I liked the way the drink helped turn me into that kind of person, someone more hardened and rebellious and cynical than the person I was raised to be, someone who could scoff and tell stories and make other people laugh. It was something I’d been looking for all my life.

I read the book and had my first drink in weeks—a farewell, if you will—but the alcohol hit different, felt joyless, almost like keeping a doctor’s appointment. I looked at my wine and said, “I don’t want to believe in you anymore. I want to believe in something else.” And even if I continued to drink, even if the books weren’t enough and I had to

sitting there drunk, I felt none of that; instead, I had a sense of something that felt new and exciting, something like rebellion, as though the door to a new version of me, a nonintellectual, nonanalytical version, was opening before me.