Allen Zadoff is the author of several acclaimed novels including FOOD, GIRLS, AND OTHER THINGS I CAN’T HAVE, winner of the Sid Fleischman Humor Award and a YALSA Popular Paperback for Young Adults and the upcoming thriller series Boy Nobody. He is a graduate of Cornell University and the Harvard University Institute for Advanced Theatre Training. His training as a super spy, however, has yet to be verified. Visit him on the web at www.allenzadoff.com.

Holly Huckeba for Junk Talk: Overeating seems to have qualities that put it in a class all its own as an obsessive compulsion. Rarely do you hear of recovering alcoholics attempting to drink in moderation. How have addicts in recovery for other things influenced your own recovery from overeating? Does it work the other way, too, where your unique insights have been able to help those suffering from other obsessions?

Allen Zadoff: Great question, but I think there’s a parallel between recovery from alcohol and overeating.  Many food addicts like me discover they have alcoholic foods, substances that for whatever reason trigger a mental and physical obsession.  There’s a now-infamous story in HUNGRY where I attack a giant chocolate Easter bunny in a colleague’s office, then find myself returning to that office again and again over the course of an afternoon until the bunny is demolished. Chocolate addiction meets Mission Impossible. At the time, I had no idea I was suffering from an eating disorder.  Let me correct that. I was over 360 pounds, so I was clearly suffering from something. But I wasn’t yet in recovery and I had no understanding of the addictive cycle. Looking back on my Easter debacle, I see that one bite of chocolate triggered a physical reaction that caused me to crave more along with a mental obsession that forced me back to eat it again until I was sick.

I found later that if I abstained from certain trigger foods, alcoholic foods and behaviors that triggered the cycle, I was free from them. My alcoholic friends tell me that if they don’t pick up the first drink, they don’t get drunk. And if I don’t pick up the first bite of my alcoholic food, I don’t get food drunk. For many of us, the journey towards eating moderately begins with getting sober from alcoholic foods and behaviors.

The big difference is that I still have to eat. I have to find a new healthy relationship with food—food as sustenance rather than as anesthetic.  In this way, food recovery might be more akin to recovery from co-dependency issues or sex and love addiction. While a food addict can abstain from alcoholic foods and behaviors absolutely, they cannot abstain from eating. I’ve been very inspired by other addicts and the way they view recovery from their substances.

Junk Talk: The 90/10 model of recovery from overeating that you propose in HUNGRY is simple yet powerful (10% changing how we eat; 90% spiritual and emotional work). What does the 90% include for you, on a daily basis?

Allen Zadoff: Our dieting culture puts enormous emphasis on food and weight, doesn’t it? So 90/10 was a way for me to share that my focus had to be elsewhere. But I think it’s important to say that it starts with the food for me. It’s just that once I put down the substance, I realized the substance was never the problem. I think a lot of addicts can relate to this.  Life is the problem. Or rather, my reaction to life is the problem. It’s the reaction that causes me to need something to soothe myself.

So the 90% is about working on myself so I can find a way to live more comfortably in the world.  These days that looks like twenty minutes of meditation twice a day, prayer, therapy, working with fellow overeaters, reporting my food and behavior to someone who knows me and isn’t afraid to call me on it, reading spiritual literature, doing service in my community.

It’s always changing. And by the way, I do it all imperfectly. I watch a lot of bad TV, too.

Junk Talk: Food addiction can certainly benefit from some PR to override the public and media’s cynicism that it is somehow a moral failure. Do you see HUNGRY as part of that PR? Do you feel the need to educate the public or are you strictly speaking to overeaters in HUNGRY?

Allen Zadoff: I feel no need to educate. I’m just trying to share my experience in the hope it might be helpful to anyone who struggles with food, weight, and his/her body.  As a side note, one of the greatest letters I received from a HUNGRY reader was someone who said, “I gave your book to my husband, and for the first time in our ten year marriage, he said he understands who I am and what I’ve gone through.”  That was really gratifying to me, the idea that friends and family of people with food issues could gain some insight by reading the book.

