How Sober Should a Writer Be?

the simplest way to begin writing about the drinking life, as opposed to the more common activity, drinking about the writing life, would be to offer up anecdotes that amuse (public streaking, embarrassing texting, chatting up a lamppost) or ones that sober (wretched confessions, trashed hotel rooms, a morning at the precinct). While I have left the house long enough to experience such trials, I’m at a loss to apply narrative significance to them. I have a scant supply of stories that center on drunkenness. Ever since my seventeenth birthday, when I attempted to do seventeen shots (one per minute, per year), making it to six before vomiting in an alleyway, I have been a moderate drinker. I’m using this description for lack of a better one: the current edition of the Dietary Guidelines for Americans defines moderate drinking, for women, as consuming “one drink or less in a day.” I don’t know what the government makes of someone who doesn’t drink for five days, then has two martinis and an order of french fries.

Drinking in America has been on the decline. Myriad articles report this, some trendy, some clinical. My personal favorite, for timing, ran in the January 3, 2025, issue of The New York Times under the headline Surgeon General Calls for Cancer Warnings on Alcohol. As if someone in the surgeon general’s press office decided: Eh, let them have one last New Year’s. According to the latest Gallup poll, alcohol consumption is at a ninety-year low. And according to an informal poll of every middle-aged woman I know, what we mostly talk about when we talk about drinking is the hangover. The hangover that springs into action after two drinks, not four, denying us our youthful mettle. The hangover that pounces on our major organs in the wee hours and starts to whimper. The hangover that, because our blood alcohol concentrations increase as we age, is actually trying to kill us. The reason we drink less is not because it’s trendy; it’s because we’re trying to spare our bodies the indignity of paying for something that used to be more or less free.

I miss it. I miss the ubiquity of a rambunctious drinking culture, whether I participated in it or not, at whatever level. Recovering alcoholics notwithstanding, I enjoyed the collective sense (give or take a couple milligrams of MDMA) of what was meant by a night out. These are not (or not merely) the rantings of someone in her forties assuming that there’s no party because she wasn’t invited. This is a wave of moderation. The new language of sobriety is particularly ill-suited to writers. Mocktails are etymologically and financially silly (pro tip: order a Shirley Temple and you won’t have to report back to the table on whether it’s good or not). And there’s nothing so tedious as a conversation about abstinence. If we writers want to talk about what we’re not doing, well, that’s why God made the cursor blink. Naturally, some of us still get hammered and take notes. But it happens less often. And it didn’t used to be such a production. In substance-fueled modern classics (Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Valley of the Dolls, and Bright Lights, Big City, for instance), booze is simply how one washes down the pills. But the buzz, on the page as in life, is wearing off.

The first place I noticed this change was in confessional nonfiction. I have long avoided reading a certain kind of yappy writing (which shares some DNA with my own and is therefore anathema to me): all those youthful “I danced on a bar and fought with my partner” stories, cellophaned pieces of narrative candy twisted at the ends with echoing dialogue or images. These lighthearted walks of shame seem to have faded from bookshelves and magazines. Maybe as their authors have dried out, the market has dried up. Or maybe using booze as a shorthand for zaniness was never that interesting. But I knew something was amiss when I craved their presence.

Then I began to notice the same phenomenon in fiction, except in reverse. Instead of cleaning up their acts, inebriated protagonists really put their backs into it. They became abusive or mean, liable to wrap their cars around trees. Psychotropics were common enough, treated with a slick detachment, but drinking was more like an animal crossing the road: everyone stops and waits until it passes. I started to get sentimental, thinking of the debauched antihero of Martin Amis’s Money: “Unless I specifically inform you otherwise, I’m always smoking another cigarette.”

Refreshingly, onto our sober bar cart lands On Booze, a slim showcase of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s most spirited pieces, which will be reissued next month. If I did a shot for every book on writers writing about alcohol, I’d be typing this sentence from the hospital. (I’m partial to Olivia Laing’s The Trip to Echo Spring, as well as Drinking, Smoking and Screwing, edited by Sara Nicklès.) But there’s nothing quite like binging from the source. For all of Dorothy Parker’s quips about cocktails and Charles Bukowski’s bromides about beer, Fitzgerald’s prose alcohol content remains unparalleled—the irony being that he was a lightweight, forever trying to keep pace with Hemingway. As the critic John Lanchester wrote of him, “If ever there was someone who simply should not have drunk at all, it was Fitzgerald.” The prolific author’s life ended tragically, at forty-four, but damn if he couldn’t make a glamorous time seem regular.

