Episode 5: Writing and Addiction

In this episode of the Watchung Booksellers Podcast, authors Warren Zanes and Thad Ziolkowski talk about writing and addiction. From their personal struggles in using drugs while creating art to the complexities in writing about addiction in general, their conversation is thought-provoking, sincere, and often very funny.

Our Guests:
Warren Zanes is the New York Times bestselling author of Dusty in Memphis, the first volume in the celebrated 33 1/3 Series, Petty: The Biography; Revolutions in Sound: Warner Bros. Records; and Deliver Me from Nowhere: The Making of Bruce Springsteen's Nebraska. With Garth Brooks, Zanes has worked on five books in the artist’s Anthology Series. As a teenager he was a member of the Del Fuegos and made three records for Slash/Warner Bros.  Zanes holds a PhD in visual and cultural studies from the University of Rochester and presently teaches at New York University. He is a Grammy-nominated producer of the PBS series Soundbreaking and was a consulting producer on the Oscar-winning documentary 20 Feet from Stardom. He conducted interviews for Martin Scorsese’s George Harrison: Living in the Material World, and served as writer for The Gift: The Journey of Johnny Cash. Zane’s work has appeared in Rolling Stone and the Oxford American, and he has served as Vice President of Education and Public Programs at The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and, for ten years, Executive Director of The Rock and Roll Forever Foundation. 

Thad Ziolkowski is the author of Our Son the Arson, a collection of poems, the memoir On a Wave, which was a finalist for the PEN/Martha Albrand Award in 2003, and Wichita, a novel. His most recent book, The Drop, which explores the relationship between surfing and addiction, was published by HarperWave, an imprint of HarperCollins, in 2021. His essays and reviews have appeared in The New York Times, Slate, Bookforum, Artforum, Travel & Leisure, Interview Magazine, 4Columns, and Galerie. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and has a PhD in English Literature from Yale University.

Books:
A full list of the books and authors mentioned in this episode is available on our website.

Resources:

The Washington Post

George Harrison: Living in the Material World

Room at the Top - Tom Petty

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The Watchung Booksellers Podcast is produced by Kathryn Counsell and Marni Jessup.

Recording and editing by Timmy Kellenyi, Bree Testa, and Derek Mattheiss at Silver Stream Studio in Montclair, NJ.

Original music is composed and performed by Violet Mujica.

Art & design and social media by Evelyn Moulton.

Research and show notes by Caroline Shurtleff.

Thank you to the staff at Watchung Booksellers and The Kids’ Room for their hard work and love of books!

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Transcript

Kathryn: 0:11

Hello everybody and welcome back to the Watch ung Booksellers podcast. Thanks for joining us today. I'm Catherine and I'm here with Marnie, and we're excited to share another conversation about books and writing with you.

Marni: 0:20

Our guests today. Warren Zanes and Thad Zilkowski are two amazing authors from the neighborhood and they're going to discuss writing and addiction.

Kathryn: 0:27

Today's discussion is an insightful and candid conversation about writing as art and how addiction can affect one's work. We'll let them tell you more about it after we introduce them, thad.

Marni: 0:36

Thad Zolkowski is the author of Our Son, the Arson, a collection of poems, the memoir On a Wave, which was the finalist for the Penn Martha Albran Award in 2003, and Wichita, a novel. His most recent book, the Drop, which explores the relationship between surfing and addiction, was published by Harper Wave. His essays and reviews have appeared in the New York Times Slate Book Forum, art Forum, Travel and Leisure Interview Magazine, four Columns and Gallery. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and has a PhD in English Literature from Yale University.

Kathryn: 1:10

Warren Zanes is the New York Times bestselling author of Dusty in Memphis. He is also the author of Petty, the Biography, revolutions in Sound, warner Brothers Records and last year's Deliver Me from Nowhere, the making of Bruce Springsteen's Nebraska, which just came out in paperback and is in the works to becoming a feature film. As a member of the Del Fuegos, he has shared the stage with Bruce Springsteen and continues to write and record music. He holds a PhD in visual and cultural studies from the University of Rochester and presently teaches at New York University. He's a Grammy-nominated producer of the PBS series Soundbreaking and was a consulting producer on the Oscar-winning documentary 20 Feet from Stardom. His work has appeared in Rolling Stone and the Oxford American and he has served as a vice president at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Marni: 1:54

Enjoy the conversation and we'll be back after to fill you in on what's coming up in the store.

Warren: 2:01

I want to jump right in in this conversation. We've got a theme which is addiction, and there are so many angles on that as a topic. But I guess you know one thing I want to put out there at the top is you know, I'm here as a writer, but when the subject is addiction, I'm also here as an addict. So I'm a, you know, in the Margaret Mead sense, I'm a participant, observer, and so you know I wanted to like, for my own sake, build in a little framework, because I write about music, which is obviously a culture that has a lot of addiction in it and among its members. But when I'm writing about that culture, being in recovery myself, it doesn't come in explicitly but it's in the work.

Warren: 2:53

So I can talk about my subject matter, I can talk about why writing might appeal to me as you know someone with an addictive personality. And then I guess the third thing that comes to mind more and more is I'm a father and the chances are getting better that my kids might read, pick up on some of the things I say. And I was a really reckless, and each time I talk about tripping on acid at age 15, I feel like I've got to go have a conversation with them, which complicates the process. But among those territories maybe we should start if this is cool with you with the kind of weaving together of early interest in writing and early romanticizing of addiction. Maybe you go first, I'll come in behind you.

Thad: 3:49

Yeah, for me. What appealed to me about writing was the kind of way it could overtake everything else. There was a kind of way in which the writing process, especially if there was inspiration, could be so absorbing and eclipsing, and I found the sort of state of consciousness of writing to be super appealing.

