Parched, by Heather King

Parched is the first book that I've read from the genre of autobiographies involving the struggle against addiction and alcohol. I'm happy that this genre exists, because people need to know that others who suffer the disease and have mostly overcome it are out there. I also thought it was rather ironic that this was one of my first books to read in South Korea, where alcohol is not only dirt cheap, but also a way for colleagues to connect with one another. The other unrelated but interesting background circumstance is that I read this book in conjunction with the Way of Korean Zen which has a drastically different voice. Comparatively, the vulnerability in this narrator seems much more human than the hardy insistence on psychological resilience in that one.

The narrative begins with the woman just waking up and already having a hangover, trying to remember what happened before she blacked out. She seems chipper enough, though she realizes that she has a problem but didn't know where to start doing something about it. I can somewhat relate to that in my past bouts of depression, but my troubles have never been mixed with substances so I can only imagine what it's like. She packs and prepares for the road quickly, because there's going to be a family reunion, and that starts off on a chapter or two where she recounts many memories from her childhood involving her family.

While I didn't have nearly as many siblings, I related to fighting with my one sibling for almost no reason other than the fact that we were supposed to coexist within the same house. Then there was the way one parent was more attentive and forgiving than the other one, but maybe that happens in all families. Her style of writing is very talkative, and it's like she's in front of you having a conversation with you - haha - over a drink. I have never met her, but I imagine that her speech would be peppered with all sorts of hand gestures and lively body language. The way she uses words reveals a kind of personal charisma that makes sure that I can't help but like her.

She also seems to really value people, because every time she mentions someone, she never has anything bad to say about them and seem truly grateful for their existence in her life. This is true even of the people who she would make fun of because they may have been somewhat unkind to her in some way at some point. She mentions everyone, even a few former lovers. She never quotes these people, though. There were also religious quotes beginning almost every chapter, but the ones I agreed with the most were the nonreligious ones - the words about fighting one's own mind, and the ones about the way it's much harder to love someone through one's actions than to entertain the idea of love. This was a foreshadowing of what Heather's salvation was going to be - part of it will have to do with Christianity.

Her sense of humor is somewhat dark, but not as dark as Kurt Vonnegut's. She didn't see millions of people die in a senseless war, but she still knows what poverty is like, what it is to consistently need a comfort object or substance, and the long unforgiving hours of retail labor. So she makes allies in that way, sometimes relying on friends to survive. I did laugh out loud several times when reading. I may have related to the sense of humor also because she spent a few years in Boston, which is where I grew up. It's true that if you're in the right neighborhood, there are plenty of bars, which would make it tough for an alcoholic to go several hundred yards without being tempted by the poison. The idea of substance abuse because a person is spiritually unfulfilled is not new, but I also thought there were other forms of salvation than religion.

The way it ended didn't seem all that interesting to me. I'm glad she found her happiness and became clean, but in terms of the story, it just felt too mundane. Of course her friends realized she had a problem, but she wouldn't listen. Of course her family had to eventually corner her and stick her into a rehabilitation program. She found that because she sometimes blacked out, she wouldn't remember appointments and bits of conversation she had said, so that upset a lot of people. It was like writing this book was her way of purging herself psychologically - to discover when it began and how it progressed, which was part of defeating it. Fortunately for the sake of the book as a whole, the way everything ended didn't really take away from any of the earlier moments in the autobiography - it was still very readable, very relatable and pleasant.