From the moment I told my agent that Drunk Mom was not fiction after all, I never doubted my decision to take responsibility for the story I told. My sweet publicist, on meeting me–and my bugged-out-chihuahua energy–for the first time, suggested I take a media-training class to prepare to answer hard questions. So I took the class where I sat in a windowless room in a corporate office with an eager stranger in a suit who showed me celebrities getting tripped up on talk shows, and where I didn’t learn at all how to curb my desire to explain and try to appease–a desire that the media picked up on and ran with. “Do you think your son will one day hate you when he reads your book?” was a common question, a question I had no idea how to address because it hadn’t occurred to me that I could possibly raise him to grow up to be a simpleton. But I did answer that particular question endlessly and patiently, explaining how I had no way of knowing how my-then four-year-old was going to feel years later and if he would hate me.
(The answer: he doesn’t hate me.)
I’ve answered all the questions. But I never really feel the shame that they wanted me to feel. Yet, 10 years later, when I read or watch some of those interviews, what strikes me the most is that although I’m not apologetic, I seem like I am. Having published a book about drinking while taking care of a baby, I had to pander to whatever shame others’ projected onto me. In order to withstand it all, I had to be nice despite the negativity. And, truthfully, the negativity I’d felt was short-lived (it accumulated but in the moment, I didn’t feel its cancerous growth). Today, I pat myself on the back (but I don’t, really, I genuinely crumble like a baby) for not backing down and for never saying that I was, indeed, ashamed for having published the book although privately, I crumbled more and more as I revelled in that discomfort. Eventually I drank again. When I step back and think about that time, yes, perhaps that was the price of public shaming that I brought onto myself: my vulnerability didn’t protect me.
But I am still not sorry. Which means that I was not really ashamed.
So what was it? As I read the articles, watch and listen to the clips again, I marvel at how well I survived all that (or managed–survived is reserved for survivors; I didn’t quite make it). Although there are a few telling vignettes: There’s the picture of me on stage, skinny and with a hollow face and big eyes in front of a huge audience, reading about blackouts. I look as if I’m about to bolt or burst into tears.
There’s the description of me twisting my hands in my lap as I’m asked to explain what was essentially a sexual assault I suffered during my drinking but that got twisted to make me look a cheater. There’s the radio host asking me how I, as a mother who has failed her baby, feel about school shootings. There’s the clip of me trying to best answer a nice journalist’s question about my “bipolar disorder,” my coyness worthy of Princess-Diana. There’s another interviewer joking you couldn’t pay her a million dollars to publish a book with that title. Or there’s the journalist with a personal vendetta writing, “confessing is not breaking ground for women. ‘I’ve been a bad girl’ is exhausted terrain and its neighbour, the Land of Victimization, is over-farmed as well.”
And then there’s gems like this, “Bydlowska, 35, did more than open the door. She flung it open to expose her booze-filled, milk-engorged breasts to the reading public.” (This from a journalist who was rumoured to die of shame, or rather, addiction, a few years after writing this.) (I’m not linking to this one out of respect. Do not google, trust.)
What’s telling in those vignettes is that I manage because I play along: I don’t apologize but I almost do, I answer hard questions by being self-deprecating and funny (to relieve the tension, to not start screaming, who knows?), and I certainly look ashamed. I sit on edges of seats, I speak in a soft voice, I dress in silk shirts and skirts, my hair is long, I wear makeup and my nails are always done.
The Philosopher Sandra Lee Bartky once wrote, “Women’s typical body language, a language of relative tension and constriction, is understood to be a language of subordination […] Whatever proportions must be signed in the final display to fear or deference, one thing is clear: woman’s body language speaks eloquently, though silently, of her subordinate status in a hierarchy of gender.”
During interviews, I am all woman and more–I am a courtesan of shame, providing all the illusion of its intimacy and authenticity although I don’t really mean any of it.
But even though I didn’t mean it, the damage of shaming was under way and when I re-examine that time, it’s clear to me that I had no idea how much damage.
I was not newly sober at that point, but being in the public eye and being criticized brought back all of my social anxieties.
In a 2013 study of body language and problem drinkers, researchers found “newly sober drinkers who showed signs of shame were much more likely to hit the bottle again.” They studied physical signs of shame–making yourself smaller by slumping and narrowing your chest and shoulders–and discovered those signs to be strong predictions of relapse over the next three to 11 months. I might’ve felt covertly cocky, self-assured and think that I was just performing shame in order to appease my attackers but I was setting myself up all along.
I didn’t relapse after the publication but eventually I did. I might’ve not cared what people said about me but my addiction did. So, in that way, I agree with the ones who said it was self-harm, although not from drinking or writing the book about it, no—it’s what happened after the book was already out.
It’s because you didn’t let me breathe.
But media is media, and it was understood that I would do media, which meant that the media would do me. We had to sell the books. And I liked all the travel I got to experience, and I liked some of the prettier pictures that got published because I am vain, and finally, I liked that I got a little bit famous, even though for that I had to cut my heart out and let it bleed.
I’ve wondered if I managed (not survived) because as someone with childhood trauma and subsequent mental-health issues such as an eating disorder or addiction, I did indeed feel comfort in discomfort and I did find home in shame. Maybe I felt safe in my fancy pillory because public humiliation is my worst fear and if you live through your worst fear, well, you…
live.
I used to listen to L.L. CoolJ “Mama said knock you out,” a lot during that time, another metaphor or an analogy where I’d imagined myself as a boxer in a ring, always getting up after getting knocked down.
“Bring it on,” I often thought as I would arrange my increasingly more steady hands in my lap, my brows and smile into a submissive yet distant expression that would let my interviewer know I was willing but that I was also untouchable. Some moments it felt as if I was in a stuffy room where a window would suddenly open bringing in a new breeze. I would become a series of blurry lenses being twisted till finally coming into focus. And they would bring it on and I would get up again, occasionally hearing from my supporters that I remained dignified, that I managed to control the off-the-rails narrative better and better. The media got easier and publicly perhaps, I appeared prepared.
Still, there was one more thing that bothered me—more than the ones who judged me for my addiction, I really hated that some journalists called me “brave.” That’s because although I refused to be shamed I did feel a lot of private shame and I believed I owed the world this public bleeding because I fucked up so badly with the baby and the booze.
Unhappy with criticism, unhappy with praise–what did I really want?
I wanted control.
I wanted to control this narrative fully and I wanted the focus to be elsewhere.
What I yearned for the most was for people to stop debating whether the protagonist was a bad or good person, masochistic and shameful, or the opposite: altruistic (“I wanted to open dialogue about addiction,” – a media soundbite I learned to lob at whoever would ask me why write about such shameful things), and courageous. My character was irrelevant.
An artist doesn’t have to be nice to be good. As my once publicly shamed (and currently “canceled”) friend, poet Christian Bök says, “Show me an artist who’s known not for his art but for his virtue.”
This is really powerful. It's hard to imagine how our perceptions have changed over a decade (at least, mine have) and this 'meditation on shame' Substack is very unique. Thank you.