Sarah Levy's Drinking Games

The author wants to offer "a depiction of sobriety from a young, female voice"

As I've said before, it's not always about the drinks in this newsletter. Sometimes, just sometimes, it's about alcohol abuse and paths to recovery.

Cut to today's edition with Sarah Levy, a young author who has already published a healthy portfolio of work on the topic of sobriety. She's written about getting sober, social distancing as a sober person, falling in love without alcohol, and more—and now she's come out with a memoir touching on all of those topics (with a little social critique thrown into the mix, too). It's called Drinking Games, and Levy took a break from working on her next project (!) earlier this week to talk with me about it. Find an edited and condensed version of our conversation below.

There's a history of writers and specifically female writers chronicling their addictions and drinking behaviors: Caroline Knapp, Mary Karr, Elizabeth Wurtzel, Carrie Fisher, Leslie Jamison... What did you want to say with Drinking Games? What did you want to put forth that you felt perhaps hadn't been?

I read Caroline Knapp, I read Sarah Hepola, I read a lot of books about drinking and blackouts and specifically the relationship between women and alcohol. What I couldn't find at the time—it exists now on different forms of social media—was a depiction of sobriety from a young, female voice. I was 25 when I first started contemplating sobriety, 28 when I eventually got sober, and my big fears were dating without alcohol, advancing in my career, maintaining friendships—just so much of my life in New York had been infused with alcohol. I was really looking for a depiction of sobriety and those “firsts” without alcohol, and that's really what I set out to write with Drinking Games.

You talk about the unpredictability of your drinking, writing that sometimes you felt “perfectly normal” after four glasses of wine, but other times you would find yourself “in tears after half a martini.” It made me think of those who, like myself, fall somewhere in the middle of alcohol use disorder’s severity spectrum and how that can make things confusing. It's easier to recognize a problem if symptoms are more black and white.

For years I held my drinking against a black-and-white definition of what having a problem with alcohol looked like. I thought it meant drinking daily and having severe consequences to my drinking, like losing my job or my home. The image we see in movies is of someone who wakes up in the morning and starts drinking from a handle of vodka on their nightstand, and that's easier for us to understand as a problem. I didn't have any examples of people I knew or even any young women who drank like I did and had elected to stop.

The unpredictability you mention is what ultimately brought me closer to the decision to get sober. I just didn't know what my drinking was going to look like on any given night. More often than not, I was blacking out and would be missing huge chunks of my memory when I would wake up the next day, which was scary. But there were also nights where I would have a few glasses of wine with friends and it looked normal on the outside. That gray area made it confusing for me—and it’s what kept me trying to find a way to make my drinking work for a long time. Trying to moderate ultimately didn’t work for me; taking [alcohol] off the table altogether was the simplest solution.

As someone who is publicly sober, I wanted to get your take on some things happening in the culture. Are you into any of the new alcohol-free beverage products that are on the market today—dealcoholized wines, alcohol-free spirits and cocktails, et cetera—or is this an area you prefer not to touch?

There’s a huge audience for them. On my book tour I went to a lot of nonalcoholic spirits shops and bars, and it's great. When you're getting sober, one of the big fears is that you’re not going to be able to go out and have a fun drink anymore or be a part of that community.

For me personally, though, I find dealcoholized wine and some of the whiskeys and gins a little triggering. They really taste like alcohol, and I never truly enjoyed that taste. If I'm being honest, I didn't drink wine because I enjoyed a nice red with my dinner; I was drinking to get drunk. I was drinking purely for the effect produced by alcohol. So there's less of a purpose for me to drink something like those products.

I do enjoy some of the mixed drinks like Kin and Ghia, but I don't typically find myself reaching for a nonalcoholic wine. But again, for a different type of drinker who's maybe just trying to imbibe less but genuinely enjoys wine, I think they're fantastic options.

I’ve always thought that drinking those drinks and being in those spaces that are about drinking don’t trigger me, but, as I reflect on the past handful of years, I wonder if I'm right about that. I wonder if it opened the door a little bit and then, somewhere down the line, I slipped. And then I wonder if, in some way, promoting these products is problematic...

I have a friend who's sober and loves nonalcoholic beer, and I think it's great that these brands are creating those products. For me, though, nonalcoholic beer, which really tastes and smells like beer, immediately brings me back to the end of a night: I'm drunk and I'm switching to beer because for some reason I think that's going to be better than vodka.

It’s really personal decision, though, and I think it comes down to intention. I’ve had to be super honest with myself: “Am I drinking this because I miss alcohol? Because I want to feel closer to it?” And, to your point, does that in some way then trick me into thinking, “Oh, maybe I could drink differently now.” Right? Having a glass of nonalcoholic wine every day would probably lead me to that place, and I just don’t need to play that game with myself now.

