Stephen King on Booze

We are in Scotland for the festive period, hunkered down around blazing fires, keeping out storm Brenda who is raging outside.

(Don't you just love the names they pick for storms? Brenda sounds like she'd be more at home in the Bingo Hall or with a knitting circle rather than flooding roads and knocking down power lines).

Whenever I get to take a break from the frenetic Christmas supermarket shopping and last minute present buying and wrapping, I've been reading Stephen King's book: On Writing.

I bought this book because it was about writing. Little did I know, it also covers King's alcoholism, about which he writes brilliantly.

King says that when he first realised that he was an alcoholic his immediate reaction was to be incredibly careful not to let anyone know, otherwise someone would tell him to get control of his drinking.

Telling an alcoholic to control his drinking, he writes, is like telling a guy suffering the world's most cataclysmic case of diarrhoea to control his shitting.

Eew, but we know what he means, don't we?

King says it's been almost twelve years since I took a drink, and I'm still struck by disbelief when I see someone with a half-finished glass of wine near at hand. I want to get up, go over, and yell 'Finish that! Why don't you finish that?' into his or her face. I found the idea of social drinking ludicrous - if you didn't want to get drunk, why not have a Coke?

Well, quite.

But the really fascinating thing about King's story is how his subconscious was crying for help through his writing.

It was, apparently, many years before King realised that the alcoholic writer and ex-schoolteacher who starred in The Shining was actually himself. He had been up to his neck in denial, but somewhere, deep inside his brain, in the part that writes the stories, he knew.

Ten years later, in 1986, he wrote Misery, a title, he says, which accurately described his state of mind. The hero - a writer again - is tortured by a psychotic nurse. The nurse, Annie Wilkes, he says (with the benefit of hindsight) was coke, Annie was booze, and I decided that I was tired of being Annie's pet writer.

The book which followed Misery was Tommyknockers, which King says he wrote with cotton swabs stuck up his nose to stop blood from his cocaine ravaged nostrils dripping all over his typewriter keys.

In this novel, alien creatures get inside your head and start messing about in there. The upside to this alien activity for the host is boundless energy and a superficial intelligence, but in exchange they give their soul. King writes it was the best metaphor for drugs and alcohol my tired, overstressed mind could come up with.

So, if you're tempted tomorrow to have just the one glass of wine with your Christmas lunch, then remember that alcohol is not your best friend, your greatest fan; she is a crazy obsessive with a penchant for amputation (or 'hobbling' in the film version). She will get inside your head and she will steal your soul.

Get the hell out of there before it's too late.

(If you need more motivation, then read this one: Relapse Stories)

Love to you all, and have a very, very merry (but sober) Christmas! It'll be awesome! See you on the other side....

SM x

P.S. I've just been told that the storm is actually Barbara, not Brenda. Still more redolent of home knitted jumpers and self sufficiency than 100mph winds....