Introducing the Quit-Litmus Scale

My non-scientific bastard of a scale by which I will be measuring our favorite quit-lit books

Tween girls should have a blood ritual for their first period that allows them to fully unleash and expel their anger. Maybe a cage made of brick and full of glass bottles where they can chuck one after another against the walls just to hear them shatter. This statement assumes they’re all angry like I was. Maybe some of them weren’t. I can’t speak for everyone, but here’s something I remember.

I’m expected to take the bus to my new junior high, but I can’t. I can’t because I don’t want to. I don’t want to because I have no friends at my new school, and I’m really not sure exactly how to get to the bus pickup location. Instead, I walk the two miles to Anacapa Middle School but don’t go in. Everything is grey here by the sea, unlike Thousand Oaks where the sun does not relent. Seagulls circle the school and fill the air with their forlorn cries. Do they yell about the trash before they dive in and remove half-eaten pieces of pizza?

I spend a week of school across the street at the mall while my family thinks I am dutifully in my classes. There’s a wall that borders the parking lot that I lean my back against it as I devour Go ask Alice. The book is meant to be a warning against the dangers of drugs.

The blurb on the back lures me in:

“It started when she was served a soft drink laced with LSD in a dangerous party game. Within months, she was hooked, trapped in a downward spiral that took her from her comfortable home and loving family to the mean streets of an unforgiving city. It was a journey that would rob her of her innocence, her youth—and ultimately her life.”

The assumption was that death would scare us, I guess. It was published by Simon and Schuster’s children’s division. The problem is that to my angry preteen mind, there was something alluring about the unraveling and death. It seemed so much more attractive to have the protagonist be found dead than to assume that she married and marched back into suburbia with all the “squares.”

I’m struck by this line while rereading the book now at age 43: “I’m not really sure which parts of myself are real and which parts are things I’ve gotten from books.”

I still have the journal I started writing in when I was the age of the narrator in Go Ask Alice. It is written in the same style, addressing the journal itself as though it were a friend I was telling my secrets to.

My Diary:

12-10-94

I’m feeling very frustrated right now. I was just trying to write a poem, but no words will come out. I hate it when this happens. I want to be a writer when I grow up, and with all that’s going on there should be plenty to write about, but nothing’s happening. Maybe I won’t be a writer. I’ll be an actress. That sounds funner. To be someone else, anyone but me. Please help me to at least do good in school. It’s the only way I can please my mom now. Monday will be a fresh start for me. I’ll do all my homework and go to all of my classes. Please help me to become a better person one day at a time.

12-11-94

I’m waiting for Emily and her mom to come pick me up for an NA meeting. These meetings are the only way I can see her now that she has independent studies and we’re both on restriction. They’re the only place I can go besides school. Today was a really good day. We went to pick out our Christmas tree and I felt like part of the family again. Maybe I will try and be good after all. This meeting will only be the second drug support group I’ve been to. The other one on Thursday was called PDAP and I don’t think I liked that one very much. Too much emphasis on God.

Jesus Christ, where are they? They’re supposed to be here by now. Someone just pulled up. Gotta go.

approx 9:20 p.m.

I just got back from the NA meeting and I’m feeling alright. It gets boring at times listening to people moan and bitch about their lives, but sometimes people say things that are worth listening to. At the beginning of the meeting the newcomers had to go up and say their names, and I did that and the man gave me a hug, and he gave Emily a hug too. I have been sober for three days now, but I’m not wanting to stay that way. I wish I had the desire to be sober, but I don’t, not at all.

I have decided to stay with Isaac for as long as I possibly can. Maybe I can stop him from smoking pot and try to salvage the few brain cells I hope he has. My decision to keep this diary was a lovely idea. When I’m older, I’ll be able to look back on it and maybe realize how stupid I am, because I just read some of my earlier entries and they’re dumb. I think I’m going to write my father a letter now.

And from Go Ask Alice:

July 20

Dear close, warm, intimate friend, Diary,

What a fantastic, unbelievable, expanding, thrilling week I’ve had. It’s been like, wow—the greatest thing that has ever happened. Remember I told you I had a date with Bill? Well he introduced me to torpedos on Friday and Speed on Sunday. They are both like riding shooting stars through the Milky Way, only a million, trillion times better. The Speed was a little scary at first because Bill had to inject it right into my arm…

HA! Here’s where I stopped during my rereading and went, WHOA THERE, fucking Bill! You don’t have to shoot speed into someone’s arm as an introduction!!!

Am I what would have happened if the narrator hadn’t died at the end? If I had read an uplifting tale of a girl starting a cat rescue/secret garden bookstore botanical garden sanctuary, would I have been inspired to do that with my life instead of riding the men and alcohol up and down the scales of my mood? 

I’m considering how I want to discuss the books I get to read in the quit-lit genre now that I’m mostly done writing mine. I’m reading all of them with the assumption that they are good and important and worth reading. The Quit Litmus Scale I’ve invented measures these books on a scale from Go Ask Alice to This Naked Mind by Annie Grace.

When I picked up Annie Grace’s book, I had been sober for at least a couple of weeks. It was a leader in a search for books about quitting drinking. I was craving commiseration, but the thought of a meeting for “addicts” made me feel boxed-in and depressed. I just wanted to read about other people’s stories. I wanted to hear the voices of people who had been through it in their own way, not being chained to a schedule of meetings and steps, but doing the things they wanted to do with their lives. She says to keep drinking while you read it—that it’s not required that you’re sober for the book to work. Throughout the narrative, she uses the metaphor of the pitcher plant to compare the person who gets mired in their drinking life. She posits that anyone could become addicted to alcohol, a sentiment I have never heard uttered in recovery groups. Up to that point, I had always understood any alcohol problems to exist for a select set of people claiming to have “addictive” personalities.

At the time of this writing, This Naked Mind has over 15,000 reviews on Amazon where reader after reader gush gratitude for the book’s help in their ability to quit drinking. Many describe that after reading it, something clicks, and they just don’t want to drink anymore. The concepts are not just reminiscent but directly derived from Allen Carr’s Easy Way to Quit Smoking, and successive series of books about quitting, which brainwash you out of these thought patterns that keep you locked in with your addictive substances. Annie refreshes the ideas and makes them more palatable to the modern reader.

When I finished reading Annie’s book, I wanted to give a copy to everyone in my family. I sent a copy to my uncle, my daughter, and I started listening to Annie’s podcast religiously, to the stories of other people who led lives so similar to my own. The connection they got from the alcohol and drugs leading to the disillusionment and fatigue they feel when they realize that those things haven’t really done much to improve their lives.

Is there anyone out there who has read both or one of these books and had a similar experience?

Is there anyone who did speed for the first time by letting some pinhead like Bill shoot it up into their veins?