The Highs and Lows of Getting High

As I write this in late February, it is snowing in central North Carolina for the second time in two days; it’s the third round of snow we’ve had this winter, which is already significant, but this time it’s really sticking given how cold it is.

These events are rare here and have gotten rarer in the last few years. But for at least a day or two, the gray and white outside reminds me of the scene in M.D. McIntyre’s essay “Ditch,” in this month’s issue of The Sun, when she is driving through North Dakota for a funeral and the wind is blowing the snow from one side of the road to the other.

The loss of a friend to drugs in “Ditch” points to the steady, insidious drumbeat of addiction. The Sun has published a lot about the subject, of course, and the selections from our archive below explore the highs and lows of getting high—and getting sober.

Take care and read well,
Finn Cohen, Associate Editor

Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Les Calanques

By Melissa Febos September 2020

Melissa Febos’s observations of heroin addiction from the perspective of someone with more than a decade clean knocked me over the first time I read this essay almost five years ago. It’s split between her time at a retreat on the French Riviera at thirty-seven years old–and sober—and a trip to Paris at twenty, with one foot out the door of drug use and the other unsure if the next will be worth it. The piece—an excerpt from the author’s bestselling collection Girlhood—goes in unexpected directions, with haunting results.

Poetry

New Weather

By Christopher Locke January 2007

A claustrophobic list of substances and romanticized visions of inebriation in Christopher Locke’s poem all get wrapped into the stunning final stanza, where the truth becomes too loud to ignore.

Fiction

Howard

By Monica Trasandes November 1998

The narrator in Monica Trasandes’s short story is trapped in a bad marriage where the only real connection seems to be cocaine. When her stepfather, who is inseparable from his Jack Daniel’s, drives from Colorado to California to help her, the result is surprisingly touching without being saccharine.

Essays, Memoirs, and True Stories

Goodbye, Johnnie Walker

By Neil Davidson July 1998

An unflinching look at the difficulty of getting and staying sober, Neil Davidson’s essay starts with some shocking admissions and ends with them too. In between are a lot of humbling, difficult moments, and there’s no bow that ties them all up.