Ah, writer research.

There’s a ton of books I read which I never review here. Oh, you hear about them eventually, in the form of characters and their psychological wounds. But what’s a good Mormon girl to do when she needs to describe some of the trashy, terrible things that happen to people? Hitchhike to Oregon, showering at truck stops in every state? Drive to the liquor and store and say, “I’ll try some of that brown bottle over there”?

Nope, it’ll have to be books.

One of them was the AA Big Book. It’s the Bible of the 12-step recovery process. I borrowed it from the library, renewed it, renewed it again. And again. I just couldn’t get through it all, step after step after step. It went faster once I reached the True Addiction stories in the back half of the book.

Eventually I ran out of renewals, which is hard to do at my very generous library. Possibly, the librarian assumed that I was coming to grips with my own demons. This poor lady is trying to turn her life around. Let her have the book one more time.

So when Allison Weiss, the heroine of Jennifer Weiner’s novel All Fall Down, opens a magazine in the doctor’s waiting room and gets stopped by the first question in one of those quizzes–“Are You Taking Too Many Pills?”—I knew this would be as good or better than the back end of The Big Book.
Allison believes she can stop anytime.

But Allison also believes that the pills help her cope with her problems. These include a sensitive kindergarten-age daughter, much of whose dialogue comes out in ALL CAPS!!!!!; a fragile and distant mother, whose troubles can be traced to an unexplained Accident; and a handsome husband who, thanks to his faltering career, grows distant and silent, plaguing Allison with questions like Does he resent me? Does he even care anymore?

Weiner delivers all this grimness with a light, comedic touch. Despite wanting to lecture that sensitive but highly annoying child, I read on.
When a single pill stops getting Allison through a hard afternoon, how many more will do the trick? How long until a Big Oops? When will it strike and where? Who will get hurt?

And when Allison ends up in rehab, will she kick or habit? What will she do when she finds herself standing in a breakfast line with tattooed, stick-thin, heroin-loving teenagers? Insist that Me and my Danskos don’t belong here? Or take a good hard look at what she doesn’t want to see?

I liked Allison. I liked Weiner. I liked the light-hearted morality tale in which addicts are not dirty scum, but hurting humans. It would be so easy to cope with life’s white-water moments by swallowing a calm-inducing little pill. However, backing yourself out of this trouble, despite the author’s comic touch, doesn’t sound fun at all.

Nor does the standard rehab breakfast of “limp slices of French toast and greasy discs of sausage in stainless steel pans on steam tables, with jugs of flavored corn syrup masquerading as maple.”

So I’ll stick to books about pill-popping, instead of actual pill-popping. That, and Dr. Pepper.

Which I can stop at anytime.

Photo credit: Charles Williams on Visual hunt/ CC BY