The psychological experience of withdrawal after years of drinking five bottles of wine a day, every day, is almost impossible to describe. My mind felt warped around an event horizon, pulled toward a black hole where thought itself disappeared, leaving only the immediate moment and an agony so profound that there are no words for it.
That is where my story begins: in the late stages of alcoholism, after two arrests by my new husband of three months, and through five inpatient treatment centers as I tried, repeatedly, to disentangle myself psychologically from a life that had become nothing but drinking.