To Dorothy Parker and The Drink

I guarantee when most us think of famous writers and booze, we immediately call to mind the likes of Hemingway, Faulkner and Bukowski. Hemingway staring out at the sea, slamming a glass of whiskey on his desk. There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed. Faulkner sipping mint juleps from his favorite metal cup, swishing it in his mouth through one cerebral musing after the next. I never know what I think about something until I read what I've written on it. Bukowski sitting on the edge of an unmade bed, chain smoking and drinking bourbon straight from the bottle. I do all my writing when I’m drunk. All the time I type I’m drunk.

It's a rarity that I speak to a male writer who doesn't also list one of these men as an inspiration. Feel free to swap out Philip Roth or Henry Miller and so on and so forth, as the cup overfloweth when it comes to mysoginist authors who have some notable experience with or kinship to liquor of all kinds. Now, this is not to say that you cannot learn valuable lessons about both writing and life from these men while at the same time recognizing that some of their work - whether only in part or in its entirety - is chauvinist drivel. If through time travel or otherwise I was given the opportunity to speak to one of them, I would first happily pick his brain about process and then just as he is expecting a compliment to conclude our spirited discussion, I'd lay a quick punch into his face and run, laughing all the way home.

As for their own glamorizing of and/or fascination with alcohol, this must be a similarly nuanced conversation. People often think that alchohol fuels creativity by relaxing the mind so it may open wider, or that it heightens emotion, thus allowing for a bloodletting on the page that Hemingway could be proud of. But I wager that it is less so the alcohol and more so the tragedy or mental illness or insecurity or anger (and the list goes on) that causes them to reach for it that truly fuels these writers, and what makes their work sing. Can you be a writer without pain? Without being a little mad in some way? Surely. But will that writing speak viscerally to the reader? Of that I'm not so certain.

As I myself drink and read, I have a particularly visceral reaction - one of rage - that becomes quite palpable when revisiting excerpts from the aforementioned writers famous works. Some write of alter-ego-type characters commiting an array of heinous acts - the most grotesque of which is often to rape women quite casually, without regard to age or mental capacity. While simply Googling any of their names in conjunction with various derogatory terms for women and/or their body parts produces a breathtaking plethora of results. You can forgive a young cunt anything. A young cunt doesn't have to have brains. They're better without brains. But an old cunt, even if she's brilliant, even if she's the most charming woman in the world, nothing makes any difference. A young cunt is an investment; an old cunt is a dead loss. All they can do for you is buy you things. But that doesn't put meat on their arms or juice between their legs.

At the same time, as I read them, I'm also driven to raucous laughter. They recount with incredulousness women who don't succumb to their charms, while quietly footnoting that they happened to be covered in their own vomit at the time of the encounter. The absurdity of these shrinking men shouting their machismo on every page as if somehow writing it down will make it true sends me into fits of cackling like the witch I am as I sit at my desk drinking tea from a black mug donning the words"Male Tears".

I hope the next time you think about alcohol and writers, you think of someone new. Someone arguably more worthy of your attention. Tonight, I've decided to drink to Dorothy Parker, who unlike her male compatriots, didn't self-mythologize in her writing while under the influence. I'm not a writer with a drinking problem, I'm a drinker with a writing problem. Instead, she makes the reader laugh with her lethal wit and biting insight into herself and others. Her work explored all the things that mattered - race, violence and inequality - giving you a window into the social activist she was off the page. When she died, having no one, she left her entire estate to Martin Luther King, Jr. and suggested that her epitaph read, Excuse my dust.