Warren: 4:13

Tell me what age you're talking about, because I feel like I came into that late in the game. When did you experience?

Thad: 4:20

that I probably experienced it when I was like 15, 16, when I started writing letters home to my best friend. We had moved from a kind of surf community in Florida to the middle of America.

Warren: 4:32

Wichita yeah.

Thad: 4:33

And I started to describe the otherness of that culture to my friend in writing and I found it really sort of intoxicating and empowering and I felt I was beginning to to read really, you know, obsessively too, as a way to survive the you know, the disruption and the and the dislocation I was feeling. So I was either reading all the time and becoming really excited by the godlike power of some of these novelists, like Michener or something, these really absorbing historical novels that I was reading and then also writing. So at the same time I was getting a taste of that in my own writing letters back to my friend.

Warren: 5:15

I mean it's interesting because what you're describing is the experience which I think I had that experience through drugs before I had it through writing, though I like that you start with letter writing because letter writing was important and odd to think that we might be members of the letter writing era whereas our kids are not. But I came. You know, I didn't have an experience of that full absorption of the process until later. I first was attracted to the Bukowskis of the world even the.

Warren: 5:53

John Cheevers of the world who were close enough to the Keith Richards model of creative addict or reckless creative that I romanticized because of rock and roll. So I was interested in the rock and rollers and I grew up in a home where the creative was given a high place. All other vocations that you know, you couldn't say you wanted to become an accountant, that was out of the question.

Warren: 6:23

You know a store owner, a baker, it's like no, no, no, it's like painter, writer, musician these are the categories that mattered, and so rock and roll among those was possibly the most accessible. And then, over the period of time, I'd see that there were writers who had the kind of bravado and wildness that I associated with rock and roll, and I thought, you know, maybe I could do it. So I had classes with Ward Just in my junior and senior year of boarding school and you know know, he smoked camel non-filters in the classroom. He was a bit of a rock star to me, and so then it, then it became more of a possibility, but I don't think I got into that full absorption in the process because I was so self-conscious until later, and now I feel like I'm really getting that 30 years into recovery when I go into the scene of writing.

Warren: 7:29

I love that the rest of the world evaporates and I'm in that thing because I don't wake up in the police department and yet I get that total removal experience. But it took me a while to get to it and I really started with romanticizing drinking and drugs as a part of the creative act and it just took me some time to go. Actually, more people do not get things done by drinking and drugging than get things done. I'm actually looking at the exceptions.

Thad: 8:05

Yeah, yeah, I mean I feel as though I was a late bloomer when it came to drugs and alcohol too, in a way, but alcohol certainly first. But I was trying to get back to, I think, to a flow state of creativity that I had had more naturally when I was younger. And so by the time I discovered amphetamines and cocaine, they were good writing drugs, at least initially, I was further along than most people. Most people had done had sort of sowed their wild drug and alcohol oats as undergrads, but I got into it as a graduate student, yeah, and everyone was looking at me like what and yeah, so I had this kind of late and it was completely connected to the ability of it to protect me from the pain of failing as a writer, to you know, failing to write a good first draft, failing to sustain my focus, failing to believe in what I was doing.

Thad: 9:00

And it overcame that and suspended all that and that was what was really the primary appeal to me of. It was just a kind of numbing of self-doubt, and by virtue of just numbing and pushing to the margins my self-doubt and my distractedness, I entered a flow state. That's not really what it is. In a certain way, it's a subtraction of distraction. If you can subtract the divisions of your mind, you're in a flow state, kind of a subtraction of distraction. If you can subtract the divisions of your mind, you're in a flow state, kind of right, you are and you're focused, and that's what I got out of it initially, and then it became its own problem.

Warren: 9:34

Were there writers who were your romantic models for that mix of drug use and creation?

Thad: 9:42

You know, I would hear, you know, someone who was really kind of admirably open about his speed use was Ted Berrigan, the second generation New York school poet, and he would say you know, I took a pill, I'm high, now I'm right, and that would be part of the poetry. And he was, he would, he would evangelize with speed. You know, this was in the kind of naive period before everyone became aware of how problematic speed was, and so I was kind of I before everyone became aware of how problematic speed was, and so I was kind of I thought, okay, he's open about it. And the Beats you know Kerouac, they were all doing lots of speed and staying up and there was a kind of falsification of the record where they wouldn't address it, they wouldn't acknowledge it.

Thad: 10:15

But there was a whole generation that was using amphetamine or uppers in some form or another. I found cocaine more painkiller involved in it, I was happier on it. But either way, either of those it was definitely amphetamines and you know there's Sarch was amphetamines, kerouac was amphetamines. There are a lot of people Baraka.

Warren: 10:34

Philip K Dick.

Thad: 10:35

Philip K Dick. Famously, there's a great example. Yeah, yeah.

Warren: 10:39

Did you have experiences where you were writing, you were on drugs, you thought you were on to something and in the light of day it had a diminished power from what you remembered?

Thad: 10:53

Yeah, absolutely. That was one of the first dirty little secrets I had to repress about writing on drugs was that I was always a little unhappy with the density of it. It would become kind of like overwrought and overcompressed and slightly self-delusional. And later I read that De Quincey would write on opium laudanum and he would have this similar thing the next day. There would be a disgust he would feel about what he had written on the laudanum and I really I kind of sat up in my chair when I read that and I thought, oh god, that's what, that's what's happening with me.

Warren: 11:31

And yet, yeah, because there's a measure of self-deceit there.