Junk Talk: Your gratitude for overeating may come as a surprise to some readers. Tell JUNK readers more about how gratitude works for you.

Allen Zadoff: It’s a great irony that the thing that almost killed me ended up saving my life and opening my eyes. There’s a lot to hate about the years I spent overeating. As my body got bigger, my life got smaller until there was almost no life to speak of. On the other hand, food kept me sane and comforted me during a troubled adolescence and young adulthood. It worked until it stopped working, until the cure became the poison.

Eventually my total collapse around overeating opened the door to a new life for me—a life of community, spirituality, and emotional growth. I don’t think addiction is the only way to get a new life. But in my case, I ran out of options at 28 years old, and I had to change or die. Today I’m grateful for that.

Junk Talk: Where do you think HUNGRY fits in the literature: Self Help? Memoir? Diet book? Would a mere problem eater benefit at all from reading your book?

Allen Zadoff: I like to think of it as a funny memoir with a serious message. I hear from many problem eaters who write to say, “I don’t have it exactly like you had it, but a lot of what you said made me think, and some of the techniques you describe in the book are helping me.”

Junk Talk: You’ve written an award-winning young adult novel, FOOD, GIRLS, AND OTHER THINGS I CAN’T HAVE, about a fat kid in high school. How much, if any, of this story is based on your own experience in high school? Do readers often ask you this question? Do you think young adult readers expect more transparency and honesty from authors than adult readers?

Allen Zadoff: I’ve written three funny young adult novels now, but I’ve got a new dark thriller series starting next year called BOY NOBODY. An exciting departure for me.

About young adult readers, I think they have a great sniff test. If you lie, you lose them. Being authentic emotionally is very important in young adult literature, but that’s not the same thing as being factual.  My book FOOD, GIRLS, AND OTHER THINGS I CAN’T HAVE is based on how it felt for me to be big as a teenager.  For example, seeing the world based on the size of the chairs. I wouldn’t go to restaurants with booths because I might not fit. I avoided plastic and wicker because they were flimsy and I could break them. In my experience, there are not a lot of 15-year-olds obsessed with wicker. I don’t think you can fake a detail like that. It comes directly from experience. Those are the kinds of things you’ll find in my novels.

Junk Talk: You’ve got a splendid sense of humor, and laughter definitely helps to deliver the painful messages in both your fiction (FOOD, GIRLS) and non-fiction (HUNGRY). FOOD, GIRLS won the Sid Fleischman Award for humor, and HUNGRY is #3 on the Amazon non-fiction e-book list, so obviously plenty of readers enjoy your sense of humor. Do you ever get feedback that your self-deprecating humor hurts or offends some of your readers? If so, how do you respond?

Allen Zadoff: Most people find it refreshing. I try to approach very serious topics with humor and perspective, but it’s humor born out of a lot of pain. I was 325 pounds by the time I was a junior in high school. That didn’t exactly make me hot stuff on the dating circuit.  But my humor isn’t for everyone. And if it offends, I’m probably not the writer for you. I encourage people to find a writer whose voice speaks to them.

Junk Talk: You quote from WINNIE-THE-POOH throughout HUNGRY, which, in addition to your humorous style, brings levity to a tough subject.  But JUNK editors want to know: Is Pooh Bear really a food addict or is Milne’s lovable creation a caricature of an overeater? Or is more going on here?

Allen Zadoff: I quote only because representatives of the Milne estate were kind enough to allow me to do so! I don’t know about Pooh, but I fear his food issues are a bit more serious than he lets on.  Here’s the difference between us. I got to the point where food and weight were making me miserable 100% of the time, and Pooh seems to delight in his eating adventures.  Based on that standard, he’s just fine.  Cartman, on the other hand—That dude has a problem. We should talk.

Here is a little “taste.”

