Summary

Jamison opens Chapter Ten, "Humbling," by revisiting the memory of the first time she told her story at an AA meeting. In AA, "telling your story" means telling about your experiences with drinking, but in a structured way--"what it was like, what happened, what it's like now" (293). The first time she told her story, Jamison was heckled by an old man who shouted out, "This is boring!" (294). Jamison draws a similarity between her memory and Malcolm Lowry's response when a critic wrote that his novel Under the Volcano was "desperately dull even when sober" (295). Lowry's indignant rebuttal was an impressive twenty-two paragraphs long. Like Jamison, Lowry was afraid of telling a story that others found boring.

Following this thread of sober writers, Jamison revisits Stephen King's career after he sobered up. More than thirty years after he wrote The Shining and twenty years...