What I've been reading, and a personal update about Rat Park

This has been a banner year for writing about addiction and mental health. It’s been a while since I’ve posted an update, so see below for some reads that I’ve found meaningful, followed by a personal note about how this Substack experiment is going for me. The top line: it’s vastly exceeded my hopes, and I’m grateful that you’re here.

I’ve already had some fantastic 2024 writers on the podcast, like Erin Williams, author of the stunning graphic novel What’s Wrong. Many more are on the way. In the meantime I always appreciate any suggestions from you; feel free to leave a comment, or just hit “reply” and write me directly.

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Splinters by Leslie Jamison

I inhaled this book, and I’m already looking forward to a reread. It’s gorgeously crafted, as one should expect from Leslie, but also fun! And, characteristically, insightful and blisteringly honest. It’s her first memoir, focusing on the rupture of her marriage and her love for her young daughter, shot through with meditations on recovery and the process of making art. She gets so much into a relatively short read: the struggles of parenting and the ghosts of one’s own childhood, the work of thriving in a relationship, the possibility of hope in this troubled world. Recovery, self-worth, and love. It’s unequivocally my favorite of hers so far and that’s saying a lot.

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Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar

This book is electrifying and unputdownable in a totally different way. The prose is constantly surprising and just delightful—Kaveh is a wonderful poet, after all (see for example his Calling a Wolf a Wolf, and the poetry collection he edited with Paige Lewis, Another Last Call). In this, his first novel, he tells the story of a young Iranian-American poet in recovery, living with the legacy of his mother’s death after her commercial flight was shot down over the skies of the Persian Gulf. It’s hard to do the story justice here. I’ll just say: he sets it up almost like a thriller, establishing in the early pages that the protagonist Cyrus is suffering from “a doom organ that just pulses all the time” at the base of his throat. His quest for relief unfolds from there like the psychological and recovery equivalent of a classic page-turner.

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Now and at the Hour of our Death by Susana Moreira Marques

I was so happy to do a book event with the excellent Portuguese writer Susana Moreira Marques earlier this year. At the time my book The Urge came out in January 2022, I didn’t get to do an in-person book event (cursed Omicron wave!), but finally, I was able to do an event here in Lisbon in January, and Susana was a stimulating and scintillating conversation partner. This is Susana’s main book in English translation, and it’s a beautiful work of narrative nonfiction and oral history that tells the stories of life and death, but mostly end-of-life death, in Trás-os-Montes, a rapidly-depopulating rural corner of northern Portugal. These are deeply moving meditations on aging, mortality, medicine, the land, and what makes a life meaningful. Her work has rightly been called “an example of the best contemporary Portuguese writing available in translation” by the New York Times.

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Tripping on Utopia by Benjamin Breen

The UCSC historian Ben Breen, who helped me tremendously as I was researching The Urge (listen to our interview for more about that), has just published his own first trade book, and it’s a well-deserved smash. Tripping on Utopia is something like a group biography and revisionist history that records the untold story of 1940s and 50s work on psychedelics. It’s centered around the figures of Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson, who were seeking to do nothing less than save humanity through a new science of consciousness. There’s Cary Grant tripping, John Lilly dosing dolphins, the CIA, and the origins of Silicon Valley and the so-called information age.

Ben also has a lovely Substack that’s well worth reading.

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Jordan Kisner is a wonderful essayist and podcast host who wrote one of my all-time favorite pieces about mental health: Thin Places, later the titular essay of her lovely book. Around the time of that book launch, she started her podcast Thresholds as an interview series, talking to writers and artists about the messiness, revelations, and friction points from which their best work is made. She loved it so much she decided to continue (incidentally, a lot like my own podcast), and Thresholds is now a treasure-trove of interviews. It was my great pleasure to be a guest back in 2022, and since then she’s had people like Megan O’Rourke (The Invisible Kingdom), Rumaan Alam (Leave the World Behind),and Ocean Vuong (On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous). And, Thresholds just started publishing on Substack!

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There are some cool people on Substack now, and more every day. The folks above are just some of the recent and most psychiatric/philosophical/literary/recovery-oriented ones. I’m glad to be here.

On a personal note, this concludes my 3-month experiment. I actually didn’t tell you this at the time, but when starting Rat Park in January, I told myself I would post regularly for 3 months and drop it if it didn’t feel right. Truly, I was fully prepared to scrap the whole thing if I didn’t like it and it wasn’t working.

It has worked; in fact, it has vastly exceeded my hopes. I won't talk about my subscription numbers or the numbers of countries in which this newsletter is read, because those aren't the truest measure of value for me, although let’s be honest, it’s also really cool to connect with a bunch of people around the globe who care about similar things. Nuanced and humanistic accounts of addictio. The phenomenon of the addiction as something in all of us. A meaningful conception of recovery for the 21st century. These sometimes feel like niche interests, even within medicine, so I’m so glad to share these preoccupations with you. More to the point, I deeply value your thoughts and feedback as I continue working on making this a learning space, a place for sharing more off-the-cuff ideas and works in process.

So here’s where I am. I'm going to publish a podcast interview next week. Then, I'm taking at least week off for vacation and The American Society of Addiction Medicine annual conference. If it feels right, and if you tell me it could be useful, I'll post a conference update later. Let me know what you think and if you have questions about it, and I’m happy to give something like “behind the scenes” reportage a try. (Also, if you’re going to the conference, say hi!)

What to expect going forward: I plan to post one of these longer-form posts per month, the ones that to date have been focused on “frameworks.” I will continue to post podcast interviews. When, and with whom? I don’t really know. It takes a little logistical wrangling, and it depends on generous people taking the time and effort to have yet another videoconference in a world of videoconferences. Sometimes it takes some work. But I’ll keep it going. Again, tell me what you think and who you’d like to hear from. When I have other things that are worthwhile to share, I'll share those too with a little update. My top priority here to put out work that matters to me, that I believe in, without being too perfectionistic about it.

This is a fine line to walk. I know some of you must feel the scatter and hustle of whatever period of the digital era we’re currently in. The twisted logic of productivity and expected-value has infiltrated every corner of it. Writing and creative work have become even more of a commodifiable entity. (This has something quite significant to do with addiction, in fact.) To be clear, I am not here to extract and convert your attention, the most precious resource you have, into dollars. I am here to connect and learn what works, what is actually of service to you, to whatever extent that is possible on the internet, this deeply flawed and hyperpolarizing monster we have created. This is perhaps an overly ornate way to invite you to keep commenting here and writing me, because I find it immeasurably valuable to my work. Thanks for being here.

All that said, of course, I very much appreciate the kind souls who have signed up for paid subscriptions. You have helped me set aside the time and resources I need to keep doing this work, and I get so much encouragement from the trust you have put in me and this project, so if you haven’t upgraded, please do consider it if you can.

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