Sanders: ‘Under the Influence’

 Scott Russell Sanders is a fine essayist. His meditation on what it’s like to be the child of an alcoholic is said to be a classic.

It begins:

 

My father drank. He drank as a gut-punched boxer gasps for breath, as a starving dog gobbles food — compulsively, secretly, in pain and trembling. I use the past tense not because he ever quit drinking but because he quit living.

 

I kept reading, trusting that voice to tell me something that I, a child of teetotalers, know about only from a distance. Sanders’s essay gave me a better understanding of something that’s hard for anyone to understand.

All of us must try to understand the influences that shape us. Sanders’s attempt is courageous.

He says that one of the reactions to alcoholism within a family is secrecy. You don’t want outsiders to know. The secrecy is linked to shame, which in turn can explode in anger.

Sanders decided to write about his experience when his young son began to try to take responsibility for Sanders’s own depression. The boy thought if he were a better son, he could fix his father’s life. Sanders recognized the pattern.

 

I write, therefore, to drag into the light what eats at me — the fear, the guilt, the shame — so that my own children may be spared.

 

We write for many reasons. This is the one that most interests me.

When people question the value of the literature … well, they must be talking about some other kind of literature.

• Source: Scott Russell Sanders’s “Under the Influence” was originally published in Harper’s, November 1989. I have it in The Art of the Personal Essay, edited by Phillip Lopate; New York: Anchor Books, 1994, pp. 733-44. The quotations are on pp. 733 and 744. The essay is online:

https://sfuadadvancedcnf.files.wordpress.com/2017/01/under-the-influence-scott-russell-sanders.pdf