Tales of addiction: a "creature awake on its wet paws"
BC's long history of widespread addiction has generated a rich literature by writers like Patrick Lane and Evelyn Lau, who have shared their experiences of dislocation, trauma and pain
A bittersweet legacy of British Columbia’s long struggle with widespread addiction, a silver lining in a cloud of dislocation, trauma and pain, can be found in the novels, memoirs and poems of countless writers.
If we want to understand the experiences of people who are the first victims of the toxic drug crisis, they can tell us.
Authors like poets Patrick Lane and Evelyn Lau open the door to a deeper understanding of the roots of addiction, the experience of people with substance use disorders, and the impact on family, friends and communities.
Lane, who died in 2019, was one of the leading poets of his generation but also a novelist, short story writer and essayist who built a national reputation over a lifetime of deep addiction to alcohol, among other substances.
In his award-winning 2004 memoir There is a Season, he recounts how he fought to become a writer as he worked as a logger, sawmill worker and salesman, burned through two marriages, and spent years in the grip of severe alcoholism and drug abuse.
His book is a masterpiece, written in the first months of his sobriety and final recovery, situated in the garden that constituted his natural world, a refuge and a place of healing. From careful observation in the garden, he moves seamlessly back and forth in time, exploring the impact of addiction on his life.
“I stare at the garden through the glass sheet of the back door, my addiction a creature awake on its wet paws,” he writes. “It never sleeps. Quiet and cunning, it watches my every move for a sign of weakness. I look out at the apple tree and think, if I could choose to be sick, then I could choose not to be. It would be like choosing diabetes or choosing cancer and experiencing it with a kind of perverse pleasure. As if that were possible, as if a man could ask for a disease and then un-ask it at will.
“At the heart of an alcoholic is a drink he can never find. It is the first of the last of many thousands of drinks, each one almost, but never quite, as beautiful as that first one he had as a boy when his world spun away. Every addict I know speaks of that first knowing when they met the monster and found it their closest friend, their sweetest lover.”
Lane’s family managed pain and trauma by pretending it did not exist. His brother went to jail, he struggled to forget the traumatic injuries of a fellow worker maimed on the job, his father was murdered in a random crime. “The silence in our home and the denial of any kind of trauma was how we understood things. The words or touch that might have helped us understand anything emotional, spiritual, or physical were never there”
In the early days of his first real sobriety, Lane finds a bottle of vodka he had hidden in his garden. The urge to drink is overwhelming: “The power the body has to go willingly toward pain is something no one understands, not even the addict himself. It was pain that made me turn away. I felt no triumph of will, just a terrible longing as if I were asking for a blade to be held at my own throat.” He pours the bottle out, feeling spring in the air with new clarity.
Lane’s own nominee for a writer who understood alcoholism was Malcolm Lowry, whose classic Under the Volcano, partly written in a squatter's shack at Dollarton, is considered one of Canada’s finest novels. Lane writes that Lowry, “who died of alcoholism, called addiction ‘a colourless cold, a white agony,’ and that is as close as anyone I know has come to describing what a drink is to an alcoholic.”
In 2006, Lane and Lorna Crozier, herself an eminent poet and his third wife, published a second edition of Addicted: Notes from the Belly of the Beast, an anthology of addiction memoirs by Canadians from every walk of life. Among its many virtues is Belly’s broad view of addiction as almost any destructive and compulsive behaviour, from drinking to smoking, gambling, and sex.
Case in point: in How to Quit Smoking in 50 Years or Less, Peter Gzowski notes that video games have all the attributes of addiction, but if he stops playing, he does not shake or retch from withdrawal, nor does he die if he keeps going. Not so with cigarettes. Once one of Canada’s most respected broadcasters and journalists, Gzowski died in 2002 of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, although he had finally quit smoking.
Still alive and a powerful writer, Vancouver poet Evelyn Lau wrote one of the most moving stories in Belly, an essay called More and More. Lau burst into the public eye in the 1980s with an award-winning essay in the Vancouver Sun. A meeting with the Pope followed, but her celebrity took a negative turn when her parents objected to her work as a poet, a conflict that resulted in her leaving home, becoming homeless, addicted, and eventually turning for a time to sex work. She kept writing throughout.
“When did it begin”?” she asks, of her original compulsive consumption of candy. “The sensation of a depthless hole opening up inside of me, a cavernous feeling of need. The surrendering to compulsion, which was like getting on a treadmill and not being able to get off. The craving for perfection, so that if I slipped and had one of something ‘bad,’ then the day had fallen into disarray, and I had to keep having another and another until the darkness fell.”
Lau’s story progresses through alcohol, painkillers, and cocaine. “I binged on these drugs, finding a more complete oblivion through chemicals, a more extensive loss of self, memory and pain . . . Even when the world morphed into a greater nightmare than it already seemed, being high was still better than staying inside myself. I sought through drugs to be somebody else – anybody else.”
From bulimia, driven by the unforgiving criticisms and demands of oppressive parents, to substance abuse, to the sex trade, Lau reeled from one compulsion to another.
“Was it their love I was after, in all the years of my life when I threw one thing after another into that bottomless well, and all of those things – food, drugs, alcohol, men – simply fell in and disappeared? . . . Was it nature or nurture, creation or circumstance?”
Writing in her thirties, more than 20 years ago, Lau had managed her drinking and given up illicit drugs, but knows “the old desire for oblivion is not gone, only lying dormant, as are the temptation to slip into sleep rather than live through a difficult emotion and the longing to give in. . .
“The feelings will ebb and flow; maybe one day things will be a lot easier, and maybe they won’t. At least I no longer wake up every morning expecting to be perfect, then destroying myself if I am not. Though I would never have believed it as a teenager, you do move beyond things, outgrow the person you were. Sometimes, just by staying alive, you find you have become someone who can live in the world after all.”
Written years before the toxic drug crisis, these stories drive home the deep currents in many people’s lives that they manage with substance abuse. As Lane says, no one would choose to have cancer and then find some perverse relief in the experience, but addiction has that aspect for the addict.
By all accounts, fentanyl magnifies every aspect of this bad dynamic — it’s cheaper, more powerful, comes on quickly and wears off just as fast, encouraging larger and larger doses that blunt the terrifying signals of withdrawal.
Thanks to writers like Lane and Lau, we have a window on the enduring pain of addiction and learn some of the pathways to recovery.
Do you have a favourite BC writer who has explored addiction and its consequences? Nominations to Lotusland’s library of BC addictions literature will be gratefully received.
Thanks for sharing these heartfelt writings. They are painfully true and thousands of Canadians suffer similar agonies.
Tara McGuire's Holden After and Before spoke to me, as a mother of two beautiful young people in BC.