‘Once you start asking yourself if your drinking is normal, it’s not’

In late August 2011, in the middle of Hurricane Irene, Robyn Flemming bought three bottles of white wine and carried them back to the apartment she occasionally sublets on the upper east side of New York. That was the weekend the freelance editor, then in her late fifties, decided to stop drinking alcohol. Over two days she drank the bottles, with some ceremony, silently saying a lonely goodbye to the substance that over the previous two decades had taken control of her life.

“It was a day of reckoning, a day I always knew would come,” she recalls now, 10 years later talking via Zoom from her Australian hometown of Albury. “And still when I walked out of my apartment on the Monday morning I turned right instead of left.”

The left turn would have taken her towards an AA meeting, where community and support and salvation and welcome biscuits waited. “I walked in the opposite direction. But there was this voice in my head, and I knew I had to turn around and I did, I went to a meeting … and I was given enough guidance to get me to the next day and the next.”

Those ceremonial sips of white wine in New York in a hurricane were her last. Flemming, now 68, explores how she got there and what happened afterwards in a compelling memoir. Flemming's story of recovery, self-discovery and travelling the world spans three decades. It begins when the Australian started a new life in Hong Kong in her early thirties and ends with the digital nomad and running enthusiast happily navigating life in her sixties without alcohol.

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Quit-lit

Her book Skinful is a valuable addition to the growing “quit-lit” genre, which includes books such as Blackout: Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget by Sarah Hepola or The Unexpected Joy of Being Sober by Catherine Gray not to mention Unwasted: My Lush Sobriety by Sacha Z Scoblic. There is a quote on the cover of her book from Peggy Cooney, author of This Side of Alcohol, another memoir in this now crowded genre.

While her solo adventures across Kathmandu, Borneo, Bali and even Ireland mean her book is as much a travel memoir as it is a recovery one, the story of her troubles with alcohol are particularly timely and important. An increase in so-called 'grey area drinking' has become, anecdotally at least, one of the offshoots of pandemic living. It's no coincidence that the book has come at a time when after the Christmas excess and the promise of a new year there is a good deal of self-reflection going on.

Flemming’s issue with alcohol, she says, fell into grey area territory. She never had a bottle-of-vodka-a-day kind of alcohol problem, the falling down in the street type of affliction, the kind that’s visible to all. At the height of her addiction, Flemming spent her evenings hidden away in her room in whatever country she called home at the time numbing herself with a mix of wine and television while appearing on the outside to almost everyone in her life as a functioning, even thriving adult. She talks about the spectrum of “alcohol abuse disorder” and the various “shades of dysfunction.”

“This is how I experienced it. I drank since I was a teenager and I never questioned it. In the first part of the book it’s clear my drinking was something I never thought about. We all have stressful periods and I had forgotten that there were other ways to deal with stress, go for a walk or do something for someone else. What happened was I moved along the spectrum to the point where I didn’t know how to deal with anything without drinking.”

But what I found over time – and I was drinking for over 40 years – was that in order to drink the way I wanted to drink there were trade-offs

When drinking goes under the radar, as it did in her case, it can make it harder to identify as an issue. “If you can still get up and go to work every day or look after a child, then it’s harder to accept there is a problem.”

“Those grey areas are normalised socially. It’s just culturally normal to have alcohol in every social situation … it’s so normal to use alcohol as a reward as a consolation. There are so many reasons you can find to have a drink. And you can still stay under the radar.”

The book, as in life, contains several turning points. She moved to Hong Kong in the mid 1980s, almost on a whim, after a short business trip. After seven hectic years there, her growing dependency on alcohol began to impact her physically, mentally and emotionally so she returned to Australia in search of a fresh start. At that point she began to take part in regular exercise and extreme physical challenges, hoping a positive addiction could help her with a negative one. But the gap between the person she presented to the world and the one she kept hidden from view grew to such an extent that she made the decision to quit.

“I could stay where I was, huddled in my upstairs bedroom every night, numbing my feelings with white wine, and trying to straddle the growing gap between my inner and outer selves. Or I could embark on an open-ended adventure, a hero’s journey, and perhaps become the woman I had the potential to be.”

