High Sobriety
by Alice King
Orion £16.99, pp301
In 2005, Alice King, once a well-known and wealthy wine writer, was unemployed, freshly divorced with three small children and regularly woke sweating to a collection of empty vodka bottles, unable to remember whether she or a visiting stranger had drunk them the night before. She needed to knock back the dregs of any leftovers while her kids got ready for school to stop her hands from shaking. She was sick every morning and could never recall going to bed. It had taken years to reach this level of alcoholism and recovery was not going to come easily.
The last section of King's memoir, High Sobriety, details her tortuous eventual recovery and is the most absorbing and best written part of the book. Dealing with her epic dependency was achieved in part through the same bloody-mindedness that convinced her she could drink all the booze in all the world without becoming a gruesome drunk and, in part, through attending many, many AA meetings. It is particularly interesting that when she began doing a column in the Times about being a recovering alcoholic, she got a huge response from readers: people saying that they saw themselves or someone very close to them in her and didn't have a clue who to ask for help.
As a wine writer, King had a life where alcohol was ubiquitous and acceptable, but she describes experiences that many of us have had - Saturday sessions in the pub with friends, raucous dinner parties, stifling hangovers with more drinks, a 'quick one' after work turning into many, then turning into staggering home and waking up blankly guilty.
That her experiences are so commonplace and yet go so badly wrong makes for an uncomfortable read. For one thing, a sober look at the reality of drunkenness reveals it to be a very silly state for so many of us to spend so much of our time trying to achieve; for another, King comes across as a particularly unattractive drunk. Chances are, she's being overly tough on herself as she is self-confessedly still deeply involved in untangling what got her to the point where she would drop her three boys off in the mornings with a red-wine smile still staining her face. None the less, she does describe herself fairly negatively: greedy with her drink from the very start ('I seem to have the leaky glass again'), self-involved, selfish and vain. Her now ex-husband Niall also comes across as being less than appealing; because both the central characters appear so unlovable, at times this is a turgid read.
King's style is very much that of a wine writer and so her story is told via the wines she drank. Consequently, there is far too much 'creamy toasty fizz' or 'delicately elegant, coconutty Chateau Lafaurie-Peyraguey'. Her floweriness extends well beyond wine. She has an odd obsession with describing almost everything she wears: 'My leopardskin coat ... my pink trilby ... my Gina shoes.'
In spite of all this, it's hard not to want to finish the book, if only to find out how someone digs themselves out of such a mess. This may be voyeurism thinly masked as compassion - reading about someone managing to screw everything up can but make you feel better about your own untidy life.