On Booze begins with a series of zingers collected from Fitzgerald’s notebooks, such as his recipe for Turkey Cocktail: “To one large turkey add one gallon of vermouth and a demijohn of angostura bitters. Shake.” In joking so much about alcohol consumption, our host gives us a sense of his bona fides before jumping straight into the most depressing piece he ever wrote: “The Crack-Up,” originally published in Esquire at a time when his wife, Zelda, was institutionalized; he was in debt; and the country was in the grips of the Great Depression. It’s also the greatest get-off-my-lawn piece ever written (as well as the name of a posthumous collection of Fitzgerald essays).

The essay is about despair. Fitzgerald traces his disappointments to his years at Princeton and failures in Hollywood. (“It was an art in which words were subordinate to images, where personality was worn down to the inevitable low gear of collaboration.”) On Booze is presented without an introduction, leaving the thematic heavy lifting to the title. And “The Crack-Up” is not an outright drinking piece. It is not the animal in the road. Instead, alcohol’s ravages on the author’s temperament soak through every line as he develops “a sad attitude toward sadness, a melancholy attitude toward melancholy.” “I saw that for a long time,” he writes, “I had not liked people and things, but only followed the rickety old pretense of liking.” The beer goggles have been ripped off and chucked across the room.

They are retrieved for “‘Show Mr. and Mrs. F. to Number—,’” the middle ground between Fitzgerald’s fetishization and his depression. Here we have a decadent diary, co-written with Zelda, of the hotels they visited between 1921 and 1933. Despite Fitzgerald’s disintegrating happiness, every sentence is its own glittering world, down to the “strawberries in a gold dish” at Claridge’s in London or the time the couple’s daughter “drank the gin fizz thinking it was lemonade” at their hotel in Paris. Fitzgerald is irritated by birdsong throughout (“a bright exaggerated parrot droned incomprehensible shouts in an aquamarine pool”), and who can blame him? He consumes Corvo in Rome, sips sherry in Bermuda, and uses a “brass bedstead as a bar” in Genoa. But the descriptions of drinking, much like the role of Valium in contemporary novels, are seamlessly folded in with images of the sun steaming “delicate blossoms loose from the rocks while far below glinted the lake of Geneva.” The reader comes away with a thirst for more than alcohol.

In “My Lost City,” booze is more prominent as a catalyst for discontent. Fitzgerald becomes disillusioned with “the style and glitter of New York even above its own valuation.” Through “many an alcoholic mist,” he stumbles between “lush and liquid garden parties,” getting “roaring, weeping drunk” on his last penny. He returns to St. Paul for three years, and when he comes back, he finds that nights out in New York have become untenable. The pace of the city has quickened, and the size of the parties has expanded. “The morals were looser,” he writes, “and the liquor was cheaper.” Here, drinking is part of a larger problem, just as it was once part of a larger joy. In a rich twist, Fitzgerald decides his friends drink too much. He hightails it to France. When he returns to Manhattan yet again, his judgment of nightlife (“a last hollow survival from the days of carnival”) is sharper than ever. The city “no longer whispers of fantastic success and eternal youth.” Frankly, as a New Yorker, I am tempted to wash my hands of this Goodbye to All That urtext. Patient: Doctor, it hurts when I do this! Doctor: Then don’t do that. But “My Lost City” remains a gorgeous topography of an emotional hangover, charted by one of our most cherished cartographers.

On Booze saves its most quaffable pieces for last. We get a taste of the author’s infamous letters. (“I fear there’s neither honor nor money in it for you,” he writes in a wilting note to the poet John Peale Bishop regarding a draft of his novel.) Most of Fitzgerald’s missives involve some degree of “tippling.” In the course of one letter, he goes from “I am quite drunk” to “Oh Christ! I’m sobering up!” to “I am quite drunk again and enclose a postage stamp.” It’s a marvelous bit. It’s also not a bit. Reading On Booze can be painful. One is left wincing, watching such an exquisite talent toy with the weapon of his own destruction. It feels almost parasitic to enjoy this writing so much.

But chin up! The following may also seem like a bit, though it’s not. At the time of my typing these words, September 5, 2025, an update from The New York Times has come over the transom: federal report on drinking is withdrawn. That January analysis, the one that warned of health risks from alcohol consumption, will no longer be used to inform the forthcoming Dietary Guidelines for Americans. Instead, the guidelines will rely on a competing report that concludes moderate drinking is associated with a lower risk of heart attack and stroke. Quick, before we change our minds again, let us raise a glass to F. Scott Fitzgerald, our poet inebriate, a man who knew all too well that “there are those who can drink and those who can’t.”