When I conceived of Making a Scene, I thought I’d stick to film and television depictions of addiction. My good friend (who came up with the excellent MAS name) adamantly believes I should adhere to that plan. “Books are just different,” he insisted. “You can’t insert clips from books into the newsletter.”
Point taken. And I could have chosen the film adaptation of the book The Good House by Ann Leary—one exists—and it stars two talented and beloved actors, Sigourney Weaver and Kevin Kline. The charming duo from one of the great 90s classic films, Dave!
But I haven’t seen the film adaptation of The Good House, and I never will. The book means too much to me to engage with any other version of it. Specifically, Mary Beth Hurt’s narration of the audiobook brings protagonist Hildy Good to life with such droll specificity that I refuse to let even the great Sigourney Weaver tweak how I hear the character.
Usually when I recommend a book, I don’t mention if I read the print version or the audiobook. Occasionally, if I listened to the audio version, I’ll mention liking a narrator. When I recommend this book, I immediately ask the person if they have the Libby (library) app or an Audible account. I will then impress upon them the importance of listening to this book on audio. If they are unpersuaded, I’ll whip out my phone (the audiobook is perma-downloaded) and play them the first chapter.
By the time we part, I have either convinced the recommendee to listen to the audiobook or I’ve forever alienated someone who used to think I was normal.
In other words, The Good House audiobook was always going to find its way into Making a Scene, regardless of whether any other books (audio or otherwise) do.
The background:
Hildy Good is a real estate agent in the seaside town of Wendover, Massachusetts. She’s in her 60s, has two grown daughters, one grandson, and has lived in Wendover all her life—she knows everyone and everything that happens in the enclave.
Unfortunately for her, small towns work both ways: the townies also know everything about her—or so they believe. They know, for example, that Hildy likes—or ‘liked ’—to drink. They know that the previous year, Hildy’s daughters arranged an intervention for their mother and that she went to a 28-day treatment program at Hazelden.
They may know that Hildy never really considered herself an alcoholic, but they believe she returned from Hazelden sober and has ostensibly maintained her sobriety since. They don’t know that she still drinks (wine—just a little wine!) when she comes home at night.
Here’s a clip from chapter two to give you a sense of Hildy and how she thinks about these things:
He was “born three drinks short of comfortable,” the Hazelden speaker said. Hildy is certain that she’s not an alcoholic, whatever her daughters and the people at rehab might think. But those six words were so true for Hildy that even the steel walls of her defenses couldn’t stop them from breaking through. It’s a moment well known to anyone who has identified with another person’s addiction story. Hearing someone articulate a feeling you’ve lived with your whole life but never found the words or courage to express can take your breath away.
Of course, Hildy tells herself, identifying with that one thing alone is hardly proof that she has a problem. So what if she was born three drinks short of comfortable? She is a very successful real estate agent—the most successful real estate agent in the town of Wendover, Massachusetts! If she wants to have three glasses (or bottles) of wine on the terrace of her empty house, why should anyone else care?! She’s an adult, goddammit.
You don’t have to be the kind of drinker I was, or Hildy is here, to understand her logic. Whatever damage Hildy might be doing to herself with her solitary imbibing, she’s not harming anyone else.
That’s certainly the attitude Rebecca, a new arrival in Westover who quickly befriends Hildy, takes. It’s not much of a spoiler to say that Rebecca begins having an affair with her psychiatrist, Peter, who works in the office above Hildy’s (it happens fairly early in the book).
The new friends become each other’s secret keepers: Rebecca knows that Hildy pretends to be sober in public but is very much not in private. Hildy knows that Rebecca and Peter are cheating on their respective spouses.
It’s in this context that the following exchange occurs:
I’ve vaguely and noncommittally mumbled my way through more of these types of conversations than I can count. Smiling and nodding while my stomach lurches down to my toes and a cold sweat breaks out across my body—yes, of course I remember saying that—smile smile smile, nod nod nod and hope the contents of my stomach can stay put until I escape this uncertain interrogation.
