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ILLUSTRATIONS BY EDITH ZIMMERMAN