“One day in 1995, I was walking toward a McDonald’s on Eighth Street in New York’s West Village. My plan had been to buy healthy food at the grocery store and make myself a nice lunch, but the moment I stepped onto the street, like so many times before, my good intentions were tossed out the window for the siren song of fast food. I started to cry as I walked, knowing I was about to do the thing I didn’t want to do, the thing that had been hurting me all my life. Now at more than 350 pounds, this thing was getting near killing me.

“Suddenly, I stopped in midstride and turned back toward Washington Square Park. I’d never walked away from a binge before, and I had no idea why I was doing it then. Maybe I wasn’t really walking away. Maybe I was going to hijack a pretzel cart. I couldn’t be sure.

Read the rest in issue 10 of Junk . . .

Passages had arrived by carrier pigeon. Everyone was agog. I snatched a copy of the story and then raced up the winding stairs to my office to read it, huffing all the while. Now it’s your turn.

Junk is proud to present Passages by Fiona Helmsley.

If you read Junk faithfully, you may have already considered this type of obsession, because Jeffery Brown was kind enough to bless our humble little journal with his own tribute to compulsive grooming in Yaaaay, Bite Your Nails.

Check out Jeffery Brown’s latest work, Darth Vader and Son, an adorable picture book for Star Wars fans of all ages. 

Cheryl Strayed is the author of #1 New York Times bestseller WILD, the New York Times bestseller TINY BEAUTIFUL THINGS, and the novel TORCH. Strayed has written the Dear Sugar column on The Rumpus since March 2010. Raised in Minnesota, Strayed now lives in Portland, Oregon.

Holly Huckeba for Junk Talk: Why choose non-fiction? You’ve written both fiction and non-fiction to much acclaim. Tell us what inspires you to write non-fiction.

Cheryl Strayed: I think I’ll always write both. What I love about writing fiction is how you take experience and cast it off into the limitless possibilities of imagination. What I love about writing nonfiction is the visceral power of the author standing immediately behind the work saying this really happened to me. Some stories demand that intensity. I think the story I told in “Heroin/e” is one. It’s the first personal essay I ever wrote, by the way.

Junk Talk: Many writers, when mining for ideas, return over and again to ‘origin’ stories: stories of our family, coming of age, or rebirth. Tell us more about your own idea-mining, and how it works in your fiction and non-fiction.

Cheryl Strayed: Anyone who has read my work knows I’ve been fairly obsessed with telling the story of my mother’s death and my grief over that again and again. I didn’t know that would be the case. It just is. I had to remake my life after my mother died. I had to re-imagine a world without her in it. Doing so was incredibly complex and difficult, so I suppose it’s not a surprise I write about that experience often. Though it’s been a powerful story for me so far, I do think I’ll move on to other things. In my next book my intention is to avoid dead moms entirely. We’ll see if I can stick to that.

Junk Talk: Your essay, Heroin/e, is two stories threaded together–the story of your start and stop of heroin, and the story of your mother’s death. You intertwine these stories without even a glimmer of the disease model of recovery. Instead, you choose a literary model–the hero’s journey–to talk about your recovery. This is, in some respects, a very old school way of looking at addiction; in other ways, it is refreshing, novel and perhaps more inclusive than a purely medical model. Tell us more of your thinking about your addiction and recovery, and your choice of story structure.

Cheryl Strayed: I wrote it that way because I lived it that way. I was heading down the path of heroin addiction, but I didn’t go all the way there. I never became an addict. I was on the cusp of that when I pulled myself away, or rather allowed myself to be pulled away by my ex-husband. It was very hard for me to stop using heroin, but it was a psychological struggle more than a biological one. I could see how heroin had the potential to engulf me entirely, but I ran away from it before it did. So writing about my experiences with heroin within the context of the hero’s journey seemed the truest way to write about it. In its most classic and distilled form, the hero goes into the darkness and comes back a changed person. Heroin did that to me. My mother’s death did that to me. It seems natural to intertwine these two harrowing tales.

Junk Talk: Some writers talk about writing as therapy. Others talk about the primacy of writing as art. What is your take on the debate about writing as art vs. writing as healing?