Worse than what I might have said in a blackout, the real terror came when I did things I couldn’t remember. Someone would start to tell me what I’d done the night before and the terror would descend on me in a cold, brutal, urgent panic. It began with disbelief; rapid decay of what I thought I knew and then spiraled into an increasingly worse nightmare. I don’t think I can describe it any better than Leary does here:
Every note of this emotional progression feels painfully accurate to the experience of being a blackout drinker that—no matter how many times I listen to it—I have a visceral reaction. It’s like watching a car crash in slow motion when you’ve totaled your vehicle in the exact same place. You know what’s coming, you’ve heard the squeal of tires and crunch of metal in your nightmares ever since it happened, but you’re powerless to stop it from happening to someone else, right before your eyes.
This exchange also helps us see why Hildy’s homebody wine-drinking might not be as harmless as she believes. When she’s blacked out, she can’t stay contained in her insulated bubble; she’s free to wander out of it at will and wake up none the wiser. Unless, of course, someone tells her what she’s done.
Hildy’s thin veil of denial is pierced when Hildy hears the sadness (or pity, as she says) in Rebecca’s voice.
This, too, feels damningly accurate. It’s easy to maintain your defenses when someone is angry—it’s what they were made for—warding off attacks. We instinctively match anger with anger—Yes, you did! No, I didn’t!
But sadness, or pity, is a different beast. It slithers past the standard defenses and hisses the uncomfortable truth—that your enemy might not be the person to whom all of your vitriol is directed—that it might be something far less tangible, and located much closer to home.
In that moment, when Hildy understands—however briefly—that the previous night she was doing exactly what Rebecca said and has no memory of it, we get the best description of what it feels like to be a blackout drinker (or, at least how I felt as a blackout drinker) that I’ve ever encountered.
“It’s like a suctioning of the soul, being told the things your body does when your mind is in that dead zone. It’s like having your very skin peeled off, like being publicly stripped down to some gruesome inner membrane that nobody should see, and revealing it to all.”
This moment of truth, the raw, humiliating exposure of it, coupled with the reality that Rebecca’s concern for her friend is not quite as intense as her concern that Hildy may have told someone about her affair with Peter, causes Hildy to snap. She lashes out even more venomously and with even more unhinged defenses of her drinking. That, too, feels painfully realistic.
Blacking out was the most traumatic, terrifying, and embarrassing part of my drinking. When I have nightmares about drinking, the drinking part is never actually in the dream. It’s always the morning after; waking up with no memory of what I’d done or said, knowing only that the potential for embarrassment and harm was limitless, left me permanently anxious, nauseated, and craving something I could use to escape those feelings.
Most often, a blackout drinker is depicted from the outside. We see the consequences of their blackout, the stupor of not knowing what they’ve done, and the horror of realization. We watch all of that on a talented actor’s face and feel their emotional response (especially if we have our own experience with it), but I’ve never heard the actual feeling described so vividly and accurately inside a fictional character’s brain.
So as much as I love The Good House, Kevin Kline, and Sigourney Weaver, I won’t watch the movie adaptation. I simply can’t imagine being inside any version of Hildy Good’s head that doesn’t include Hurt’s outstanding narration of Leary’s precise, brutally accurate words.
If you’ve read the book (or listened to the audiobook, or seen the movie), I’d love to know your thoughts. I’d also love your thoughts on Hurt’s narration and, as always, suggestions for what I should cover next for Making a Scene.
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Coming up on 15 years sober, I still remember the abject shame that would grip me by the throat with the day’s first slap into consciousness. That shame was a throughline across 35 years of blackouts. A month before I finally did get sober I left my marriage; I just couldn’t bear the inevitable recaps my husband would provide on my lost behavior from the night before.
On the flip side, as hard as those first sober days were, one benefit rose brightly to the top: I remembered every move I made the night before. I could finally breathe. And I could start to rebuild
Wow! Somehow I missed this book and look forward to reading it. I was blackout drinker from the FIRST drink at 14. Having grown up in a teetotaling household, I was baffled and spent years trying to figure out how to prevent myself from blacking out — only 2 drinks, maybe 3–haha after 1 or 2 I was gone and I couldn’t predict it. I started using white crosses (speed) to control my drinking and they kept me from blacking out. Other drugs too. I wrote a story about a woman who wakes up from a blackout on one of the planes on 9-11. People who don’t experience them really have a hard time comprehending blackouts. Thanks, Katie for the walk down memory lane.