“Ian was my biggest cheerleader, and we sold our companies at a profit.” Together they bought a twenty-thousand-square-foot lakeside home, and began spending every weekend there, traveling on Fridays, each with their mug in hand—his of gin, hers of vodka. “It would just be a lost weekend. We would isolate with our books, magazines, newspapers, and alcohol.”
Then, on New Year’s Day 1990, Ian woke and declared, “I think we should quit drinking and smoking.” He did; she did not. She would sneak into bars, downing double vodkas. “I worked very hard on that marriage, to make him love me, but it ended by September.” Alex’s drinking escalated. “No one was watching, at that point,” says Alex. “All I could think of was: ‘I managed to fuck this up. I might as well drink.’ I would take a vodka bottle out of the freezer and while the bottle was in my mouth, I would lecture myself. And that was the beginning of the day. I would get a block from the office and realize I was too messed up to work. I would lie about why I wasn’t coming in, take down my messages, and pass out in the car for a couple of hours—at ten or eleven in the morning. Later, I wouldn’t be able to read my own writing. I was incapable of showing up at my own business. I would book appointments for three in the afternoon and hope that I could make them. For months and months, I was incapable of functioning.”
Not only did she drive drunk: at that point, she also had a horse and she would ride drunk. Increasingly, others became worried. “My father called my GP. My staff knew. I never went anywhere without a ton of vodka—and the only time that vodka doesn’t smell is in the bottle, with the cap on!”
The week after the Las Vegas incident, Alex’s senior executive asked for a meeting in the boardroom. He said: “You may fire me for saying this, but there are a lot of people who care about you who are very worried about what happened in Las Vegas.”
Alex responded by driving to her parents’ cottage drunk, picking up two hitchhikers on the way, stopping at an old boyfriend’s cottage en route, finally arriving at 2:30 a.m. “I was driving on the same road where my brother had been killed.” The next morning, she downed a mickey of vodka and visited one of her sisters, who said: “I am not going to lose another sibling to alcohol. You are going to treatment.”
Alex phoned the Betty Ford Center drunk, securing an intake date three weeks hence. In the meantime, she drank every bit of alcohol she owned, with the exception of her Tia Maria. “My sister dropped me off at the airport, saying: ‘I can’t imagine you never having another vodka martini or glass of wine.’ I said: ‘Me, too.’ With that, I boarded the plane and ordered a tumbler of vodka in first class.”
Still, she was sober when she landed. Within days, she was introduced to the Twelve Steps. “The compulsion and obsession to drink was lifted,” says Alex. On the first anniversary of her sobriety, she treated herself to a black Ferrari. But she was not contented. Quite the opposite: she was depressed and anxious. Without alcohol in her system, the symptoms she had grown used to were much more evident. “I hit bottom in sobriety. My system would flip every three to five weeks, from mania to deep depression. Other people were getting more serene, and I was not. Half the time, I wanted a twenty-two-wheeler to roll over me, and the other half, I could tell people thought I was on cocaine or speed. When I am offensively manic, I want to go shopping and be in public. All I have to do is look at my promiscuity or my jewelry”—she holds out a spectacular diamond ring—“and I know when I am manic. I get so high and manic that I feel like the ball in a pinball machine on full tilt—nobody does anything fast enough for me!”
Five years sober, she was told by her doctor that she was manic-depressive and should go on Lithium. Alex was diagnosed with rapid-cycle bipolar, discovering that much of what had fueled her remarkable productivity and her rocketlike career was her disorder. “To be diagnosed with this was as big a relief as it was to be diagnosed a plain-vanilla alcoholic,” she says. “Alcohol had taken the edge off the very high points and off the very lows as well. It was clear I had been self-medicating. The symptoms were greater sober, and all magnified. The more sober I got, the more severe and violent they were.”
Today, Alex is dedicated to routine. Alcoholics Anonymous is an enormous part of her life. She says: “When I am not on the beam in my program, it is as if my twelve-cylinder Ferrari is in third gear at sixty-five hundred rpms—I need to take my foot off the pedal and breathe.” In addition, Alex works out three times a week, plays tennis and golf, and travels around the world. “I lead a very charmed life,” she says. “I sold my last business in 2003, and I did really well. It has allowed me to be very generous with my family, and my foundations. And if I weren’t sober, I wouldn’t have any of this.”