Cheryl Strayed: I used to be quite defiantly in the writing as art camp, and I still essentially land there. I don’t write to heal. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with writing as catharsis, but there is a difference between being a serious writer and writing because one seeks an emotional release. When that line gets blurred the art of writing is diminished and I think writers—by which I mean people who’ve developed their craft in intentional ways over a long period of time—tend to feel a bit defensive. Like they have to distance themselves from the writing as catharsis camp in order to be seen as legitimate. They didn’t have an experience and then accidentally and brilliantly spill it out on the page, no matter how it might seem. They worked long and hard to create that effect. Having said that, there’s no question that writing is often cathartic for me. I don’t write seeking to be healed, but writing has healed me.

Junk Talk: You make several references to the hero’s journey in Heroin/e. The quest seemed to involve a spiritual journey through death. But you portray neither yourself nor your mother as particularly heroic or successful in your respective quests. Tell us more about how the idea of the hero’s journey plays a part in how you think about the events of this time.

Cheryl Strayed: When my mom got cancer I had this distinct image of what a “heroic” cancer patient looks like. She keeps a positive attitude. She battles and at least temporarily wins. She loses her hair to chemotherapy, but doesn’t let that get her down. She wears brightly colored scarves instead. But my mom didn’t do that. She didn’t have the chance. She just got sick, then she got sicker, and then she died. She lived only seven weeks after her diagnosis. She had always been my hero, but how could she keep being that if she went so fast? I struggled with that question—of whether my mom did cancer “right,” whether she fought hard enough.

The answer is, yes she did. She wanted to live. We don’t always get to choose whether we live or not. We simply like to think we do. Seeing my mom die that way was a tremendously painful thing, but it was informative too. It changed the way I understood almost everything about the world. As far as my own journey, by writing what I did about myself in “Heroin/e” and elsewhere, I’m saying I believe in the strength of the jagged path. We don’t always do the right thing on our way to rightness.

Read Cheryl’s lovely essay Heroin/e, available in this month’s issue of Junk.

We encourage you to go over and check it out. See how that Russian existentialist vibe is relevant (if it is) for writers in the media age.

And keep watching this space. Next month we’ve got a story and an interview from none other than the amazing Cheryl Strayed.

We’re so excited.

Also, dear readers, we have a great surprise for you in the early fall, but I don’t want to reveal it just yet. I do want to hint. Another great writer, someone really sweet, this time from our own Pacific Northwest backyard. Generous as she is talented, she’s given us permission to run a fabulous story, and we’re proud to present it for the very first time online in its entirety.

Keep watching.

THE ZAPS
by William Dickerson

I was in New York City at the time of the 9/11 attacks. While many watched the tragedy unfold live on television, I watched it live from the window of a skyscraper in midtown Manhattan, some sixty blocks away from the unfolding disaster. I would never dismiss the effect that 9/11 had on anyone, no matter how one ended up watching it, because we all did watch it one way or another. But the events of 9/11 had some very specific effects on me, and it’s those effects that I want to tell you about.

Several months after the event, which seemed so completely unreal and unfathomable as I watched it live, its effects began to manifest itself within me in a very physical and emotional way. I began to experience severe panic attacks when I entered the elevator of the building where I worked. I was working as a paralegal during the day at the time, while moonlighting at night editing my first short film. As the elevator door closed on me, I began to experience an instantaneous feeling of vertigo – the 90 degree corners of the floating box I was standing inside began to bend and encroach on me. My sense of equilibrium, my ballast, disappeared entirely and my knees began to buckle. All I could do was casually put both hands on a wall and lean. Sometimes I would have to face the wall, in order to shield my face from the co-workers around me, so they wouldn’t think anything was wrong—as if standing facing the wall in an elevator isn’t itself somehow wrong. The balance was a big problem, but that didn’t compete with the racing heartbeat and inability to breathe. Until the door opened and I was able to step out of it, it was an absolute chore to simply take a breath.