Thad: 11:32

Absolutely well, there's also an altered consciousness in which you think it's it's getting better as it's chasing its own tail. That seems really interesting when you're on cocaine or methamphetamine, but it actually, when the light of day sober, you think like no, no, this is, this is sane and it's precious yeah or it's broke or it's too round about.

Thad: 11:49

There would be this coded feeling. I mean it's starting, you start to feel like you're insane. I mean, in a way, you do kind of go insane in a certain way, right, yeah, well, it's that, like carlos castaneda was one of those figures.

Warren: 12:02

When I was at boarding school, like on that line, I remember doing an interview for Martin Scorsese's George Harrison documentary and it was with Derek Taylor's wife. Derek Taylor was the Beatles publicist, really key figure in the Beatles story, and she was talking about their first acid trips and she said on camera I feel like I can't say this, but there was so much good that came of this, like when they say it was expanding our consciousness. I can't lie to you. It was In a way. You know, they're the facts of becoming more cosmopolitan. And then there's the drug factor that just opened the mind in such ways that they could absorb other cultures more freely, like those Liverpudlian working class backgrounds are suddenly not the framework through which they're seeing the world. And as she's talking about it, I'm thinking, man, I could use a hit of acid right now.

Warren: 13:08

So I think there's a line here and I like that she drew it out in that interview. It's like actually some good things did come of it.

Thad: 13:16

What I retain about that was that Harrison took so much LSD that he stopped getting high on it. Ben LSD, it takes a few days to recover. You can't binge on LSD and stay high. It won't work after a bit. And the number of trips he took I read this somewhere was mind-blowing, and it was because he was chasing those early epiphanies and early experiences that you couldn't.

Warren: 13:39

I don't think of him as an addict, but that to me is one way of describing the addict. Experience of like is chasing what it was doing right in the first place. You know, like first experiences with alcohol gave it got me off the wall at the school dance, you know I was in the mix and then it stopped working after a time and the addict is the one who's going to chase it until it's got them down on the mat.

Thad: 14:07

Yeah, I had always felt like that metaphor of chasing didn't really speak to my experience. But the thing that I think speaks to my experience about drugs and alcohol is like if I had just gotten the formula right and if I just did a little of this and a little more of that, and if I could go back and mix it properly, you know, then it would work. And that was actually the same kind of you know, you know that delusional sense that you were going to be able to recapture it. But it's very strong, you know. That's that that kind of belief in the early. And I do think it. I think chasing is a good metaphor actually, but it was for me it was more like getting it right. I could never get it right again.

Warren: 14:45

I had that one for a little bit. But then you know that scene in in miyazaki's spirited away, where the parents turn into pigs, right and that's like an all-you-can-eat buffet. Right, that's I. That's where I kind of got to but let's you know thinking about time considerations, so can we shift to talking about writing about cultures where addiction is, I think, rampant. For me, in writing about music, particularly rock and roll and its aftermath, rampant is not the wrong word.

Thad: 15:17

Yeah, I mean, for me, the space that really attracted me to figure it out was surfing, and there was surfing, such a kind of healthy, radiantly healthy sport, and a lot of the benefits of surfing are this kind of physical robustness, you know, and the idea that there was addiction mixed up and that was partly a function of the 60s and 70s, but it's still there, you know, and I do think that I was interested in the kind of contradiction of, in the same way that I was interested in the kind of contradiction of, in the same way that I'm interested in and in writing, is that there's this culture or there's a cult of inspiration where you're touched by the muses without any help except that right and that, and maybe not even the muses get acknowledged, it's just like self-originated.

Thad: 16:02

And then there's the reality in which there's all of this's, all of this drug use, same with surfing. There'd be surfing and it would look very clean. Surfers invented health food, basically the smoothies and the sprout sandwiches. That's a surfer phenomenon. And yet there was also rampant addiction within surfing, especially in the elite circles of surfing. And that contradiction really interested me in the same way that the contradiction or the sort of hypocrisy of art being ultimately a divine experience or divinely inspired, but in reality being very embedded in the materialism of addiction my heroin, my cocaine, pot for certain poets, caffeine.

Warren: 16:44

Say more about how you kind of intellectually walked through that contradiction to understand it.

Thad: 16:50

Ultimately, I had to kind of follow my editor. I worked with a really great editor for my last book, which is about surfing and addiction, called the Drop, and Karen Rinaldi at HarperCollins said you know, you're going to have to do the neurochemical piece and I didn't want to do that. I didn't want to do that homework. I didn't want to risk my own prose being hijacked by scientific writing that I hadn't digested.

Warren: 17:11

But what I did.

Thad: 17:11

I found some really great memoirs that were written by addicts who went on to become addiction researchers who had a very strong scientific side Can.

Warren: 17:20

I just ask you. I mean, is the thing that she was looking for a kind of correlation between the neurochemical experience of surfing itself and the neurochemical experience of taking drugs? Like there's a related high that's being?

Thad: 17:35

Yeah, ultimately, ultimately. But in any case, if there's an addiction, if you can become addicted to any pleasurable activity and surfing certainly pleasurable you can become addicted to surfing. Is the neurochemical signature of the surf high comparable to the neurochemical signature of a cocci?

Warren: 17:51

That's the idea of it. Are chemicals being released naturally in surfing?

Thad: 17:56

Yeah, that are being released, so to speak, unnaturally. But in a brain signature you're not seeing the unnatural part, you're just seeing the signature. You know neurochemically, you know it could be behavioral or you know it could have a material source, like cocaine. I could be getting high on gambling. There's nothing there. I'm not shooting anything into my body. Yeah, but the neurochemical signature of a gambling addict addiction is comparable to drug addiction.

