The New Yorker Radio Hour - Alcoholics Anonymous Goes Remote, and Jia Tolentino on Quarantine

Episode Date: March 31, 2020

An old Alcoholics Anonymous slogan goes, “Seven days without an A.A. meeting makes one weak.” But COVID-19 has made in-person meetings impossible in many situations, removing the foundation on which many alcoholics build their sobriety. Reagan Reed, the executive director of the New York Intergroup Association of Alcoholics Anonymous and a member of A.A., has watched as nearly a thousand regular meetings across the state have been cancelled. Earlier this month, she made the difficult decision to close the organization’s central office. The Radio Hour’s Rhiannon Corby spoke with Reed about the challenges of staying sober in a tumultuous time, and how A.A. continues to help people in recovery. Plus: social distancing remains the best way to contain the coronavirus, but many are starting to feel the emotional toll of constant isolation. David Remnick called Jia Tolentino, a staff writer at The New Yorker, in search of a few things to help lift our spirits. New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. I think all of us are feeling like social distancing is pushing us a little too close to the edge. And I don't mean to belittle that feeling at all. But for some people, the lack of direct contact is a genuine threat. Alcoholics Anonymous and many addiction treatment groups depend on in-person meetings. Reagan-Reed is the executive direct. director of the New York Intergroup Association of Alcoholics Anonymous. She's also a member of AA herself. The radio hours, Rianne and Corby, called up Reed a little more than a week ago, just as organizations all over the country were shutting down. What did it start by telling you, like, what the past 72 hours have been like for you? They've been completely chaotic.

I think I've been sleeping about two and a half or three hours the night. We have over 5,000 meetings in just the New York City area, and most of them are shutting down, and nobody knows what to do. We have some young people who are able to easily set up Zoom meetings, for example, but for our kind of older AA community, it's been especially hard. What we're doing, what I'm doing now is trying to set up. sort of like an AA emergency Zoom center so that we can host 10 meetings every hour with up to 300 participants each.

And what's your fear with having those meetings close or go digital? Like how is that different for people attending these groups? It's a tremendous, tremendous difference. The way that our fellowship works is that we, sitting a room together and we talk to one another face to face. The meetings are the cornerstone and foundation of alcohol is synonymous. So removing them is basically, you know, it's going to have a really big impact on people's ability to remain sober. I mean, just think about, like, that decision to start closing stuff down.

And, like, were you part of that decision? I personally, with the permission of my board, made the decision to close down our central office. And our central office is where all of our volunteers answer phones and provide a web chat service on our website. And we've never shut down the office before, even during, you know, our harshest blizzard. So what I had to do was then immediately set up remote call forwarding shift, which I did, and we've been able to keep the phones and web chat on during those hours just by doing really 24-7-hour outreach. And it seems like, you know, on top of not being able to do a meeting, like this has just

an incredibly sort of like alienating time for everyone. Like I can imagine that it would feel more important than ever to kind of, you know, show up and be able to talk about about stuff with people? Absolutely. I mean, that everybody's anxiety is higher and, you know, a lot of alcoholics suffer from depression and, you know, problems outside of alcohol and all of those things, those other isms are blowing up. You know, my own anxiety is much higher than it was 72 hours ago.

And for most of us who are in the program who have hit a rock bottom in our drinking days, you always go back to where you ended, you know, so things progress and they get much worse every time you relax. I am an alcoholic, and it's been very hard. I have not been able to go to a meeting since one day. the meetings that I go to are closed. And I am personally just talking to my sponsor and trying to just take care of my basic needs, which is often the hardest thing for alcoholics, you know, just eating and sleeping.

You know, I think that, you know, we've been discussing things that are very bleak. But I also... I also want to say that, We have a, you know, we have a program that's been going on since 1946 and has grown by millions and millions of people and is shared all over the world. And it's a very solid and remarkable fellowship. And I think that within our own communities, you know, we're going to find a way through and get through it. And we should be okay.

Reagan Reed, an executive with Alcoholics Anonymous in New York. She spoke about a week ago with Rianan and Corby of the New Yorker Radio Hour. Now, to help alleviate some of this despair and boredom, I've called up my friend and colleague Gia Tolentino, a staff writer who's hold up right now at an undisclosed location upstate. Gia, I'm calling you from Manhattan, and you are somewhere upstate, right? I'm upstate in the snow. How is it? Is it at least beautiful to look out the window?

Yeah, it really is. I mean, also, the key is that now my boyfriend and I don't have to take, you know, phone calls in the same 250-foot square-foot space and, you know, incite each other to murder. So it's delightful up here. Yeah. You got to wonder how divorce lawyers are going to do in the wake of all this. You know, COVID-spelled backward is almost divorce. Let me ask. you this, your job today is to please, please, please make us a little happy or a little happier than is thought to be humanly possible in these circumstances. What's keeping you sane

upstate? Well, so where should we start? So there's one good Instagram account that has sprung up in, I think, just the last week. It's called Work from Home Fits. It's at WF.H. Fitz. And it is just a selfie gallery of people sending in their, you know, totally insane work-from-home outfits. How do you mean? What are you seeing? Oh, you know, let's let me pull it up right now. I mean, we've got- Oh, my God. We've got robes. We've got blankets as skirts. We've got formal evening gowns worn with Birkenstock slippers. We've got, you know, we've got a nice blouse and I love New York boxer shorts. I got to tell you, this one guy here in a green leather jacket, I've never looked that good in my life out of the house,