The thing that stands out to me now is the fact that, for the first few months following the event, I felt fine. But clearly the impact of seeing, and living through, such a horrendous catastrophe began to work its way into the shadows of my subconscious, ultimately manifesting itself physically through these panic attacks. It was debilitating, affecting both my personal and professional life.

I had to get help.

I explained my condition to my doctor, who recommended that I go on anti-anxiety medication. No need to see anybody else, no psychiatrist or mental healthcare physician. He could prescribe the meds himself and I could go on them immediately. There was an answer, and the answer was a pill. I was prescribed a standard dose of the drug Effexor, and I was told I would feel concrete results in a couple of weeks. Getting accustomed to the drug wasn’t that bad; I barely noticed it. There were some headaches here and there, but nothing that seemed out of the ordinary. Before I knew it, the panic attacks had ceased. I could ride the elevator just as I had before. There was no vertigo, no trouble breathing, no feeling that I was going to have a heart attack.

Now, as I departed the elevator and turned into the hallway where I worked, I could sense the walls around me – and the walls were as stable as ever, like they were built from titanium. The structure of the building now seemed almost impervious, as if it was better protected from an accident than the walls of a fortress or the deck of an aircraft carrier. What was odd, however, were the people who passed me in the halls. Somehow, they seemed like a part of these walls, as if they were nothing more than impenetrable, gesticulating statues. I felt completely disconnected from them; not like they were strangers, but almost like they were not actually human. I tried to get over this idea by reminding myself that these were only my co-workers. How much more disconnected could I possibly be from them? And did it really matter? In hindsight, this seems like a callous thought, but I was trying to protect myself from the horror of going back to the panic attacks. If the price of not suffering from those panic attacks was that my co-workers seemed like statues, I was willing to pay that price. It wasn’t until I also started to feel disconnected and numb around my friends, my family, and my sexual organs, that I began to consider the potentially dehumanizing effects of this drug.

My stint on Effexor lasted six months. In those six months, my panic attacks were rendered a thing of the past and I was grateful for that. All things considered, medicating myself seemed like the appropriate measure. Looking back on it, I suppose I would do it again. It got me over my hurdle. Presumably since I had never experienced anything like these attacks before, it’s possible that they might have gone away eventually, with or without the use of pharmaceuticals. The numbness became worse, or perhaps it just became more and more noticeable. The first three months were marked by relief after having overcome the panic attacks. The subsequent three months were marked by the realization that to overcome these attacks, I had sacrificed access to some of my emotions. While I wasn’t down as often, and I had certainly stopped panicking, I wasn’t high in the natural sense either. The pill had become an emotional limiter, like a blanket of numbness pulled up to the chin of my senses. I was protected, yes, but protected from what? Life? Life has its ups and downs. You either want to feel them or not. But you can’t pick and choose; you either feel both or you feel neither.

I decided to take myself off Effexor. I didn’t tell my doctor, which maybe wasn’t the best idea. I simply began weaning myself off the pills. I was in control of my life, wasn’t I? I went from a full dosage to a half dosage and within a day, I started to feel the withdrawal. I’ve never been one to dabble much in the realm of recreational drugs. My expertise primarily extends to alcohol and marijuana. I rarely drink, at least heavily, and I can’t remember the last time I smoked weed. Part of the reason I don’t drink much is the horrific hangover I am forced to endure as a result of drinking heavily. The term “hangover” is a term we instantly associate with uncomfortable things like: headaches, nausea, vomiting, dizziness, and moderate to severe dehydration. I can say without a moment’s hesitation that, despite my negative feelings about hangovers, withdrawal from my prescription anti-anxiety medication was exponentially worse than what I would consider a bad hangover. It not only included the uncomfortable things associated with hangovers, but also things called “the zaps,” also known as “brain zaps,” “brain shocks,” “brain shivers,” “head shocks,” or “cranial zings.” If these terms conjure up images of electro-shock therapy in some medieval mental hospital, your visualization wouldn’t be that far from what I actually experienced. For two and a half days, about every 15 minutes, I would endure one of these zaps to my brain. Needless to say, I couldn’t sleep. Every time I’d nod off, WHAM! a shock to the cranium. It was like my brain was strapped into an electric chair, which some deranged executioner inside my head activated at random intervals, whenever he felt it was appropriate to punish me. But I couldn’t get to him because he was protected by the thick bone of my skull. No matter how hard I scratched and pulled at my scalp, there was no getting in there to stop this bastard or to pull the plug from his torture device.

