It’s the 1980s and high school junior Myra, drug of choice alcohol, on Elavil for depression, secretly and compulsively pulling out her hair, is put into a rehab center by her father, Keen. It’s called OPP, “Our Primary Purpose,” located in Iowa City, Iowa with its program based on the “Alcoholics Anonymous Big Book.”
“Don’t Pity The Desperate” ($17.95 in paperback from Unsolicited Press) searingly and with keen observation enters deeply into Myra’s consciousness on her sixty day journey at OPP (that’s when the insurance runs out). The brutal honesty demanded of those in group sessions called Community fracture her self-understanding.
“Why had so many awful things happened to all of them? Myra did not feel like a kid, an adolescent, a young person. None of them did. They felt bruised, marred, wise with age, as if they had been living through the hardest parts of their lives.” As Counselor Rachel says: “Addicts’ lives can go three ways … Jail, insanity, or death.”
Moore takes readers into the unspoken world that shapes Myra’s response to OPP’s rules, especially “No Contact if counselors discovered your relationship with another patient or if they thought your friendship was destructive.” She is separated from Charlie, the boy she thinks loves her and who violates his “No Sex” contract.
Though Myra gets drunk on a day pass home, is called to account as no way to deal with the death of her mother in a car accident, she is also asked to choose a Higher Power to aid in her recovery. Myra begins to “fake it till she makes it,” praying “for love to help her: to take away her obsessions, her worry, her fear.”
But this is not a story of easy redemption; far from it. In a teenage world of speed, cocaine, heroin, beer, glue, downers and Jim Beam, sobriety comes an hour at a time. Would the Higher Power help?
Just know this: At one point Myra hugs a counselor; her name, it turns out, is Grace.
Dan Barnett teaches philosophy at Butte College. Send review requests to dbarnett99@me.com. Columns archived at https://barnetto.substack.com
