If She Can Do It
The alcoholic life and times of Marty Mann
I’m grateful for a new library card and another library. Two actually. I’m grateful for quiet evenings. I’m grateful for exciting projects. I’m grateful for a hazy morning and an orange pathway on the water. I’m grateful for special days. I’m grateful to be sober today.
The first thing I would like to point out is that today is a special day. There are days throughout the year where the date adds up to itself. For example, in May there were several days that had this date combination: 5.23.23 or 5.14.23 or 5.5.23. I see 5.5.5. So today is 6.6.23, we multiply instead of add (we’re looking for patterns not operator-consistency) , et voila. 6.6.6. There are other reasons that today is special, but it doesn’t hurt that the numbers work out, even with the obvious summoning of dark forces.
Speaking of dark forces, let’s get back to alcoholism.1 I have mentioned Marty Mann here before and I think her story is gigantically under-appreciated. Who is Marty Mann? Marty Mann may have done more to promote AA and de-stigmatize alcoholism than just about anyone else. She was born in 1904, her father died of alcoholism and she was eventually confined to a sanitarium in Connecticut, unable to stop drinking despite years of treatment and therapy. Her psychiatrist, Dr. Harry Tiebout got access to the near-final draft of the Big Book in 1939, and since roughly nothing else had worked for Marty Mann, he gave it to her, said it was the product of about 20 alcoholics in New York and that it had apparently helped them.
She read the book and immediately saw the error of her ways, light filled the room and her decades-long obsession with alcohol suddenly ended. Hahahaha. No. Marty Mann was an out-lesbian atheist and she thought this was horseshit.2 Not her words, but these are:
On every page there were four or five capital Gs—God!
The very excellent biography of Marty Mann explains:
Marty, a confirmed atheist, had long outgrown a belief in God and no intention of returning to so childish a notion. The whole idea offended her. Then she found other shortcomings. The writing wasn’t up to her standards. In addition, she began to realize the book was all about men…Marty couldn’t relate it it. So the more she read, the unhappier she became. Disgusted, she hurled the manuscript out the window and flounced off the grounds of the sanitarium to tie on a big bender.”
Mrs. Marty Mann, The First Lady of Alcoholics Anonymous (S. Brown, D. Brown 2001), pp. 105-6
Does that sound familiar? What happened? Dr. Tiebout had her read a few pages a day and then they would get together and she would explain why the whole thing was so stupid, the work of truly addled alcoholics who obviously didn’t realize how far gone they were. She thought the idea of desperation and crisis producing the necessary willingness was dumb: Her whole life had been a crisis and she was now mostly indigent and confined to a sanitarium and if that wasn’t enough to produce this spiritual, soft-hearted and wet-brained malarkey than what was?
Like two days later she flew into a rage over some dealings with other people and was shocked at how the anger had completely overwhelmed her, made her actually want to kill someone, but that’s where that alcoholic brain-glitch kicks in and we decide to begin the homicidal spree in a really illogical way. Here’s a joke that I used to tell on the high school debate circuit that actually perfectly illustrates this proposition:
A person arrives unexpectedly at home and finds their partner in the arms of another. Person A retrieves the gun in the nightstand and points it at their own head. Perfidious Partner B calls out, "what are you doing? Please don't shoot yourself!" Person A: "Shut up [bad word for Partner B], you're next."
In the midst of her murderous rage, and as she was preparing to exit the grounds in search of oblivion, Marty M. saw the stupid, f***ing Big Book and, of course, it was laying open on her bed and she couldn’t avoid seeing this:
In the middle of the page was a line that stood out as if carved in raised block letters, black, high, sharp—’We cannot live with anger.’ That did it. Somehow those words were the battering ram that knocked down my resistance.”
Id. at 107.
The next thing you know, old Jed’s a millionaire.3 No, even more improbably, Marty Mann, avowed lesbian atheist and confined asylum patient, got on her knees and found herself praying to something, but what? It didn’t matter.
The walls crumpled and the light streamed in. I wasn’t trapped. I wasn’t helpless. I was free, totally and completely free. And I didn’t have to drink to ‘show them.’ This wasn’t religion, it was freedom. Freedom from anger and fear, freedom to know happiness and love.”
Id. at 108.
You know what comes next? Marty is getting sober and some also-sober New Yorkers invite her to come with them to one of the first two AA meetings in existence. This one was hosted on Clinton Street in Brooklyn by a couple named Lois and Bill.4 Marty was undone by the crowd of 40 or so alcoholics, mostly men, stuffed into the house and kindly Lois W. guided her from her hiding place in the bathroom back to the living room. Here was her reaction:
I could finish their sentences! They could finish my sentences! We talked each other’s language! It was not a room of strangers. These were my people. I had come home.
Id. at 112.
Then she became Bill W’s sponsee and began bravely speaking publicly all over the country, one of the first to openly proclaim,
“I’m Marty Mann and I’m an Alcoholic!”
She would often say, “I love the word alcoholic!” For her, the term was “joyful liberation,” a name that explained what heretofore had just been considered plain old, untreatable insanity. She was exactly right, it’s like I like to say,
“Alcoholic” is a diagnosis, not an insult.
Obviously, I find Marty Mann’s story remarkable. What’s more remarkable is how obscure it is. I completely understand that the language of the Big Book is off-putting to some. It reflects some really outdated and harmful stereotypes and ways of thinking. It is very imperfect. But the thing is, it contains the seeds of transformation and what’s even more remarkable, is that it works differently for everyone. The hook and the set, the thing that draws you in and then compels your new willingness-spawned attention, is different for everyone. Mary M. was intrigued by the spookily correct description of her symptoms, that was what hooked her.
Marty Mann was a pioneer, and she definitely was the very pirate-y variety of alcoholic. She spent the next forty years tirelessly trying to carry the message and save alcoholics. She wrote a remarkable book, which I found not too long ago at a used bookstore:
Marty Mann’s New Primer on Alcoholism (Holt Rinehart Winston 1950)
Her now seventy-year old insights are pretty much spot on and her work with Dr. Ruth Fox inspired what I think is one of the great and also completely unread books on alcoholism:
Alcoholism: It’s Scope, Cause and Treatment (Random House 1955)
When Marty Mann died in 1980, the New York Times published her obituary:
"MARTY MANN DEAD; HELPED ALCOHOLICS.” Founder of Alcoholism Council, 75, Wrote Books and Lectured Extensively on Drinking 'I Am an Alcoholic' (Published 1980)
Marty Mann’s story is like my story is like a zillion other stories. That was exactly the realization that let her see the words in the Big Book lit the path for her journey to sobriety. The words that turned the light on for her were different than the ones that did that for me and probably different than the ones that worked for you. Here’s what I know: As long as the exercise was finding stupid, nonsensical things in the Big Book, pointing out the archaic style, the lack of scientific validity, the just plain hokey-ness, I kept drinking. Things changed when I became willing to notice the similarities.
I’m not an atheist, out-lesbian confined to a sanitarium for alcoholism. But if Marty Mann could see herself in the Big Book, I know I can, too.
If there was a way to incorporate an audio rimshot there, I would. And I am here all week.
She lived in London and socialized with Virgina Woolfe and Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas.
It does seem inconceivable that we’ve never discussed this.
If you recall, 182 Clinton Street was also the site of Bill’s famous dinner with Ebby. Bill was living on a mattress in the basement at the time (so he wouldn’t jump out the window) and kept a bottle of gin in the toilet tank for special occasions.
Now I need to go read up on Marty