As I was writing this book, I knew that I wanted Marion Kane’s story—hers being one of two addictions, intertwined. Still, it took her several months before she decided to share her story with me, using her real name and all her history, unvarnished and undisguised. When the well-known food writer finally welcomes me into her living room in Toronto’s funky Kensington Market area, she begins to speak with a journalist’s flair. “They conspired, my two addictions: for almost thirty years, they were benign and somewhat separate. Then they weren’t, and they came together in one demonic combination.” Her eyes are wise and frank, and she uses her hands when she talks. I like her immediately.
Kane first took Valium in 1976, when her ten-year marriage, to a man she had known since she was fourteen, came apart. “It was a nasty breakup,” says Kane. “He left precipitously, and our daughter was only five. I was overwhelmed by motherhood. This breakup unleashed abandonment fears, ones I’d had since childhood. I realized that I had been suffering from depression since my early teens. But the world went really gray when I was thirty. That year, I started drinking with the pills—which multiplied the effect of the sedation. I can remember falling out of a cab—I was starting to self-medicate.”
By the early 1980s, life had turned around for Kane. She started her food writing career, a vocation she loved. “I was the food editor at the Toronto Sun, not taking pills, happy because I had found my passion.” By that time she was in a second relationship, and in 1987 she had a second daughter. A couple of months later, she and her partner broke up. “Being a mother again and having a career was the happiest time of my life,” she says. “I still had episodic problems sleeping—I had anxiety as a child and a lot of insomnia—but I am a feisty individual. I had a good happy period for several years.”
In 1989, she was wooed by the Toronto Star, Canada’s largest newspaper, to become their food editor. “I believe I am an adrenaline junkie,” says Kane. “I loved my job. I interviewed them all: Julia Child, Jamie Oliver before he was big, the chef who escaped from 9/11. It gave me an outlet for my creativity, and for about fifteen years, I was happy.”
Still, she was taking Imovane and lorazepam to sleep, rotating them. Then menopause hit, and her sleep problems grew worse. “I realized that I might sleep better if I had a glass of wine with the pills,” says Kane. Eventually she discovered that brandy worked very well, too. “I would take a few shots of brandy, a couple of pills, maybe another few shots in the middle of the night, and more pills.” Kane had episodes of falling down, the odd bloodshot eye, a stomach ulcer, gallbladder issues.
The rubber hit the road when her younger daughter turned seventeen and left home. “I had trouble at work, an empty nest, menopause all at once,” she says. “Menopause is an upheaval of the first order. I was an addict, waiting to happen.”
Thinking she could escape all this, Kane experimented with a geographic cure: she moved to the small town of Stratford, Ontario, buying a big house on a quiet street. But despite the fact that she made several good friends, she was isolated and missed the urban scene of Toronto. “Soon I had started to drink copious amounts and take pills every night at bedtime. One night, I was on assignment in Miami, for the South Beach Wine and Food Festival. I was staying at the Fontainebleau hotel, with a balcony and a view of the ocean. I had
a headache, so I took three Imovane and drank four or five little rum and vodka bottles from the minibar—I had a great sleep. I started taking the vodka bottle to my bedroom. At first it was a couple of nights a week, and then it was every night. Often I would have ‘lost weekends,’ sleeping the whole of Saturday and Sunday. It was incremental and gradual. My goal was oblivion.”
On more than one weekend, Kane booked into one of Toronto’s better hotels, hiding behind the Do Not Disturb sign. One weekend, her youngest daughter came searching for her mother and discovered she had consumed the whole minibar. Says Kane, “I was in denial. I genuinely didn’t think I needed help.”
In 2008, a doctor told Kane: “You will die if you continue.” “That was the date of my last drink,” she says, “but it took six weeks to get off the pills. The withdrawal was horrendous. Each week was harder than the last. For four months, I would go to my friend’s house and say, ‘Help me!’ The withdrawal was made worse by an antipsychotic I was prescribed to help me sleep, called Seroquel. I was going from bad to worse. Every morning I would wake with a feeling of impending doom.”
