DRUNKEN WOMEN NOVELISTS DIDN'T SOBER UP

drinking A number of readers have written in to point out my misidentification of Brendan Behan as "British" and to question the lack of women writers in my article about novelists who sober up. “Where are the women?” asks one. “Is the complete lack of women in this article due to the author's sexism or to a lack of women who are writers and alcoholics?”

My wife, who is Irish-American, had a short answer to both questions. “It’s because you are a sexist colonial English bastard,” she said to me.

As juicy as this sounds, sadly I must admit that my mistake over Behan’s nationality was only that—a mistake, so apologies to those concerned. The lack of women is a more interesting puzzle. My focus in the piece was narrower than it may have looked; I was primarily interested in that small subset of writers who were alcoholics who had sobered up and kept writing. The idea was to compare the "before" and "after" periods. The number of male writers who met this criteria was very small. The number of women writers who met it was precisely zero.

This isn’t to say that there haven’t been women alcoholic writers—readers wrote in to suggest Marguerite Duras, Francoise Sagan, Dorothy Parker, Jean Rhys, amongst others. But as far as I know, none of them wrote after getting sober. If anyone can correct me on this count, please do.

Does this mean that the novelist-as-self-destructing-rock-star is a mostly male phenomenon? Or that women stayed sloshed for longer? It could be that there are many sober women writers out there, but they’re better at maintaining their alcoholic anonymity than men.

~ TOM SHONE

Picture credit: Un ragazzo chiamato Bi (via Flickr)