Roger Ebert: His Drinking/Recovery Memoir

You know Roger Ebert as a film critic, one of the best in the business.

But on August 25, Roger Ebert came out to the world as a recovering alcoholic in his blog in the Chicago Sun-Times called “Roger Ebert’s Journal.” After 30 years of sobriety and an operation that left him physically unable to drink, he felt ready to go to step #12 of AA and share his story in order to help others. Judging from the response, he is doing just that!

The essay contains a brief history of AA itself and of Bill W., the man who founded the self-organizing “organization.” But the missing link between Ebert and AA was a wonderful doctor, “wise old Dr. Jakob Schlichter.” Reading about a doctor who took an hour with each patient and who offered homilies about aspirin being the only drug which we know really works, who distinguished depression from manic-depression by giving him an appetitie test with grapefruit sections, who suggested AA, but asked for monthly updates from his patient–all this filled me with great nostalgia for the good old days of American medicine. In the midst of HMO’s, nasty fights between the right and the left in politics, insurance companies that drown both doctors and patients in paperwork and pour millions into protecting their profits, I want Roger Ebert’s kind of family doctor and the uncomplicated system we used to have in this country and that other countries enjoy more completely than we do now! Not only did the wise doctor’s medical prescriptions work in Ebert’s case, but they were also very inexpensive.

Roger Ebert’s memoir essay has touched thousands of lives and initiated a deluge of comments–1201 of them by this time! The comments include many long, revelatory essays from the alcohol experiences of readers. Many are from recovering alcoholics; some are from heavy drinkers who want to get help. Amazingly, very few of them are critical or cynical.

Here is a link to the full Ebert blog post, including three movie clips (The Long Weekend, The Days of Wine and Roses, and Clean and Sober), a list of AA locations, a diagnostic quiz for drinkers who think they might be alcoholic, and all 1201 comments.

And here’s an exchange between Ebert and a commenter that illustrates why I chose to highlight the essay in a blog about memoir:

Great memoir comes from just this kind of boiled-down experience.  Wordsworth and Coleridge called it emotion recollected in tranquility. A reader can sense when it happens, and so can the writer.

Passionate, controlled, honesty found in this essay jumps from the heart of the writer to the heart of the reader, who hears the ring of truth.  What more can any writer or any reader ask of language?

Ebert’s essay can save lives and deserves to go viral. (By hitting the share button in this blog, you can email it, send it to FB, Twitter or other social media sites). You can do the same by going to the original essay and hitting the share button there.