Finally, she went to rehab. “It’s been a long, bumpy road of recovery,” says Kane. “Rehab was like boot camp, but it saved my life. It wasn’t a picnic being there. I hated it at first, but there were AA meetings and I was with kindred souls. I was with a lot of soldiers who had come back from Afghanistan and Bosnia. When I arrived, I couldn’t peel a banana or make a cup of coffee—people thought I was a junkie. But they nurture you. Being parented, cared for: this is what you need.
“I want people to understand that we don’t become addicts because we want to destroy ourselves,” says Kane. “It’s about banishing the demons—and I had a lot of demons. I have too many antennae—it’s a curse and a blessing. I’d like to have a dimmer switch, to turn things down.”
Kane believes that most addicts have been deprived of love as children. “My family was pretty dysfunctional,” she says. “My mother, who is a biologist, fled the Holocaust. Most of her family was murdered. Both my parents had had brutal lives. I grew up in a secular Jewish household in postwar England—both parents had funny accents, we ate funny food. My father, who taught medicine at University College London, was a very angry guy, although brilliant and a softie at heart. It was a chaotic household.”
Kane is radiant as she pours tea, and tells me of her life today. “I have healed a rift with my eldest daughter. I live with a good man who treats me well. And I have really made my peace with my mother, with whom I never got along. I believe that recovery is a process of being reborn. You know, you can keep stumbling, or you can go through a crisis and find deeper meaning and peace. Today, I take no drugs to sleep. I exercise and I try to find peace of mind.” What’s her secret to sleeping? “I watch Jon Stewart each night before bed.” She tosses back her head, and laughs her throaty laugh. “A lot has come together.”
Sleeplessness and alcohol use: it’s a common coupling. Anxiety and alcohol is, too, and to discuss this I turn to Julie—or we’ll call her that. A raven-haired woman in her early thirties, with enormous brown eyes and a delicate tattoo etched on her inner wrist. Very hip, very open, well-known on the Toronto scene. “With me, it always comes back to anxiety,” she says over grilled chicken in an outdoor bistro. “I think I’ve had an anxiety disorder my whole life. As a child, it would manifest this way: I couldn’t sleep because I had such a persistent fear that our house was going to catch fire. How would I save my little brother and sister? ‘I am going to kill them somehow. I am just not going to be a good sister.’ That’s what used to haunt me. God knows where that pressure came from.”
Julie started drinking when she was eleven: “Everyone else was drinking, so I did, too.” It was during those years that her anxiety escalated and she began having panic attacks, crippling ones by the time she was sixteen and seventeen. They happened often, especially when she drove. “The more I thought about it, the worse it got. I went to a doctor, and took pills. But the only thing that seemed to work was alcohol. Alcohol was the only thing that would get me through minute by minute.”
When she was in her late teens, her parents moved to another city for work opportunities, and Julie moved into her own apartment. By then her anxiety had turned into full-blown agoraphobia. She would drink just to be able to go out to a concert—and then black out by the second half.
Once she finished college, her friends started settling down—but Julie continued to party at bars. “It was like everybody else went home and I stayed out.” She gets very quiet. “In my mid-twenties, I was with the man of my dreams, shopping for rings, looking for condos. He came home one day and said, ‘I can’t do this.’ Why did he leave me? Things were getting bad. I would buy two bottles of wine—and finish one before he got home from work. After he left, my drinking escalated. The times I was feeling terrible were getting longer and longer. I saw no hope and no answer.
“I would put myself in situations that no one would dream of. Drinking a bottle of wine, and then driving to get another—I will never forgive myself for that. Nights were longer on red wine or beer. On vodka, they were shorter—vodka my blackout drink. One night I went to a vodka bar. The next morning I woke up in a hotel. There was a pair of boxer shorts on the floor. The guy was nowhere in sight. I didn’t know where I was. I called my roommate and said: ‘Where am I?’ She said, ‘You’re kidding, right?’”