Warren: 18:20

Yeah, the signature, yeah, the chemist, you know right, yeah, I mean, Can I ask you when your editor made that sounds like a strong suggestion, how much time did that add to your project to take that circuit?

Thad: 18:36

It's hard to say. You know, Like I say, I felt like I stumbled onto some really great books that were hybrids, that were partly memoir and partly, you know, accounts of the recent breakthroughs in neurology that had to do with drug addiction. They had that kind of integration into a more literary narrative made the scientific angle more quickly digestible for me.

Thad: 19:00

Which was the best example? The best example is probably Unbroken Brain, or there are two that are very, very strong. One's called the Biology of Desire why Addiction is Not a Disease by Mark Lewis, who is an addict and writes beautifully about his addiction, and Unbroken Brain by Maya Solovitz, a revolutionary new way of understanding addiction, and she was also an addict and she writes her story. And then she writes about the recent science and that was perfect and I thought okay, now I can do this did it change the way you thought about what you were doing when you were surfing?

Thad: 19:34

it changed the way I way, what I thought was going on when I was high on drugs. I don't know that it changed, I'm not sure it. You know the the neurochemistry of flow states and surfing. I felt it more in a way that was a wake-up call about the kind of tragedy of the neurochemistry and addiction you know you weren't going to be able to sustain it. There was a kind of you could see the exhaustion of the synapses and so forth at a chemical, at a kind of neurological way, in a neurological way. But I don't know that I really changed my head about the surf high as much.

Warren: 20:11

I feel like in barbarian days as a non-surfer, I was really struck by moments where this guy needs medical attention, like physically not for recovery. But it's like he's pushing so hard to have this surfing experience that, like the number of infections and going to places where you know there were parasite issues it seems a lot like a heroin addict to me no, I think that's really, that's true, it is like that.

Thad: 20:40

And there is a kind, especially a young surfer, who's obsessed, who looks kind of too thin, sunburned, kind of like homeless, you know, dragging himself along the road especially when there's not, yeah, at the end of the savings, you know in Bali or whatever, yeah, yeah.

Warren: 20:56

But you, with the Drop, you're writing a book that recovery's in your title, right yeah, is in your title, right yeah. So you know, when I was doing tom petty's biography, I knew because I'd worked on peter bogdanovich's documentary and I'd done a companion book for that project that when I made the book they gave me all the transcripts for the documentary, which is like half a million words in a box, and in petty Petty's interviews he talked about heroin use. He didn't think of himself as an addict, didn't talk about himself as an addict, but there's heroin use and he a couple times got off heroin and did it through. Like blood transfusions were involved.

Warren: 21:38

So it was very medical not a recovery-based getting off heroin, and so when I was writing the bio, I went to him and I said now I know this was in your interviews, but you didn't let it into the film. And I said I think there's a way to talk about this that doesn't romanticize it, and I think we're actually at the point where there's a little bit of an ethical imperative that you let people know I had this problem and I no longer do, and my life is better because of it. I think that's a message. If you can carry it authentically, you should and all find a way to make sure it isn't romanticized or it's, or it would be difficult to, and so he kind of committed to that. But the hazards there for me are when the book came out, I gave the washington post an exclusive and the headline was like tom petty's on heroin you know, and it was like oh shit, and it got picked up widely internationally.

Warren: 22:44

it's one of those great for the book. Let's see where the relationship goes, because it was tough and I had done my work. I can't reroute the Washington Post and the many who want to hear those kind of tabloid-like stories.

Thad: 23:00

How do you think about his resistance to coming out about it? The?

Warren: 23:03

very effect that we saw with the Washington Post, which was what it can overwhelm everything else Like why do you think that is?

Warren: 23:12

I think same reason. Like me, as a kid I was just hot to romanticize Keith Richards' world. You know, like I, before I did cocaine I knew I wanted cocaine because of Keith Richards, like I was in. I think that's the danger is that you can become a part of that tradition when in truth you know you've been beaten up by this thing and you wouldn't want your own kids to go near it.

Thad: 23:43

So there's a kind of mark of authenticity for the experience, almost like a rite of passage where you have the drug addiction, the drug experience, and then you're a rocker or you're more likely to be a rocker. Aren't all rockers addicts? And therefore if I'm an addict my odds are better to become a rocker like the ones I admire. Is that?

Warren: 24:01

Well, it's very cowboy-like. I can go through this experience and still walk up Main Street, you know, like with your holsters. You know it's like blood dripping down your face. It's a really problematic romanticizing of a particularly masculine way of being in the world, that take-no-prisoners kind of thing. And I think I was young I picked it up really quickly. I think Tom Petty had the anxiety of, like I don't want to be that. But I think, more to the point, like once you share an addiction story it can overwhelm everything else and and you know, he was definitely a guy who rightly wanted to be remembered as a songwriter but what is behind the way, the power of it to overwhelm the rest of the story?

Thad: 24:47

Why, how is it? Why is that?

Warren: 24:49

I think it's just easy to pick up and run with because it's widely promoted.

Thad: 24:55

But do you think the culture has a hunger to dismiss or to ascribe a kind of material source of inspiration? Like Petty, he wanted to say I did heroin, but it that's not the whole story. But the culture wants to say yeah, but it is. That is such a huge thing. Why is that there's that kind of prurient? Is there a desire to reduce or to dismiss this here, to take the hero down a peg, to say he has, you know, feet of clay, like what?

Warren: 25:25

is going on with that? I don't think so. I mean, I think there's still this tendency to say drugs can take you to places that you might not otherwise get to that's certainly the way heroin was in the bop era.