What do you think about the sober curious movement?

I first started to think about getting sober in 2013. There was no sober curious movement and I could barely find articles about sobriety. I remember doing a Google search and finding one old Wall Street Journal piece about how AA was patriarchal. I felt so alone, and I think that if sober curiosity had been what it is today, I probably would have gotten sober earlier. I really see it as a positive.

Not everyone who’s sober curious has the same relationship to alcohol as someone who identifies as an alcoholic and is working a program of recovery, but I think that’s fine. I see it as similar to the conversation about mental health. We’ve made so many strides over the last decade in the ways that we talk about depression and anxiety and, while someone who has general anxiety and takes a low-grade antidepressant is not the same as someone who has severe depression and is not able to get out of bed, I think we understand both as being a part of the same umbrella of mental health. And so similarly, I think sober curious, sober, someone who goes to rehab… It’s all a part of the same conversation, and it’s overall a net positive in terms of breaking the stigma around what drinking less means and what it looks like.

If I wake up on the right side of the bed, that's how I feel about it. But, abstaining because you’re in recovery and abstaining because you’re sober curious are different things, and one of them carries more stigma than the other. We’ve made progress, but we can’t deny that stigma remains. I have recent examples of this in my life. So, I guess I feel that as long as our culture stigmatizes substance use disorders, we should acknowledge that sobriety has been hard-won for many people, and looking at the way some of these drinks are marketed, I feel that’s not the case. But, again, what you say makes sense. Any alcohol moderation is great, and people deserve to celebrate that.

I totally understand what you’re saying, and it was so hard for me to get sober. It really, really was. Staying sober was hard, too. I talk in the book about how I have been a part of a 12-step program and go to meetings. It was not just like, “Oh, I’m going to be sober! It’s easy!” Some of the narratives we’re being fed now can make it seem that way, and when you’ve worked really hard for something and it hasn’t come easily, that can be frustrating.

At the end of the day, when I think about the 22-year-old woman who feels terrified and now has a place she can hide while she figures out what to make of her relationship with alcohol, I think that’s really what I would’ve liked. This isn’t to say that every single sober curious person has a substance abuse problem, but I do think that it’s a entry point for a lot of people who will ultimately get sober or who will continue to do work on their relationship with substances. That there’s a socially acceptable movement maybe makes it easier to explain to their friends why they’re not drinking.

In your chapter on startup culture, you write, “When you don't know who you are, your job can be an excellent placeholder.” I thought of the labels that come up throughout the book: first employee at a startup, guy’s girl, drinker. You write about about being scared of losing your place in the world and how these labels helped you feel tethered to something. This is something that comes up when I’m working with patients in therapy: The attachment to, at times, superficial identities, which can be seen as substitutes for a sense of self, a move away from internality… I wonder, since removing at least one of those labels from your life and doing a lot of personal work in therapy, how do you identify now? How do you think of yourself?

I thought about this recently… A lot of the ways in which I identify myself now are just new versions of the old labels that I gave myself. So I identify myself as a writer. I identify myself as a sober woman. I’m a wife. I’m a daughter. I’m a sister. I’m a friend. I try to think of myself in the context of how I’m interacting with other people versus what I’m getting.

For so much of my life, the labels I held in the highest regard were the ones that had some sort of external validation attached to them. So, being a good student who got good grades and being a graduate of a college that I was proud to have attended. Those are all still parts of who I am, but they don’t necessarily define me.

I do sometimes wonder if I’m doing the same thing with being sober, though. Is it a moniker that I can continue to hide behind? Ultimately, I don’t think so, because being sober is something very authentic and a decision that I made out of tremendous fear… But it is sort of funny now to be open and public about being sober, talking about it all the time and having conversations about how identity is this slippery thing…

So, like you said, when I wake up on the right side of the bed, I feel like who I am is enough. I’m Sarah. I’m a person. I try to be a good person. I try to help others. I write every day. I try to exercise. I feed my body. I just try to be a person who does the right things. But then I’m like, “Okay, I’m a writer, so what will I write next? And what will my next book be? What happens then?” It’s so easy to latch onto these other labels and think about how I identify myself through them.

What I’m hearing is that you are a person who asks herself these questions.

Yeah. And I never asked myself those questions before. It was just like, “I’m the first employee of this startup and that’s everything.” And I didn’t ever think about any other aspects of who I was or who I wanted to be. So I would say I’m someone who seeks and who is continuing to seek.

I usually link to some pieces I either wrote or was featured in in this section, but I don’t think there’s anything new for me to promote since the last letter. There will be soon, though. Soon!

Have a nice weekend. Continue seeking.