My panic attacks had subsided, but now I was left panicking over whether I had permanently fried the motherboard in my brain. If that was the case, it seemed to me that no soldering iron or spare circuit in the known universe could fix what I had so nonchalantly screwed up.

How come I hadn’t heard any warnings of such a withdrawal? If I had, I just might have heeded them! I can recall horror stories from my youth of people falling asleep in bathtubs of acid and waking up legally insane for the remainder of their lives. I had heard this happened to one of Mick Jagger’s girlfriends. It wasn’t even my generation and the story was in earshot. It doesn’t matter if it was true or not, what matters is I heard it somewhere and it scared the crap out of me. Where is the REEFER MADNESS equivalent for Big Pharma? Where are the propaganda films? The commercials? This is your brain on…SSRIs (cue the egg in the frying pan)? Instead, it’s the opposite: slick commercials littered among our primetime television programs reassuring you that there’s an answer in a pill, and it’s only one doctor’s appointment away. Or mouse click, if you want to order meds yourself from websites outside the medical jurisdiction of the United States; the internet is, after all, international. The warnings today are mild; the horror stories are virtually nonexistent. Pharmaceutical companies no doubt have much better PR people on the payroll than your average LSD blotter chemist did in the 70’s. In the early 1990’s, SSRIs (selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitors) hit the anti-depressant market in a big way and the market did not exclude children. Not until over 10 years later did the medical community realize that prescribing such hardcore meds to children whose bodies and minds are still developing was probably not a good idea. Childhood SSRI prescriptions were banned in Britain in 2003, and in 2004, the FDA issued a black box warning against prescribing SSRIs and SNRIs to children. The reason for the concern was increased suicide risk, which was confirmed by a 2007 study that found that SSRIs increase the urge to commit suicide in individuals under the age of 24. There have even been cases of SSRI use in children leading to permanent, untreatable tics and spasms of the voluntary muscles. There have been links to Tardive Dyskinesia, a movement disorder that afflicts the voluntary muscles, including the eyelids, tongue, larynx, diaphragm, neck, arms, legs, and torso, for which there is no known treatment. In the early 2000’s, when I was under medication, the downside to these drugs were still ignored. It was not common knowledge that you could get the zaps.

After I withdrew completely from Effexor, the zaps stopped and I wanted to fall to the ground and hug the entirety of the planet Earth. I had thought that they would never stop. Everything around me was noticeably clearer. I felt connected again; to my family, to my friends, to myself, and even to my co-workers. Just as happily, I found I could ride an elevator again without experiencing panic. The pills had done their job, but not without a cost.

In 1987, the first SSRI, Fluoxetine (street name Prozac), hit the shelves. It hasn’t been that long since these types of anti-depressant and anti-anxiety medications first went on the market. Our knowledge of the long-term effects of usage is limited at best. In fifty years from now, will we know if cell phones have been proven to cause brain tumors? Will music still be left on CD’s? Will our digital photos remain on our hard drives? Will our brains be okay after years of lacing them with anti-anxiety meds? You can count me among the legion of test subjects who are planning to be around to find out the answer to that last question.

William Dickerson graduated from The College of The Holy Cross with a degree in English and received his Masters of Fine Arts in Directing from The American Film Institute. He is a writer/director whose work has been recognized by film festivals across the country. His feature film, DETOUR, has just been acquired by Level One Entertainment. His first novel, NO ALTERNATIVE, a character-driven look at teenage lives in the grunge era, has been published this April. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife, Rachel, and Cavalier King Charles Spaniel, Duet. For more info, visit: http://www.facebook.com/noalternative.novel

Failure is a condition of life, the point of which sometimes happens in unexpected places. While addicts might be encouraged, more than most, to direct a spotlight into the darkest parts of their soul, it is every writer’s burden to tell their story in such a way that the spotlight shines in the reader’s soul as well, illuminating our deepest fears, and reminding us that the light won’t kill us after all.