‘Trade-offs’

What happened in Flemming’s case was that every night she wanted to drink “and I always wanted to have more than I allowed myself, I had to force myself to stop, so that my days would be functional”. By stopping she could tell herself “I’m not an alcoholic so I don’t actually have to do anything. But what I found over time – and I was drinking for over 40 years – was that in order to drink the way I wanted to drink there were trade-offs. And I’ve edited enough economic textbooks to know all about opportunity cost and trade. You can’t have everything, you always have to trade off something and I was trading off more and more, personal things that were invisible that only I could see.”

What were the trade offs? “Dignity, self respect, peace of mind, intimacy, those aspects of life that would come under the umbrella of emotional well-being.” To the outside world, to friends and family, she was fearless Robyn, a strong, confident woman creating opportunities for herself wherever she went. And yet “the reality was I would always make excuses to get home where I always had a bottle in the fridge waiting. My big relationship was with that bottle and it was very private.”

I'm still not a perfect person or a paragon of anything. I'm flawed. I've got anger issues. But the difference is I'm no longer numbing myself every night

Her stopping point was when she started to ask herself ‘is this normal?’. “Once you start asking yourself that, then it’s not normal anymore,” she says. As with most recovery journeys there were a number of false starts, but one constant in her recovery was physical exercise. Flemming began to set herself challenges, marathon walks or runs with groups of like-minded people she’d meet online and connect with all over the world. She developed what a friend called OTD (Obsessive Trekking Disorder) and went on remote adventures. Running and trekking is a metaphor in the book.

“It was a strategy for me to control something that was getting more and more out of control. If I was running a race in the morning I can’t have more than one bottle of wine. But it was also a metaphor for running away and not dealing with things. I was running away from myself.”

Underlying reasons

She explores her underlying reasons for her drinking – issues in her childhood, parental neglect – but ultimately comes back to one of four quotes at the beginning of her book. Joseph Campbell said: “Your life is the fruit of your own doing.”

“We all emerge from childhood bent out of shape to some degree,” she says. “It’s up to each of us to make our life. We can’t sit in the back seat and blame the driver. We are the driver. We are the only Uber driver in town. It’s not about finding a path, it’s about making one.”

Her drinking ended, she says, when she “surrendered”. For the past decade she has lived an alcohol-free life, a digital nomad with networks all over the world. But it did not mean her new life path was smooth. As a sober woman she has been severely tested, getting mugged in Chile and breaking her arm in Morocco.

She meets an old friend who is as in thrall to alcohol as she used to be, and the experience is challenging – the woman has since died by suicide. She discovers that she can get through all of these challenges without that bottle in the fridge. “Not drinking hasn’t changed me,” she says. “You deal with challenges, you carry on and it doesn’t make you have to go and drink. You no longer need oblivion to deal with your life. I’m still not a perfect person or a paragon of anything. I’m flawed. I’ve got anger issues. But the difference is I’m no longer numbing myself every night.”

(There’s a sub-plot in the book involving what might be the longest, most dysfunctional romantic relationship in history with a commitment-phobic, self-centred man called Tom. Even now, free from her struggles with alcohol, I’m fascinated to learn Flemming is even now preparing to welcome him for a visit to her home town. “This is why it’s called a memoir of addiction,” she laughs. “There are many addictions.”)

Globe trotting

The pandemic put a stop to her globe trotting, but as Flemming creeps closer to 70 she's raring to go again and about to return to Budapest – where she rode out the first lockdown – to continue her book promotion. She takes photographs wherever she goes and builds up communities of deep and lasting friendships.

“It’s so important to me to feel that I’m making some impression on a place,” she explains. “Not just taking but giving, giving something whether it’s just that I figure as a memory in someone or that I create something, just to feel that, you know, we touch some chord when we are in a place.”

Coming back to her home town felt right in the pandemic. “Home towns are very interesting, because they do have that umbilical effect, whether you want it or not … but I’ve decided that I’m not done yet. I’m not done with the travelling.”

Flemming hopes her book might inspire people. She says it’s for anybody who has questions such as: “Who am I? What life do I really want to live? And is it too late to start a new path to a different future?”

Flemming’s answer to this last question is an emphatic no, it’s never too late.

Skinful: A Memoir of Addiction by Robyn Flemming is out now