Marina Scholtz

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Early Sobrieties, Michael Deagler, (Penguin, 2024), 272 pages, £16.99
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So obviously your title includes the term sobriety, and this book is very much literary fiction. What booksellers call ‘quit lit’ is such a prominent and profitable part of publishing—during the publishing process and your book tour did you feel pushed into any marketing pigeon holes?

That’s a good question. I actually hadn’t come across the term quit lit until a few months ago.

You are so lucky.

I hadn’t realised what a social media presence it had, and that’s because I got sober in 2013. I never really got into any of the memoirs, which I think is mostly what occupies that space. The book was originally sold as a short story collection. Which, you know, publishers are not as excited about. My editor talked me into putting it out without a subtitle— it wouldn’t’ say ‘stories’, but then there was some concern with the marketing people that if the book was just called Early Sobrieties with no subtitle it might be considered a memoir. It says ‘novel’ on the book right— on the cover?

It doesn’t, but it looks like a novel and then a Percival Everett quote on the front cover says, ‘this novel is surprising in all the best ways.’

Interesting. I haven’t seen the British edition yet.

Oh it’s lovely, but the American editions are always nicer.

I feel the opposite. I wonder if the grass is always greener.

So you were having this marketing question about it being a short story collection or a novel.

Yes, we had to really emphasise its being fiction. There are certainly a lot of sober people who have read the book, and I think some of them, who hadn’t really had any kind of previous relationship to literary fiction, have maybe been disappointed in some ways. It doesn’t have that kind of normal recovery arc, and it just doesn’t have some of the normal beats of more commercial fiction.

You mentioned the recovery arc. This book doesn’t delve deeply into the war stories, or the more extreme consequences, of Denis Monk’s [the protagonist’s] drinking—these are mostly alluded to. Your novel is far more concerned with the experience of sobriety than of active addiction, which is unusual. So often getting sober is a narrative punchline, and sobriety itself is ignored. Was this a conscious decision, or did you start out writing about active addiction?

It was definitely a conscious choice. I had been writing a lot more addiction stories prior to this project.

Well, they can be so funny…

When I got sober, because I was in my early 20s, a lot of the books I was reading, and the books I was writing towards, were about these people who are fucked up in various ways.

What were you reading? 

I mean, Trainspotting was a big one. Jesus’s Son by Denis Johnson and Drown by Junot Diaz, which doesn’t really have anything on addiction in it, but exists in a similar problematic young man headspace. There were a lot of books like that. There’s a great book called Knockemstiff by Donald Ray Pollack. I was writing that kind of stuff. It’s sort of a crowded space. I don’t know if they still do this, but when I used to submit to literary magazines, they really didn’t want stories about people just sitting in bars, because they just got so many of them. I kind of felt like I had gone as far as that topic would take me. But as you said earlier, I wasn’t finding a lot of fictional treatments of sobriety, and especially when that became my reality, and therefore became interesting to me, I wanted to try to write a book about that. I set parameters for myself, because the problem with sobriety is that from the outside it’s sort of boring.

Yes, certainly to other people.

Yeah. Precisely. I needed to figure out a way to make it interesting and to make it feel new. You also see depictions of sobriety in film and television, and they’re all kind of the same thing. People are very familiar with the AA meeting or the person who’s in rehab. Similarly, relapse is such a big part of sobriety narratives, and I didn’t want to dangle relapse as a source of tension throughout the book.

You do it once, and it’s really agonising.

I had to break some of my rules a little bit, just for the sake of plot, but I didn’t want there to be flashbacks. When writing fiction, you want the most interesting stuff to happen in the present. Having these big trauma plot type things in the background would, I think, take some of the attention out of the present. I was really seeing how, if you take away the war stories, which are ostensibly perhaps the most interesting thing about this guy, it forces you to come up with a way for him to be interesting in the present.

There are relatively few examples of literary fiction that do write about sobriety rather than addiction. Did you come across any examples? Was there anything you read that influenced you positively?

There is a memoir by Tom Macher called Halfway that I don’t think a lot of people read, unfortunately. I think he got sober at 17. It’s a kind of a coming of age memoir, but he’s coming of age and he’s already sober. He’s living in these halfway houses in Montana and Louisiana, and he’s around the older, more fucked up men who also live in these houses. It treated sobriety as this new way of living which he needed to figure out, and that all these other people are also trying to figure out. In the absence of substance abuse, there are just other people, and you have to deal with their instability. That was a really fun book.

You chose to write specifically about early sobriety which feels like such a fertile time. Your protagonist has these moments where he finds the world unbearably beautiful. Is this new lease on life, and perspective, why writing this specific period works so well?

I mean, that was just kind of my experience. I got sober in my early 20s while I was doing my MFA. I was there for three years and I got sober in the summer between my second and my third year. So for me, my first year of sobriety was in a writing programme, which was perfect because I hadn’t gotten much writing done. I had this great period of fertility and all this stuff was just pouring out of me, and I had the perfect outlet for it. I reread Jesus’s Son that year. It is a book about an active addict who has this very lyrical way of seeing the word, and I related strongly to that. I mean I read it when I was still drinking, but I related to it much more when I was newly sober. I just think I was feeling the immediacy of everything. That was the feeling I wanted to try to capture. Everybody tries to capture the feeling of being fucked up on the page, but I thought this was better, and more interesting. There is a deeper psychology to this. I still feel that way. Sobriety does get quite uninteresting fairly fast, but if any period of sobriety is interesting, then it’s this.