Thad: 25:40

You know, a lot of people got on heroin because of charlie parker. It looked like charlie's you know brilliance was, you know, connected to heroin high and there was a whole generation that got strung out due to Charlie Parker. Yeah, and and and you know, the rock thing came after that, but it was seemed to me the same thing. And petty, yeah, oh, same thing, yeah for sure. I mean, what what we admire about Keith Richards is he's so open about it, right, but a lot of people, for whatever reason, aren't. But it seems like Keith Richards, his reputation, sort of just digested it, right. He's like ah, I'm Keith Richards, I did all the drugs in the world, there are none left for you. That kind of joke of Keith Richards of the excess, which is macho.

Warren: 26:23

Yeah, in his case I feel like it's less attached. It is, to a degree, attached to creative work, but he's more, I mean like there they are making Pirates of the Caribbean. Who are we going to? You know who's Captain Jack Sparrow going to be based on? Well, keith Richards, of course you know he's a pirate. I feel more often there's a connection to the creative work, where it's going to take me places.

Thad: 26:49

Keith.

Warren: 26:49

Richards is almost like the platypus. He's a species of one I was more attracted to. You can get things done because you can go to places.

Thad: 26:59

Like what Derek.

Warren: 27:00

Taylor's wife was describing about early Beatles acid trips and the truth is is those are the exceptions. Like what addiction looks like is what you see on the streets of western massachusetts now in an opioid crisis, like what happens with most people that I have seen is they stop producing. It's like in the end, once I met later made the connection that you were starting to see at age 15 of writing takes me to another place. On some level, it feels safer. I can control the elements.

Thad: 27:36

Yes.

Warren: 27:37

And I come out the other side, the worst that can happen is that I don't like the writing. But it's not the call from the police station. You know it's not waking up, not knowing where you were. So I got more scared of not producing and that you know, I said at the top, like I was from a family, that like it was produce above all, like we've made way too much stuff just to get mother and father's love, you know. But that ended up being the problem that I have to contend with. But it had so many upsides, like okay, the writing process is going to give me something of what I was hoping for out of the drug experiences without mishap and it's going to answer these somewhat unfortunate familial needs of I'm going to be recognized as a producer and possibly get the love of my parents that's and

Thad: 28:31

that's what you untangle in a late stage but let's circle back to the shame issue for a second, because I I what I as someone watching myself become addicted and almost like having to work for it, or almost having to clearly make it a project. It didn't, you know, it snuck, but it sneaked up on me. But it was also something I remember thinking I needed to complicate things, to complicate my life, like there was, there was something tiresomely clean living about my fundamental impulse. Clear-headed, it wasn't interesting. I needed I and here's, here's, here's a writer I was attracted to in this regard is Rimbaud and the dérèglement de tous les sens.

Thad: 29:11

You know to turn your mind upside down, fuck yourself up. Your mind is boring in its current state. You need to revolutionize your consciousness. And how are you going to do that? Well, a lot of different ways, but drugs is an obvious and easy way, and this, I think, was the appeal of psychedelics revolutionizing the mind.

Thad: 29:28

For me it was more production oriented, but the reason I brought up shame again is because it makes me think of petty's reluctance to admit to it. But also for me, I remember thinking like, okay, anyone looking at you a girlfriend, a friend, is gonna, is is thinking this guy is going over the deep end. He can't stop. He's doing too much. Everyone else has pulled back, everyone else has gone to bed. Thad's going to do it until there's no more left. He may even leave the house and go get some more. And that was something that I felt a kind of need to hide pretty quickly. And that was something I'd never done in my life. I'd never hidden anything. I'd never lied about anything. Life I'd never hidden anything. I never lied about anything, but drugs introduced this pressure to to deceive because I could not. It was almost like I didn't have the energy to justify it to everyone who was looking at it like whoa and use the word shame yes yeah, and so that the shame was behind hiding it, otherwise I'd be open in a way.

Thad: 30:22

That was what isolates addicts. Is this sort of like the kind of weariness you get of hiding? And if you can just go into an SRO, if you could just be left the fuck alone to do your drugs, everything would be fine. It's all these people judging you right. Do you remember that feeling? Do you have that? Well?

Warren: 30:38

I mean, just to go to Petty, he was so conscious because of the impact Once you become a star at that level. You're doing so much identity construction because you're creating something for the public to digest. It's not that it's dishonest, it's just you're doing it more consciously. And he just knew full well if you drop Addict into that story it's going to cloud the space. So, like the songwriter is the one that's going to take the hit and there's going to cloud the space, so the songwriter is the one that's going to take the hit and there's going to be more talk. And he had a lot of pride in his work, as he rightfully should have. So I think that was different. So I don't think it was driven by shame, I think it was just an awareness of how it would eclipse other stories about who he was and how he made what he made.

Thad: 31:28

But, if he has a debt to heroin in the making process, and this is the kind of thing that you hear with people that are really honest about rock and roll. They're like look, if you subtracted all the drugs from rock and roll, I don't know what would be left. A lot of good stuff was written and conceived while people were altered on drugs was written and conceived while people were altered on drugs. This is, like you know, a kind of complicated version of things.

Thad: 31:52

where it's not, you can't then kind of like but that's right, but it seemed to me that petty's, the shame potential in the petty narrative is, and the prurience of the addiction narrative is yeah, but you know you were leaning on that heroin to get those songs written, weren't you? You couldn't have done it on your own. That seems to me the logic of the disavowal. I don't want heroin, I don't want my brand is that I'm a songwriter yeah and yes, if I bring in heroin, it's going to cloud that brand management.

Thad: 32:18

But it's also because drugs and the the use of drugs for during the creative process is a corruption or a kind of dirtying of the water of it is not. You're not dealing straight with a muse. Yeah, you're getting that from yeah, no, that's.

