![]() My husband was made miserable by this, but I had already made him and myself miserable. At the tender age of twenty-three, I got a divorce. Her father became both mother and father to her. The birth of a daughter filled me with new fears. But I did not fit into this pattern either. His were good, simple Quaker folk who accepted me with love. It did not occur to me that marriage might be a job, too. So I married a nice, well-meaning young newspaperman, so as not to have to go home. I was still untrained for any work but washing dishes and waiting on table. My mother’s heartbreak, or the unpleasant publicity I had caused did not bother my pretty head. ![]() Like most sick people before me, I was implacably selfish, and chronically self-centered. I went out to the West Coast, waited on table, washed dishes and sold newspaper subscriptions. Showing all the courage and ingenuity that I had not used in a positive way, I covered my tracks and his from my family so successfully that they did not find me for months. Otherwise, I got nothing out of it.īefore I started to drink seriously, I tried a couple of other escapes. I got a good non-academic education my intellectual curiosity was encouraged. But I did not feel a part of my family or a part of the set-up. Up to my early thirties, when my drinking had become a major problem, I lived in large houses, with servants and all the luxuries that I could possibly ask for. It took me three psychoanalysts and several years in A.A. They did the best they knew how as far as I was concerned. They were ambitious, successful, strong and famous. My family, on my mother’s side, was brilliant, gifted and charming. When I was a baby, my mother brought me to America, and I never again saw my father. My father had a title there was plenty of means in the family. I was born in a castle, in pre-war Austrian territory. There was no material or external reason for this. I had to go through extreme alcoholism to find my answer. my life was a shambles I was a mess, and I made everybody near and dear to me miserable. Inside, I went right on being a mass of unlovely self-pity, queasy anxiety and sickening self-debasement. I also wanted to be the queen of society, with a glittering salon, the bride of a dream-prince and the mother of a happy brood. I had writing ambitions, and nothing would do but that I’d write like Shakespeare. Even when I was old enough to know better, I dreamed about being as beautiful as Venus, as pure as the Madonna, and as brilliant as the President of the United States is supposed to be. I tried to compensate with impossible dreams and ambitions, which were simply early forms of escape. I was out of step with life, with my family, with people in general. I was always at odds with the entire world, not to say the universe. My personality, from the time I can remember anything, was the perfect set-up for an alcoholic career. MY ALCOHOLIC PROBLEM began long before I drank.
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