When I was five, my parents divorced. Shortly after, my father met Sandy, first at a cocktail party and then again at a tennis league for single 30-somethings around Portland, Maine. She was brilliant, anxious, fast-talking, and from old Chicago money. They were engaged within two years.
<strong> WHEN I GOT </strong> sober in 2017, my new AA sponsor, a tall, goofy painter named Kip, invited me to a mens stag meeting in the basement of a church in downtown Los Angeles. I arrived early, shook some hands, exchanged some nods and sat nervously in the circle of metal folding chairs.
<strong> 2015 was a banner </strong> year for me. It started with a breakup and became masked in a fog of depression that only cleared when I was snorting cocaine. (Things get better, promise.) I was 32 and addicted, driven by a desire to make it. I had everything I was supposed to want: the badass career, the six-figure salary, the weekend home. But I see now that my happiness was conditional-I was always just a setback away from spiraling out. When things ended with the girlfriend I though...
I was ten years old when I experienced a childhood trauma that would last for years. It was 1993. And Id recently entered middle school in southern Maine. One afternoon I left Spanish class to pee. I entered one of the stalls in the mens bathroom, dropped my shorts to my ankles, and relieved myself.
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