Warren: 32:34

That's interesting and I could only speculate on that one because I didn't talk with him on that level about addiction. But what's funny, as you're saying it is, he and Dylan both would say it's amazing to me that these songs came and they get into. I was channeling now channeling everybody's okay with, because it's like you're still special, because you were accepted, that's right as the channel, whereas if you say, oh, I think the drugs might have got him some of his best songs, then it's like that's a dirty story, that's right yeah, yeah, so yeah I can see that he would want to avoid that.

Warren: 33:12

I can't say that again, pure speculation because I couldn't speak for him on that, but there's so much pride in you know what he created and it's it's different, like he. He talked about abuse at the hands of his father. Now that works into the narrative because it's like I was abused.

Warren: 33:33

It was this traumatic thing and rather than die from trauma, I used it as an engine to create art that's a good pure story, whereas if you drop addiction in exactly as you say the risk is, then some people might see it as oh, the drugs made it possible.

Thad: 33:53

You're not as great as you're making yourself out. To be Great means, yes, you're a vessel of God, You're a vehicle for some bigger thing, and aren't you lucky to have been touched by divine inspiration. But if we introduce heroin into it, that's dirty and that's where the shame comes in, I think, for the artist, and that's why it was the exception for a while, and that was why the beats occluded it too. You wouldn't hear speed be brought up in the story of Kerouac's writing of On the Road. Not initially. It took the biographies to come out. Oh yeah, he did. You know God knows how much speed and stayed up for a week. Right, that's the reality of On the Road, of the final composition of that famous scroll version, right, yeah?

Warren: 34:39

yeah.

Thad: 34:39

And yet we know instinctively that you can take all the speed you want and you're not going to be Kerouac. There's that kind of Kerouacian. The essential thing is Kerouac and the narrative right. And so from a purely like from an adult post addiction perspective, we can look at Petty and say, like we understand why he's ashamed, but there's actually no cause for him to be ashamed because you know, a lot of people do heroin. A lot of people go to war and can't write a good memoir about it. A lot of people have experiences and it amounts to nothing. But the essential thing is petty in this equation right, and you can't have those songs without petty.

Thad: 35:14

Yes, maybe he was high when he was writing them, maybe he got some painkiller out of the heroin that permitted him to kind of stay with it in the way that I was talking about earlier. But we don't as adults really judge him. We understand the brand management impulse but we don't as addicts, as addicts in recovery. You can look at that and go like well, some of the things I wrote most of what I wrote when I was altered weren't actually good, but some was. I'm not going to disavow all of it.

Warren: 35:40

I don't know if you know the song Room at the Top Worth listening to, but I could never not hear that as a story about heroin use. It lined up on the timeline of when he was using but he's describing this. I got a room at the top of the world tonight and I'm like that's a good high. I'm like that is. It was such a great description, it's a great image, but I never associated it with being high. I always thought it was just a good writer describing being high in the aftermath yes, in the Wordsworth sense of it.

Thad: 36:18

Yes, recollected in hindsight, in tranquility which still requires a great writer absolutely no diminishment, but also it requires the experience. Yeah, that's where we have to have. That's where you, where it gets complicated, you go like well, you know he's writing, but he, he might not have had that image occur to him or that even had that experience be so italicized. So if he hadn't been whacked on, just in relation to to music.

Warren: 36:43

So some, I think you, you know my mother was growing incredible pot when we were young. She didn't smoke it, she was growing just for us. And she was growing so much she obviously had no idea how much we needed because she was tripling it. We may as well have been bob marley and the whalers. We were smoking huge joints and when we were out making our first record when I was in the del fuego's you know, I'm still in my teens we would have my mother send boxes a pot to someone at the record company so that we wouldn't get in any trouble. It'd be like t-shirt on the bottom, half pound a pot, t-shirt on the top make it out to anna statman at slash records.

Warren: 37:27

And and we opened this thing in pre-production our producer was there who seemed much straighter than us mitchell froome and he's like he could not believe what he was seeing but said can I have a little bit of it, because it's a great writing tool? And we were all like what we were like. Well, we didn't know what it was like to not be high, so like what? But it suddenly made legitimate pot smoking. And pot's so different from heroin. Like heroin, it's easier to have a conversation about addiction in relation to heroin, but like pot really, I mean now, look it's in every storefront you pass. But thinking of petty, I wonder if he wrote anything without being high on pot, because it was a great writing tool. And I remember when I stopped drinking my brother came to me he's like and was like you may as well do the bundle and quit both these things.

Warren: 38:25

And it was like well, I guess I've written my last song Because I'd made such an association between them and the truth was it did take a little time. Then I realized, like that myth is also bullshit. Oh yeah, you know, it's like if you're a writer and you got something to write about and you can become responsible with your time management, you can have a little discipline. It's coming. Mm-hmm. Your problem is probably not gonna be drugs, it's gonna be discipline. Mm-hmm. It's funny to me. You know how wrapped up in different ways drugs were with this idea. You know me being the best writer I could be.

Warren: 39:12

It came from different angles. There's romanticizing, there's mythology and then at the end of the day, through a lot of good fortune and a lot of help, it's now my favorite place to be. I still need discipline to do it. I mean, I might rather roast vegetables and clean the dishwasher out than do it. But if the discipline kicks in, I then get some of that thing that I was after in the first place, like being in that room at the top.

