Our Sunday posts are usually paywalled, but if you’re in the shit and need a lift, email me here and I’ll hook you up: [email protected].

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Hi all — keeping the seat warm again today for A.J. More of my writing can be found here — it’s free, but you gotta ask. —Ben Gaffaney

I’ve known writers with gigantic Notes-app lists of thoughtful ideas for future articles, poetry collections or novels. I, too, have a Notes-app list, with exactly three ideas to burn:

My shortage of ideas comes from an honest place. I was influenced at a young age by Roger Ebert’s maxim that “It’s not what a movie is about, it’s how it is about it,” and I still tend to prefer art where you can see the marks, imperfections, and weirdness, rather than uncanny accuracy or clockwork plots. By the same token, I can usually summon enough belief to find a throughline in anything, though I’m just about ready to give up on Fred T., due to the constant pummeling stream of news that creates an ever-shifting context to life in the U.S. I’ll pitch it to The Baffler if it ever comes together.

Anyway, since I haven’t cracked Fred T., and the second idea on the list is not an idea at all, I’ll get started on number three.

In 2019, early in my recovery, I read a few recovery memoirs. Sarah Hepola’s Blackout stuck out as one of the best, one I gifted to a rehab friend. David Carr’s The Night of the Gun rules; I read it in 2015, when it didn’t apply to me, and again when it did. I mostly enjoyed Craig Ferguson’s American on Purpose and Carrie Fisher’s Wishful Drinking, among others, but they helped clarify that the celebrity recovery genre wasn’t for me. I found some solace and relatability, but it drove me nuts how often wildly successful people succeeded while wasted, got sober, then continued to succeed. Maybe they lost some friends, but these protagonists maintained core relationships and, in the final third, were able to finally appreciate their success. The drunkalogues were always more engaging, which was perhaps not the message I needed to hear in my first 90 days of sobriety.