I really liked what you said earlier about good writing being in the present, and that’s essentially what your character is learning to do—to be present and to observe.

Yes, exactly. Because so much of addiction is trying not to be there, and then suddenly you’re here, and it’s almost overwhelming.

You said that it’s boring for other people—perhaps because they’ve been experiencing life as it is for forever, and then you’re just at this new baseline of being like, look at the sky!

Exactly. You sound kind of crazy. It is a rebirth type thing. Which is wonderful. It is an experience, obviously not the whole thing, but I do wish more people could experience things anew like that.

Would you ever write about more long-term sobriety? Obviously, statistically, there are far more people who’ve been sober for one year than have been sober for two, or five, or ten. You’re ten years sober now?

Yeah, almost eleven.

So that’s actually just quite a rare experience. Would you ever write about sobriety now, or are you bored of it?

I’m sure that I will again at some point, but I think there would need to be more stuff going on. I couldn’t focus on it as purely as this book is focused on it, I don’t think that would work. When you’re twenty-six and you don’t drink you’re the outlier, but when you’re thirty-five and you’re not drinking, well nobody is drinking. Even my most dysfunctional drunk friends just have jobs now. I’m shocked by how much they don’t drink. Then I’m in Los Angeles where nobody drinks, because they’re afraid it’ll make them look old. I think as you move deeper into normal life, and you have more years, it’s harder to tell who is an addict and who is just middle aged.

How did your writing practice change when you got sober?

I think drinking really just got in the way of writing. If I hadn’t been in classes I don’t know that I would have written anything at all. The few things that I tried to write outside of class just never went anywhere. Everything would be written the night before, and it would just be very, deeply bad. There was a lot of embarrassment surrounding that, because, you know, you’re turning in this horrible work that you wrote when you were very hungover, and you know you’re not proud of it. It was really hard for me to write anything longer than seven pages, and my source for that was very raw and very dark, because that was just my headspace at the time. I can remember thinking that I’d never be able to write a book in that condition. It would have been impossible. Then when I quit it was the complete opposite, and part of it was just having all this time, and all these thoughts. I feel like all I did for the first three years was just write stuff, and that has slowed down a lot now. It was night and day, and the writing was just better, because your head is clear, and you can actually think about something from more than one angle.

I wanted to ask you about Monk’s precarious living situations throughout the book. He never has a home, he is never stable. Each chapter charts a new living situation. Do you think this state is analogous to his early sobriety, and what did constantly changing his setting allow you to do?

I think that just from a practical standpoint, the fact that he doesn’t have his own spot enforces the idea that he himself hasn’t settled within his own life. But also, if he moves around a lot and he’s always with different people, there are just more opportunities to confront him with different situations.

It drives plot and action in a way that is very satisfying and neat. 

It’s useful. There is that genre—the literature of the wanderer and that idea that you need to figure out the thing that you are figuring out before you can find a peaceful existence somewhere. I think partly that’s just an attractive narrative structure, and it’s a pretty well-established genre. It felt particularly suitable to writing this experience of sobriety and to drawing out the volatility of his [the protagonist’s] situation.

I want you to tell me a bit more about Monk’s reading habits in the book. He’s always picking up a Le Carré or a Patricia Highsmith. He reads like an old British lady.

I thought about that a lot actually, you’re the first person to ask me about that. I kept changing his reading habits. I wrote the first version of this book in 2016-17—I’ve been working on it for a long time. He was often just reading whatever I was interested in at the time. There was an earlier version of this where he was on this creative writing track. So he was reading more contemporary things that a creative writer would read. But then I was like, okay, he’s not writing his own novel. He’s just a dude. I was trying to think of what he would like—he just reads like a normal person. I tried to pick best seller type stuff that that I still think is good, that would also be readily available. Authors my grandmother would read. They’re all good writers. On a sentence level they’re just great, understated stylists.

Ok, a less serious question to end on, but I am curious. In the U.K book events are consistently the worst for non-alcoholic drinks—we’re talking lukewarm tap water in a wine glass. What is literary sobriety like in the U.S?

I mean I think the publishing industry might be different in New York, there’s always a lot of drinking at events. When I was on my MFA and I first quit it felt like everybody was drinking all the time, and now it doesn’t seem as big a deal. The literary scene in Los Angeles, in particular, has a lot of sober people in it and there is more of a culture of that out here. Situations where you have to not drink something come up less and less frequently now. My sense is that the U.K. drinking culture is a little more ubiquitous.
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Michael Deagler is a writer based in Los Angeles where is he pursuing a Ph.D. at the University of Southern California. His stories have appeared in Harper’s, McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading, and elsewhere. Early Sobrieties is his first novel, and was a New York Times Editor’s choice.

Marina Scholtz is a writer and bookseller who lives in London. She can be found making TikToks on out of print books @oopsarchive.