Thad: 39:42

Yeah, it's like being a. You see those baseball pitchers where they're touching their cap and they're chewing tobacco and spitting it and they're doing all this wind-up where the tennis player about to receive a serve and he's like. You know who's the one from Mayorkas, the really great Nadal. Nadal, he takes five minutes to get everything in right. He's doing the same ritualistic little tucks and twitches and everything and now he's finally ready. But he's ready already. He's just associating all these moves, not almost superstitiously, but it has a kind of superstitious character because it's in association with the event. But you don't need anything except to wake up and jump right in. You're rested, you're ready to go for a flow state. Just jump into the material before you get self-conscious, before you have a chance to do something else procrastinate.

Warren: 40:33

The Paris Review interviews were a breakthrough for me. You know the ones that are all collected in penguin volumes and you hear about people's process and they had to people's process and they had to figure out discipline.

Thad: 40:46

Right right.

Warren: 40:46

And just something as simple as like it's going to go a lot better in the morning. Yes, that took me a while to get to yeah same here, but morning's better. You know how long should you be able to go? Is it good that I'm trying to go for eight hours? Well, obviously not. This is not a nine to five job, once you get the drink and the drugs out of there, and then you can learn from others how to have some discipline.

Thad: 41:10

I also feel like the rhythm of it depends on where I am in a book. It's like if I'm toward the end, my God, you know, I'm not even looking. I don't know how much time. But in the beginning it's kind of hard and I'm lucky if I can get three to four hours. But when I really get going that's a different thing altogether and it's almost like there are different phases within the process of a given thing.

Warren: 41:30

Do you take pictures of your workspace when you get into the more obsessive?

Thad: 41:35

I have kind of inadvertently and been kind of tripped out by what is around at certain points. You know the notes and so forth, but it's like, yeah, in the background of something, yeah, yeah, like writing my dissertation.

Warren: 41:47

we were living in Brooklyn at the time and I stayed up for three days straight and it was just coffee and Twizzlers. You know there were no drugs involved. I was clean. That's impressive. Coffee is very strong.

Thad: 41:58

Yeah, you can stay up if you're, if you're also kind of feeling driven. But coffee is very strong. Yeah, you can stay up if you're. If you're also kind of feeling driven. Yeah, I was in a delusional state when I was writing my dissertation. I did something to make myself aware of the passage of time because I was trying to finish it in the summer and I would take a picture of my self-portrait every day. This is before cell phones, and that repetition helped. You know, like, oh, that was a funny trick. I was like don't you know this summer's going past, get it done yeah, well it's.

Warren: 42:24

It's obsessive work and I feel like I bring an obsessive mind to the work and I brought an obsessive mind to my drug and alcohol yeah, no, it's very much on a continuum.

Thad: 42:38

I really think so. I I don't think that. That's why I don't think there should be any real shame attached to it. I think it's just obsessiveness gone off the rails. And that whole thing about.

Thad: 42:49

Thomas Mann says a writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people, so artists are more aware of the actual media, mystic challenges. This isn't actually easy. These are all sorts of problems and pitfalls and traps in this thing. That looks straightforward by the time I'm done, but the actual process is very fraught with peril and where it can all go wrong in so many ways. And you're trying to enter a flow state and if you get addicted to drugs in the process, well I'm sorry. Now I'm not addicted, now I've broken with that.

Thad: 43:26

But that was what it was about. I couldn't bear the pain of seeing how mediocre my writing was on the first draft, or I couldn't bear the pain of not focusing on it, being distracted, and so I did what I could do to focus myself, but that became its own problem almost immediately and finally I broke with that. But that was the process. I became this person. I didn't nothing that I didn't recognize, but who was someone I didn't respect? Yeah, yeah, and I never felt that way, you know, and that was, that was what really drove me to renounce it.

Warren: 43:59

We're at time, but I did want to get this question about parenting in here Because I want to remain open in telling my recovery story in the off chance that it might help somebody out there who could use it. That's just part of the culture. But at the same time, I am increasingly aware of my kids being aware of me as an alcoholic addict. I try to acknowledge what was productive about it and why it became a problem with my kids, without losing the fact that it didn't work for me in ways.

Warren: 44:39

What I say to them is like never ask that you don't drink or do drugs. I only ask that you know where to go if you need help Understanding that.

Thad: 44:53

I had a place to go and it worked for me, and also know the family you come from.

Warren: 44:56

Our family tree is like at the base of it. It's like bottles and needles. It's like that's what you come from and it's not a level playing field as you enter into the world as a young person. So know your past and know where to get help if you need it.

Thad: 45:11

That's such a hard thing though the asking for help part and I and this is something I I wanted to get your take on there's a support networks and there's management of this.

Thad: 45:22

And you know, we've come a long way in the recovery movement since I became an addict, right Through hard work and, yeah, I don't feel I feel like I benefited from it a couple of times. But fundamentally, here's my question to you, Don't you I guess I'll put it that way to be honest question to you Don't you I guess Bob put it that way to be honest don't you feel that, fundamentally, breaking with addiction is altogether an individual act and a solitary, isolated, soul-searching kind of revolution, a kind of, you know, seizing of yourself and pulling yourself out of that? And here's kind of what the background of that is. I feel like in that unless that point is reached, people don't break it it and so, like all the support in the world is gonna, but you've got, but there's a kind of desperation you have to come to that is going to be an inverted pyramid on your head right and then there's the possibility of breaking once you've induced the addiction right yeah right, we're talking about our kids prior.

Thad: 46:22

There isn't that yet and there may never be. And they have maybe a radically different life path. They may see addiction differently. They may see creativity differently. They may not even be involved in creativity. Yeah, you know, in the way that we were, yeah, I mean you're describing hitting bottom. Yes, you know.

