ORANGUTAN: A MEMOIR
By Colin Broderick
Published by Three Rivers Press, $14
June 10 of this year will mark the 75th anniversary of Alcoholics Anonymous. The World Health Organization estimates that 140 million people suffer from alcoholism and the United States alone can lay claim to about 17.8 million adult alcoholics. On any given day at least 700,000 of that number will be in treatment.
In 1988, Colin Broderick, a 20-year-old from County Tyrone, Ireland, landed in New York in the midst of a tribe of hard-drinking Irish immigrants. A refugee from the chaos and terrors of the Troubles, where his young friends were blown up with some regularity, he had recently attended the funerals of three of them. The traumatized youngster was already well primed to become a distinguished member of the “Irish drunk brigade.” As his story unfolds, it echoes the vow of the French poet, Rimbaud, to pursue “the systematic derangement of the senses.” Broderick will do his best.
He calls his memoir Orangutan -- wild man of the forest -- to describe himself, a prisoner in his own skin. His narrative begins with a warning note that this is not a pleasant story, at times even an ugly one, but it is his story and he will not apologize for it. And if we don’t like it, “I don’t care. Stop whining and go write your own damned book.”
Does that sound like a man with an attitude, even with a chip on his shoulder?
On his first morning in the Bronx, the shoe of his cousin Sean kicking his side wakens Broderick from his spot on the floor to a colossal hangover. He had downed a full bottle of vodka and 10 shots of peppermint schnapps the night before. His Irish relatives now take him in tow and introduce him to the construction trade along with a daily routine of whiskey, drugs and eager young women. Not that he needed much tutelage. He had started to drink at age 15, so when the chance to do cocaine presented itself he seized it. Once he started doing cocaine, he found it impossible to take even a few drinks without the urge to get high.
Broderick had now charted his life course for the next 20 years. One book blurb describes that course as a story of “drugs, drinks, dregs and degradation.” While fueling these daily habits, and between waking up in hospitals and jail cells, he somehow managed to write and produce a play, and go through two marriages and an affair with a young Russian immigrant.
Within only a few years, he thought he had hit bottom -- a series of dark party rooms full of ghosts, confusion and tears. He wanted to stick a fire hose in his mouth, and blow the poison out of his system. At the age of 23 he longed to begin his life anew. As his life spiraled downward into “drink, drugs and debauchery,” in sheer desperation Broderick turned to the AA program. He would dip his toe in the water, but he tried his best not to get too wet. He boasts that he had no fear of God when he mocked what he calls the “institution of sobriety.” After a period of miserable abstinence, wallowing in confusion, anger and irritability, he would once again plunge into the vortex of active addiction.
It is not the task of a reviewer to judge the personal life of an author, but in the case of a personal memoir the line between the two runs thin. Paul Ricoeur, the great French philosopher of narration, reminds us that “we tell the story we are, and we are the story we tell.”
When we tell that story, it enters into the public domain and invites a response.
When Broderick sought refuge from the big city on June 6, 2006, to recuperate at a friend’s farmhouse in upstate New York, his weight had dropped to 115 lbs and he had been drinking without end for the past six months. After a three-day withdrawal nightmare, he began to write this memoir. After only two months, he was arrested for driving while intoxicated and sentenced to two months in jail. Still, he did stop drinking, met a girl, now the love of his life, had a daughter, and finally finished this book.
Broderick undertook to write this memoir with the hope that he would discover the overall trajectory of his 20 years of addictive degradation and desperation. As I read his tale of unbelievable agony, disgrace and terrible human waste, I kept thinking of the story of the man lying on his deathbed as his whole life passed before his eyes, and he wasn’t even in it. In some bizarre fashion, Broderick comes across more as a spectator on all the terrible events of his life than as an active participant.
In the AA program, before a new member tells his story for the first time at a meeting, he is advised to observe a basic formula: Just tell it like it was, what happened, and what it’s like now. Broderick’s memoir skips over two of the three elements. It is for the most part a tale only of what it was like with little attention to how the events actually touched and transformed him.
It is the task of the memoirist, looking back over his or her life, to tell us what it was all about. What did he learn from it? What sense does it make now?
Alcoholics Anonymous members would call Broderick’s memoir a drunkalogue. No matter the specific details, the repetitious account of one drunken episode after another sounds pretty much the same and soon bores us to tears. What a drunkalogue lacks is any sense of personal ownership binding together the discrete events. It parades all the drunken episodes before our eyes, but the parade is going nowhere.
Broderick’s publishers assert that his story throws light into the depths of addiction, but I see only darkness and little hope. Insisting that he harbors no regrets, and would not swap his life with anyone else on earth, he still boasts that he is glad he drank. “I’m glad I had the life I had, at least it was mine.” Was it? Any life held in thrall to a drug for 20 years can hardly be called one’s own.
A final caution: In an interview with Irish novelist Colum McCann, Broderick rejects the distinction between fact and fiction as sheer nonsense. So, if Orangutan falls into your hands, caveat lector.
[David L. Smith is professor emeritus of psychology at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh.]