Join the Junk editorial staff in celebrating Alan Schulte‘s story, The Point of Failure.

Alan Kaufman is the author of Drunken Angel from Viva Editions. The author of the novel Matches and a critically acclaimed memoir, Jew Boy, he is also the award-winning editor of several anthologies, most notably The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry. He lives in San Francisco.

Tim Elhajj for Junk Talk: I’m a recovering addict myself and thought you really captured what it feels like to navigate the rooms of a 12-step fellowship as a new person. Twelve-step programs, and even the culture of self-help and pop psychology, are parodied in the media, but you write with such reverence of the 12 steps, sponsorship and even your higher power. Did you feel any reluctance as a writer to cast yourself as such an unabashed 12-Step believer?

Alan Kaufman: Not really. The twelve steps saved my life. Also, significantly, they lead me through existential doors that I had sought for all my life but could not somehow access.  Before coming into Recovery, I could READ Camus and even remotely sense my kinship with his perspective and yet have absolutely no idea just how to extract personal meaning from his work for my own life. I could, intellectually-speaking, identify with, say, Melville and yet not be able to grasp the essential spiritual struggle implicit in every line he wrote. But when you have death perched on your shoulders–an awareness of which is absolutely essential to successful engagement with the Steps, Recovery, et al.–then, suddenly, the moment of clarity is at hand. Suddenly you feel identification with others. You can grasp the spiritual struggles at  the heart of so much of what others have faced and wrestled with, the questions about our essential meaning, our actions, our core beliefs–all of which we must confront when getting sober.

Junk Talk: You’re not afraid to weigh in on political or social issues in your work. In one particularly memorable and poignant passage, you meet up with a mentally ill, homeless woman. You’re essentially homeless yourself or very close to it. You allow the passage to become a meditation on homelessness, a stinging indictment of American values. Do you feel called upon to use your gifts to speak to issues that you feel passionate about?

Alan Kaufman: Absolutely! My spiritual life and sobriety and my writing are inseparable from my sense of existential responsibility to whatever lies at hand. And if what lies at hand is glaringly unjust, how can I soberly look away?In fact I would say even further that I dare not look away if I  hope to remain sober. I cannot falsely refuse to bear witness or fail to respond to an urgent human crisis lying near death at my very doorstep or at the very least to express it through my writing.  Because think of the constant lies I will need to tell myself in order to deny what I have seen. I will need to numb myself to a considerable degree in order to avoid the pain of such refused witness. And that is precisely the sort of somatization which modern society–the State and Corporation and most political isms– has fostered among contemporary populations; a kind of feel-good trance state self-absorption that requires, on the part of the individual, constant numbing consumption and denial to sustain. I cannot afford that. Nor do I choose it. Also, my sobriety is contingent upon an ability to empathize with and respond actively to life, meaning other human beings. How can I experience your suffering and turn away indifferently? But if I embrace it at some level, even only as a writer, and convey it, then somehow I have served a purpose. It has not been lost. It will somehow matter. It will not be completely swallowed up. I may not be able to directly counter all such suffering. But I can at least use my gifts as writer and witness to be sure that some of what I have seen is not forgotten.

Junk Talk: Why is it that so many great writers and artists have destroyed themselves with drugs and alcohol? Is there some link between art and addiction? If so, how do you keep your art fresh with no addiction? If not, what do you make of so many good writers being alcoholics?