Warren: 46:43

Effectively. I mean you're describing hitting bottom. Yes, effectively. I didn't come in on a winning streak, but you used the word isolation. That was the thing for me, isolation was just going to bring me back out into the danger zone and I did need other people.

Warren: 46:57

But I totally agree with you that anybody's quitting slash recovery is gonna look different from the next person's. It's almost like I didn't actually give birth, but I always use giving birth as an example, because you go take those birthing classes and everything they describe has nothing to do with the experience, right, you're gonna have with your partner in birth. It's like everything's gonna change because everyone is so individual, right, like both my kids are totally different. Birthing classes didn't do a lot to prepare us in an overcoming and addiction, getting into recovery. Yeah, everybody's story is going to be different. They're going to come in with, you know, different me a lot of self-disgust, a lot of shame, toxic levels of that. And I got in and it was very isolating but how I pulled it off was by not being isolated. But I didn't walk into recovery going. Man, I'm psyched to be here.

Thad: 47:55

But the act of breaking with the drug and alcohol use. The act was solitary, yeah, solitary.

Warren: 48:05

And then the support was, of course, collective. Yeah, you're getting there.

Thad: 48:07

You have the, I'll take the community but I'm talking about the act yeah, and that's why I think a lot of people can go into these great rehab programs and not take because the act isn't happening. You know there's a lot of support, there's a lot of great, and you feel like it's happening and you're in the community and you get outside the community and you're lost again.

Warren: 48:24

That's why I like I don't. You know I'm no expert, but look at interventions and I go. I'm not sure You're like it's gotta be a self-intervention. I know it's worked for some people. It has for worked for someone.

Warren: 48:43

Yeah, I just I don't have a lot. You know, I had to hit my bottom and go, that's it. Yeah, I gotta, I gotta try this. But the interesting thing that you make me think of is all the things I'd used to reduce pain and to find comfort. One day I didn't have and it was that was incredibly isolating, like drugs and alcohol were out, and that's how I got my comfort and reduced my pain.

Warren: 49:01

And so I was alone in discomfort and pain. I could sit in a room with other people and I knew they weren't feeling what I was feeling. They might have their version of it. But yes, that was isolating.

Warren: 49:13

But I remember when I went through divorce and somebody wrote an email and said my divorce was the making of me and I was in so much divorce pain and that was exactly what I needed to hear and I knew that was true from recovery and I was like okay, absence of that comfort, pain reduction is potentially the making of me.

Marni: 49:36

And that was the case you know, like more became possible.

Warren: 49:40

I wouldn't be here talking about writing with you if it wasn't the case, you know.

Thad: 49:45

So I think.

Warren: 49:46

hats off to Wachung Booksellers. Great to do this with you, absolutely. Montclair has a bunch of freaks and bring them on. When's the next shipment coming?

Thad: 50:00

Yeah, this poet friend of mine, she pushed me to go to an AA meeting and I did and it was very helpful. And she said you know, my father died of alcoholism and I was really saved by this. But when we were at the funeral I said to my mom why didn't he ever go to AA? And she said he wanted to do it on his own. And I often think, ruefully, of course, about the sort, about the sort of yeah, it's a lone wolf thing I have as the years pass I don't worry about as much, but initially I certainly were I think you might be deluding yourself with this because it didn't take for me to do meetings. Yeah, I didn't seem to need them. Yeah, I didn't find the circling back to an identity formation around it helpful, like or necessary. Yeah, and so I didn't.

Warren: 50:42

It's it's and there are a million different ways. Yeah, that's the thing. Totally agree on that, but you did. You did remind me of a joke, of that. You know. This guy dies of alcoholism and two friends are at the funeral. There's the open casket and one says did he ever try aa? And the other one goes oh, it wasn't that bad.

Thad: 51:02

Right, it's similar. So thank you, Thad, thank you, thank you.

Warren: 51:06

Enjoyed it and I'll see you at the bookstore Cool.

Marni: 51:13

Thank you, warren and Thad. Your conversation is the very reason we started this podcast, which is to have honest and meaningful conversations that support reading, writing and each other Before we go. Which is to have honest and meaningful conversations that support reading, writing and each other.

Kathryn: 51:23

Before we go, we want to remind you of a few of our author talks you can hear live and in person.

Marni: 51:28

Tonight, may 28th, we're celebrating the book release for Garth Risk Hallberg's the Second Coming. He's going to be talking about it with author and podcaster Willa Paskin. Register and pick up a copy today. On Sunday, june 2nd, the Latinos of Montclair welcome Luis Miranda for a fireside chat at the Montclair Art Museum. He'll be discussing his memoir Relentless.

Kathryn: 51:48

On Tuesday, june 11th, the Montclair Literary Festival hosts Eric Larson to talk about the Demon of Unrest a saga of hubris, heartbreak and heroism at the dawn of the Civil War. And on Wednesday, june 19th, henry Neff will be in store to celebrate the release of his novel Witchstone.

Marni: 52:03

You can register for our newsletter and find out more about all of our upcoming events at watchonbooksellerscom.

Kathryn: 52:09

Recording and editing at Silver Stream Studio in Montclair, new Jersey. Special thanks to Timmy Kellany, Bree Testa and Derek Matthiass. Original music is composed and performed by Violet Mujica, art and design by Evelyn Moulton and research and show notes by Carolyn Shurtleff. Thanks to all the staff at Watch ung Booksellers and the Kids Room for their hard work and love of books, and thank you for listening.

Marni: 52:31

If you enjoy the podcast, please like, follow and share it. You can follow us on social media at Watch ung Booksellers.

Kathryn: 52:45

And if you have any questions, you can reach out to WB Podcast at WatchungBooksellerscom. We'll see you next week. Until then, for the love of books, keep reading.