much less bunking inside. This account is run by fashion editors and I think it, you know, it is featuring a lot of cool people. I mean, I look terrible. But I think it's, like I like this account because it reminds you that being seen by each other, it is actually a sort of lifeline. It can be salutary and not appropriate. impressive. And I think like the way we dress on a daily basis is that we're trying to give each other

pleasure as much as anything. You know, one of the things that me and my friends have been doing on our group text is just doing a little selfie roll call, you know, periodically throughout the day just sending a little roll call. What you're doing, how you look. And it has, it is a true mood booster. What's been your best outfit through the course of this? Oh, I look terrible all the time. But yeah, I'm wearing, you know, I'm wearing old, like, college sorority sweatshirts. It's really, it's a bad scene. But the thing is, I always look terrible all the time because I always work at home, you know. I was, I was born in this darkness. So I'm used to it. Now, what else is keeping you saying, Gia? Have you ever read that

Irene Nemerovsky novel Sweet Francaise? I have. It's so good, right? Do you like it? I do. I love it. Yeah. I mean, that novel, I've been, I have two copies of it, and I lent them both out last week, like drop them on my friend's doorsteps like, contactless delivery, you know? That novel feels, it starts with the German occupation of France. I think that we're all looking for comparisons for this time, and there is some vague war time feeling to this. And I think, you know, like, people are making lots of jokes about reading Proust or, you know, re-reading War and Peace or whatever.

And to me, I'm like, no, everyone should just read Sweet Francess because it is kind of Proustian. It is kind of Tolstoyish. It has that fullness, the kind of sensory enveloping quality. And, you know, and it's a really good book about, like, you know, disruption and sheltering in place and love, I think, right? It's a great suggestion. I made the mistake, although, you know, maybe it's a professional mistake of reading John Barry's the great influenza about 1918. I've been thinking about, should I not read that? You might want to skip that for a few days. It's a superb history of the flu epidemic in 1918, but God Almighty. Yeah, but there's a way in which, you know, it's like I feel like I am often trying to tamp down my anxiety by exacerbating it.

And it actually, reading like a novel off the screen is the only way I can keep myself from just, you know, not turning. Even if I'm watching something on my computer, I end up being like, well, what's new in, you know, what's the count in Spain today? Like I have to be off a screen to calm down, I think. That's for sure. That's for sure. Gia, what else is going to save my life right now or at least save my sanity? So I strongly recommend pulling up a window that does not involve email or Zoom the Monterey Bay Aquarium's live jellyfish cam. It's incredible.

It runs every day during work hours. I got it. Third link? So I've been obsessed with jellyfish ever since I read this wild New York Review of Books article in jellyfish in like 2013 or something. and, you know, it's like talking about, you know, the immortal jellyfish that they can live forever and the ones that you can't differentiate, like they don't know whether to call the jellyfish a singular or a plural. They're wild. And I've never been able to meditate, though people keep telling me that it would be good for me. And I have found that this jellyfish cam, which is unbelievably beautiful, you know, is the next best thing.

It looks like, and I'm looking at it on my phone right now, it looks. looks like what used to play behind psychedelic bands in the late 60s and 70s. Maybe that's why I like it. Now, what else is keeping you saying, Gia? So do you know the artist Karibu? I don't. So it's this guy, Dan Snaith, and Karibu is sort of, it's this sort of intimate, like, mesmerizing, really joyful, really pleading, kind of housey electronic music.

Um, there, his last album was called Our Love and it came out in 2014 and the title track from that song. It was my number one favorite thing for like a year to listen to whenever I was on the subway. It was sort of this like wordless meditation on connection and love. And it would, it made me cry all the time in public and I never cry. And this new album, which is called Suddenly like it really couldn't have come at a better time. I feel like I'm listening to a lot of things that. The music I'm listening to is the music that can supply the vibes that I myself cannot produce for myself at this moment. And for this album, it's sort of a focus and a command and a joy, like a quiet joy that's hard.

That's usually pretty easy for me to access, but it's a little harder when you're alone all day. I mean, everyone's alone all day and going a little nuts. One of my favorite tracks on the album is the fourth song. It's called New Jade. and it's sort of this kind of very relentless, almost psychedelic track that to me, there's this part in Midway Through the song that sounds like what it's going to feel like to go out dancing with a bunch of strangers and with my friends once this is all over. You're thinking about that a lot, I bet.

Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, it's nice to really, remember when this is over, the amount of joy we're going to feel just to be in each other's presences again, you know, like how good it's going to feel just to hug somebody, or to meet a stranger and hug them, to, you know, be around strangers' sort of skin and their voices and the sort of mess of being a human and have it feel good again. Yeah. Gia, well, that all, all those recommendations sound like deliverance itself. We'll see you soon, I hope. Thanks, David.

Take care, Gia. You can find hours and hours of great reading by Gia Tolentino at New Yorker.com. Not to mention her bestselling collection called Trick Mirror, wherever books are still being sold. I'm David Remnick, and I want to thank you for listening. However the COVID emergency is affecting you, I wish you and your families the very best. Good health to all of you. We'll be back next week with more of the New Yorker Radio Hour. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of W.

NYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tune Arts, with additional music by Alexis Quadrato. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.