Alan Kaufman: Those authors whom I admire fall into different camps around this matter of self-destruction. Hemmingway, Faulkner, Kerouac , Hunter Thompson, Ken Kesey, did some of their best work when not yet in the throes of their worst drinking and drugging. Then, as the alcoholism and drugs kicked in heavily, the quality of their work declined sharply.  In other words, one can see a marked descent into tragedy and disintegration in the careers of such writers. Fitzgerald is of course the great example of this. But then, think of those who did not destroy themselves with drugs and booze, like Dosdoyevsky, Tolstoy, Saul Bellows, Rousseau, Joseph Conrad, Flaubert, Tadeus Borowski, Victor Hugo, Emile Zola, Philip Roth, Knut  Hamsun, Mark Twain, I.B. Singer, and Dickens–all writers from whom I have drawn inspiration and example.  They would not have attained the great heights that they did if they had wasted decades drinking themselves into oblivion. Two of personal favorites are Hubert Selby Jr., author of Last Exit To Brooklyn, who had about 25 years of recovery from serious heroin addiction when he died.  Selby put quotes on back of two of my books and we had contact back in the nineties.  Cormac McCarthy is another  personal  favorite who I believe  gave up the booze and in doing so saved himself as a writer.

For myself, I have replaced booze and drugs with spirituality and that includes the necessity to engage with life, with people, and to be true to my experience and to possess the self-discipline and determination, one day at a time, to sit down and write as truly and best as I can.

Junk Talk: I remember going to a meeting a few years ago where at the end we all held hands and recited the Lord’s Prayer, as we have done many time before. I noticed two Jewish men, both newcomers, standing in the circle. After the meeting I asked those men if they felt uncomfortable reciting a Christian prayer. They both said they did, but offered a shrug—“Whatdya gonna do” looks on their faces. Your Jewish identity comes across strong in this work—you’re an Israeli citizen and have fought for the IDF. Have you ever struggled with the Christian charter of 12-Step programs?

Alan Kaufman: Speaking only for myself, I don’t find any particular charter evident anywhere in the 12 step programs that I attend, though there’s attempts now and then by a few misguided folks to impose one.  Recovery is not about religion but spirituality. Few of those who seek to impose religion on programs ever stay sober for long. Live and Let Live is the motto I live by. Efforts to steer programs in some other direction offer result in the one making such efforts getting drunk again. In a typical meeting in SF,  I, a Jew, am sitting among Pagans, Hindus, Muslims, Protestants, Atheists. Episcopalians, Chasids,  Epicureans, Stoics, Sufis, Buddhists, and so on.  At the end of the meeting we all hold hands and pray together. The absence of any specific charter as regards religion is precisely what makes the 12 step programs so distinctive and attractive. You know what is said in the programs about Religion, right? “Religion is for people who are afraid of going to Hell; spirituality is for those who have already been there.”

Junk Talk: I had the pleasure of watching you read from Drunken Angel recently. Wikipedia says you were “instrumental in the development of the Spoken Word movement in literature.” I’m not completely sure I know what that means, but I really enjoyed listening to you read from your memoir. You were very engaging and I felt moved at the end. What can you tell aspiring memoirists about the Spoken Word movement?

Alan Kaufman: Back in the late eighties and early nineties, a movement sprang up in NY, Chicago, San Francisco, of poets who declined to term ourselves poets–a kind of  avant garde protest against the stultifying state and exclusivity of American Poetry at the time. This gave rise to the Poetry Slam and other forms of poetry performance. We sought to write poems that you could see with your ears and hear with your eyes and we wrote for audience. And the benefit  was that I got an opportunity, time and again, to hear my voice and to see the impact of my use of language on real-time audiences. Also, I developed a sense of economy of statement and alternately of poetic possibilities through my involvement with the Spoken Word scene. I edited one of the principle anthologies of the Spoken Word Movement: The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry, which is a bestseller, now in its 14th printing.  And I’ve since had published an earlier memoir, entitled ‘Jew Boy’ and a novel, entitled ‘Matches’ and in each of those, as with ‘Drunken Angel’  my sense of voice and language were the direct result of my long involvement with Spoken Word poetry.

But the bottom line in writing, I believe,  is to write, consistently and with discipline. And in choosing what to express,  to thine own self be true. My life is the story I have to tell. It is inexhaustible.