Hunter Biden and the trouble with addiction memoirs

The burn as the liquor goes down feels good, but the blackouts, the hangover, mornings of self-loathing, the inability to control desire, the dependency, the loss of self-determination — the way in dreams you leap off buildings and it’s still all right. 

Hunter Biden’s Beautiful Things is the latest addition to the niche of addiction-and-recovery memoirs, announcing his salvation to the world. The US president’s son chronicles the debilitating effects of the lethal amounts of alcohol he consumed, his wider substance abuse and the inevitable family tensions — his divorce, an affair with his brother’s widow, fathering a child with a stripper.

Unravelling, he cooked crack cocaine in his room in Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles, spending money recklessly, being wasted, out of his mind. The book’s nucleus is the endless cycle of debauchery and relapse, rehab centres all over the country, falling off the wagon, the endless waiting in parking lots for dealers to arrive, the degradation of buying recycled urine in order to cheat on the drug test. In an interview with CBS promoting the book, Biden said he has spent more time than anyone on his knees searching the carpet for crumbs of crack. 

After Thomas De Quincey wrote Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, a new genre was born. But addiction memoirs end up being less subversive and more confessional and melodramatic, steeped in sentimentality as the narrative arc moves in predictable ways — moral failure and salvation, the inevitable descent in church basements for AA meetings.

“Addiction is always a story that has already been told,” writes Leslie Jamison in The Recovering, a 500-plus page tome, including stories of other people struggling to stay dry in the 12-step recovery. For Jamison, addiction hinges on the mantra “Desire. Use. Repeat”.

In Lit, Mary Karr describes the alcoholic’s empty promise to stop, the veering towards chaos. Happy hour starts the minute she puts her baby son to sleep. It documents her surrender to booze, the breakdown of her marriage, the redemption she finds in the Catholic Church. She admits that she did not want to stop drinking.

In Drinking: A Love Story, Caroline Knapp described her life as a high-functioning alcoholic, a newspaper editor and columnist, her addiction a bad love affair that almost ruined everything. 

No matter how heartfelt their pain is, how eloquent the account, there is something self-indulgent in recovery tales when driven by a craving for absolution

Is drinking into oblivion more fun than being sober? The roots of alcoholism are unclear and although there is not enough evidence to suggest that thirst for drink comes from longing or trauma, it certainly can play a major role. In 1972, a car crash killed Biden’s mother and infant sister while he and his brother Beau survived. His brother died from brain cancer in 2015.

A switch sometimes flips and lives are made desolate. Somewhere between the moral and the medical, there is retreat. The Big Book of AA indicates that to prevent annihilation you must stop drinking forever and turn your life over to a higher power. 

Critics have been posing the same question again and again: what is the value of one more addiction memoir? Is there ever a confession devoid of self-pity? The pattern is always the same: the demons, the liquid security blanket, the pivotal moment when the narrator has hit rock bottom, the superiority of sobriety.

But there is often a saccharine element in the relationship between addiction and storytelling. No longer chained to alcohol, the addict strives to make peace by publicising his misery, in an attempt to validate sobriety. But in craving sympathy, an illusion of emotional authenticity often hijacks the narrative. The platitudes, the servitude and tyranny of addiction, its cyclical nature.

What becomes clear is how conclusively alcohol can wipe out a life and that, ironically, despite all the excess, one can hardly live on the edge with faculties impaired. 

In 1967, Life magazine ran a profile of John Berryman, entitled “Whisky and Ink” describing them as the two fluids the poet needed. There is something exhausting about Biden’s relentlessly earnest memoir — the booze, drug dealers, bouncers, strippers, smoking crack in roadside motels and fancy hotels all over America.

No matter how heartfelt their pain is, how eloquent the account, there is something self-indulgent in recovery tales when driven by a craving for absolution.

Thankfully, no one glorifies alcohol anymore. Berryman jumped to his death from a bridge in Minnesota. And yet for those who survive, a measure of irony is needed even when writing about the harmful relationship with alcohol, the feeling of being alone in a crowd. There is vodka intake and hangovers. There is pain in being sentient and although joy without sorrow is mania, even in sobriety, they only count the happy hours.

This is the latest in a series of Monday columns on where the arts meet the news. Follow @FTLifeArts on Twitter for our latest stories first