Chicago newspaperman Neil Steinberg recently wrote a book about his troubles with booze. Stacy Klein of Playboy.com has the interview:
When Chicago Sun-Times columnist Neil Steinberg was arrested in September 2005 for hitting his wife while intoxicated, Chicago media -- especially the city journalists whom he had critiqued in the past -- wasted no time covering the story. In his new memoir, Drunkard: A Hard-Drinking Life, Steinberg details his alcohol-steeped lifestyle leading up to night of the arrest, as well as his attempts to stay sober while finishing a court-mandated alcohol recovery program and reluctantly attending Alcoholics Anonymous meetings.
PLAYBOY: You promoted your book Hatless Jack: The President, the Fedora, and the History of American Style while living Drunkard: A Hard-Drinking Life. What happens when non-fiction collides?
STEINBERG: Sometimes, when your life goes off the rails, work can be a comfort. So I kept writing, all during the hectic events in Drunkard, the way a man who loses his job will put on his suit and go downtown anyway, just to have something to do. I was still doing publicity [for Hatless Jack], which is why I have that awful scene in New York when I go to Tavern on the Green to give a speech.
PLAYBOY: You mention that movies such as Days of Wine and Roses and The Lost Weekend aren't screened in rehab -- instead you watched Healing the Addicted Brain Part III -- but maybe that's what comes across best in your book: life isn't the boozy, romantic version with a hard ending.
STEINBERG: I wanted to de-romanticize the problem of alcoholism -- I find that even harsh treatments of it tend to present it as an edgy, alluring thing, and downplay the gross, compulsive aspects, which I tried to include.
STEINBERG: Well, it was depressing as hell to write, if that's what you mean. At some point, you want to move on, and when you produce a book like this you really can't, because you keep on refining it. It was like voluntarily returning to your worst nightmare and sharpening the knives.
PLAYBOY: For me, the most devastating part of the book is the first relapse. Did you write through that period quickly or did you need to linger over those events?
STEINBERG: Since I began taking notes at the beginning of rehab -- a friend suggested it and, as a writer, it was a way to pretend to be working -- I ended up writing the book as it was occurring. It was like writing about a fire that's burning in the next room. Several scenes in the book were written an hour after they happened.
PLAYBOY: Your book will likely be compared to A Drinking Life. Have you read Drinking: A Love Story, the memoir of a well-off anorexic, or Smashed, a young female binge drinker's story? Drunkard may strike a chord with many readers because you lead a more familiar lifestyle than exists in recent drinking memoirs. Readers might be able to relate to feeling sad about no longer being able to do Napa wine tastings.
STEINBERG: I've tried not to read any since this happened, because I didn't want to influence my own. I did read A Drinking Life, because I'm a big fan of its author, Pete Hamill. But I remember his giving up drinking by setting down his glass at midnight one New Year's Eve and that was it. Which is sort of like writing about climbing Mt. Everest by saying how you woke one morning at the summit. The program [Alcoholics Anonymous] teaches you "One Day at a Time," and that is handy when brushing away regrets over wine tasting tours you theoretically might have taken someday. Besides, given the rate of relapse, it's premature to decry my dry future. That's only if I'm strong and lucky. I have to remind myself, I've had my share already.
PLAYBOY: Do you still have the bottle of 1960 Scapa you hoped your wife wouldn't sell on eBay?
STEINBERG: Yes, I do, on a shelf in the basement. Perhaps I'm still hoping that I'll drink a bit of the single malt on some happy day when this all magically vanishes. There's nothing wrong with irrational hopes -- that's what keeps us all going in life.
PLAYBOY: Your book is coming out on the heels of several fake-memoir scandals (e.g., Love and Consequences, Surviving with Wolves). Fact-checking is part of the newspaper world, but not an integral component of book publishing. Have you sent Oprah Winfrey a galley?
STEINBERG: Trust is a lot cheaper than fact-checking, which is why publishing houses get into trouble. It isn't even as much part of the newspaper world anymore, as the industry falls away in big chunks. Perhaps the bottom line is that people are more interested in watching videos of a kitten playing with a bowl of spaghetti than whether things are true or not. In my column I once called Oprah "that froglike dominatrix presiding over her Theater of Pain," so I won't be expecting her show to call anytime soon.
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