Today, Julie is on anti-anxiety medication, sees a doctor regularly, and just picked up her one-year medallion at AA. Without alcohol, she’s thriving: a new job, a new man in her life, and a calendar filled with international travel. “I still get anxious,” she admits. “But I can fly, I can see the world, I can go to a concert without freaking out. It’s so cool.” She grins her impossibly charming grin, and I have no trouble believing her as she heads off into the soft summer night, her bag slung jauntily over her shoulder and her head cocked toward the light.
9.
Romancing the Glass
A SLIM STEM OF LIQUID SWAGGER
There is some kiss we want with our whole lives.
—RUMI
Toronto, Spring of 1996
A party on a cold Wednesday night: I am reluctant to go, but my friend Victor Dwyer persuades me to get a babysitter. What is purported to be a fiftieth-birthday party for my friend, writer Marni Jackson, turns out to be her surprise wedding celebration: she has married her longtime partner, film critic Brian D. Johnson. Zal Yanovsky—formerly of the Lovin’ Spoonful—is onstage, pumping up the crowd. Brian is on the bongo drums: delirious tribal joy. I feel self-conscious in my singlehood.
A handsome man approaches me. “Remember me?” “Of course. You’re Jake MacDonald, from Winnipeg.” Almost two decades earlier, we had had a twenty-minute chat at a party, talking about writing. I sat on a piano bench, a newlywed, happy with my new magazine job, talking to an aspiring writer. I wore white linen and brown velvet. He had beautiful eyes, dark hair. I remember him well.
“Can I get you a drink?” It is me offering: he doesn’t know this crowd. He has come with his good friend, the writer Paul Quarrington, and he’s looking to me for cues. “Sure, a beer,” he says. He thinks I’m finding a way to ditch him, but I return with two drinks. We begin to share life stories: our failed marriages, the fact we have children the same age, our mutual interest in writing.
After a long time, we part. But when the music starts, he crosses the floor and asks me to dance. It’s a slowish song, which catches me off guard. Something electric happens when he holds me in his arms: I feel a current in my whole being.
We find a quiet corner at the bar. “I have a question,” he says. “From where I sit, it looks like you have everything in life—a great job, a son you love. For a woman with so much, why are you so sad?” I tell him about lost love. He has deep, questioning eyes. He’s a good listener. I am, too. I learn that the second of two marriages has just ended. I am intrigued.
When the last guest leaves, we are st
ill perched on the bar stools, cleaners sweeping around us. Outside, in the crisp night air, standing in our trench coats, he offers to escort me home. In the middle of negotiating who will drive, we kiss. For the next fourteen years, our lives will be intertwined, transformed, blessed.
Two nights later, both of us are headed to the National Magazine Awards. I dress with extreme care: my sheerest stockings, my slimmest skirt, my favorite perfume, lipstick. When I leave the house, I tingle.
Hours later, we arrive home, two writers flushed from winning. His magazine has given him a bottle of scotch. Will I keep it for him, to share the next time he is in town? I blush. Of course. I pay the babysitter, pour him a glass of Irish whiskey, and the story begins to unspool, like a fairy tale—only better.
The Houseboat, Summer of 2003
In the lake, both naked, mid-morning. Jake and I, treading water, talking. I look beyond his head and I see two things approaching: a moose, and a Jet-Ski. The moose will retreat. The Jet-Ski won’t, bearing as it does a man who has traveled for an hour to find the houseboat, to tell Jake he wants a book autographed. Jake has won a national award for his book Houseboat Chronicles, and his fan club is growing. It makes me deeply happy. But Jake tells the man to come back another time: he is not going to interrupt our swim or invite a stranger into the houseboat. I think: what a singular man.
That night, I am inscribing a book for him, one called The Sea. Carefully, I copy the words of a poem I love: “Natural History,” by E. B. White, one he wrote for his beloved Katharine in Toronto’s King Edward Hotel. A poem that says too much about the fact that Jake and I live in two different cities and can’t resolve where to call home. We each have a child, there are two other parents involved, and three places we call home. This is complex. Both of us are writers, and the web we are devising will be our eventual undoing.
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