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I received my copy of Judith's book in the middle of the single most grueling semester that I've ever experienced, my teaching load and my course overload compounded by every influenza and stomach virus that came through my classroom, my wife's, and my son's daycare classroom. By the time I started rereading the beginning, it had been staring at me from my office's bookshelf for three months.
I've never been really close to anyone addicted to cocaine. My experiences have always been secondhand, knowing people whose lives fell apart on account of a drug they'd never taken into their own bodies. As I made my way through Judith's chapters on her switch from inhaled to injected cocaine, my imagination went not to her own experience but to those around her, coworkers and family. Even as I read about her deteriorating body, I hated her.
Because I'm an English teacher and Judith is a former English teacher, my mind forged parallels throughout between the story of the cocaine-addict English teacher and John Milton's Satan. (No, I didn't read this book very sympathetically, and I don't think, knowing the Judith of the book, that she would mind that so much.) When he's at the height of his empty confidence, giving nonsense rallying speeches to the demons in Hell, Satan is almost a comic figure. I know what he's going to do to humanity, but already knowing that, I can enjoy the utter stupidity of watching him and his cronies grandstand about a fight that they never had a chance of winning and a plot that can only destroy them. The moment when I really hate Satan is when he stands on the border of Earth and Heaven and addresses the sun. In that moment, alone and unseen, save by the reader, Satan utters a confession to the chief of the visible sky. He admits knowing that his pursuit is futile and can only bring ruin, never benefit, to anyone in the universe. He admits that with a simple decision to submit to the Father and the Son, he could once again join the harmony of God's creation. He admits that to continue on his course has absolutely no merit. But he refuses to change. His speech ends with one of the most nauseating lines in Milton: "Evil, be thou my good."
Because I've always looked from the outside at drug addiction, and because I looked from the outside in on Judith's, her letters to the people who love her brought forth the most visceral reaction as I read. As she begged forgiveness of her students, her friends, her parents, I never really felt any twinge of sympathy with the former English teacher, and as she confessed her addiction through these letters, knowing full well that she would be seeking out more cocaine when she finished writing, I could not help but to hate.
Of course, Milton's Satan is easy to hate. When I turn my gaze on myself, when I consider my own reading experience as my experience, I realize that Judith is less like Satan and more like the parabolic Prodigal Son. And I realize that my own hate lies not outside the story but within another character, the older brother. And I realize that his hatred never really came into play when the prodigal was wasting his life away; it came in the moment of forgiveness. And I realized that I despised her injury to her parents and friends and students less than I despised the fact that she came out of rehab straight into a lucrative teaching gig, while I labor away, drug-free, in the basement of a university English department for less than I made working as an electrician's apprentice. I realize that my sin is not hatred at all but envy, wishing that she were as miserable as I try to make myself.
Of course, such a recognition is not alien to us English teachers. In Flannery O'Connor's stories, the ones with the wonderful wretches who think they're virtuous, a moment comes when God reveals just how nasty virtue can be. (O'Connor is subtle enough not to use visions in the clouds most of the time, but a good reader knows it's God talking.) As I wound down Judith's book, my epiphany came when I realized that Judith, right now, is at least sixteen years my senior.
That moment of math brought my own wretchedness home to me: I am decidedly not her older brother. Instead, I'm a third sibling, waiting offstage in the Parabolic Repertory Theater, about to live the years that decide whether I'll be prodigal or not. This book is not a Satanic tale for my judgment but a warning for my instruction. I have little fear that I'll become a cocaine addict, but I imagine that the thirty-year-old Judith Hillard thought the same. Moreover, I imagine that such poisonous thoughts that made my reading so bitter came rather naturally to Judith before the book started. Perhaps not. Perhaps, ultimately, I'm Milton's Satan, looking in on her redemption, hissing snake-like as I hate the goodness that God has given her even after she fell.
Perhaps I'm a warthog from Hell.
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excellent article. and i fully understand your anger and envy when life isn't fair.
i have no answers, so we can just sit with each other sharing empathy. ;)
Nathan, what a candid assessment of your own struggle while reading the author's story. Although I didn't really get a thorough sense of what "The Other Woman" was all about, unless it's mainly about her journey through cocaine addiction, your story behind the story was poignant in its raw honesty.
Though I may have more of an insider view with family members who have had addictions, the emotions you described are very similar, although grief is an added ingredient. Anger and grief I can handle, but it's envy that ruins me if I don't slay it by throwing myself at God's feet.
Just another Warthog
Anne, you may want to read my review of it as well: http://www.theooze.com/articles/article.cfm?id=1745&page=1
As an educator, you become the judged, the damned. This book gives hope that perhaps there is more forgiveness, acceptance, tolerance. We all need the chance to make the mistakes we have to and I don't think our lives should be given a permanent stop sign because of addiction issues.
As the writer of The Other Woman at the Well, it was at first a harrowing journey to read Mr. Gilmore's depiction of me as resembling Milton's Satan. Yikes. But alas, he brings redemption (which indeed I have been granted by others as well, including God) by the end and points the finger back at himself as the brother of the prodigal (to which I often compare myself). No, I did not mind the comparison; it just frightened me to think of the pain and suffering I so thoughtlessly caused those who loved and trusted me. Thank God those days and months of existing are over and done with. I know I've been forgiven by the humans in my life (well, most of them). Rebuilding trust, however, takes much longer.
I am very grateful for his review and hope you with read the book and write one of your own.
Judith www.addictionovercome.com
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excellent article. and i fully understand your anger and envy when life isn't fair.
i have no answers, so we can just sit with each other sharing empathy. ;)
Posted by tammy | Posted at 06/05/2007 2:27 PMNathan, what a candid assessment of your own struggle while reading the author's story. Although I didn't really get a thorough sense of what "The Other Woman" was all about, unless it's mainly about her journey through cocaine addiction, your story behind the story was poignant in its raw honesty.
Though I may have more of an insider view with family members who have had addictions, the emotions you described are very similar, although grief is an added ingredient. Anger and grief I can handle, but it's envy that ruins me if I don't slay it by throwing myself at God's feet.
Just another Warthog
Posted by Anne | Posted at 06/13/2007 9:46 AMAnne, you may want to read my review of it as well: http://www.theooze.com/articles/article.cfm?id=1745&page=1 Posted by Lydia | Posted at 06/15/2007 11:47 AM
As an educator, you become the judged, the damned. This book gives hope that perhaps there is more forgiveness, acceptance, tolerance. We all need the chance to make the mistakes we have to and I don't think our lives should be given a permanent stop sign because of addiction issues. Posted by Shanon | Posted at 06/23/2007 7:51 PM
As the writer of The Other Woman at the Well, it was at first a harrowing journey to read Mr. Gilmore's depiction of me as resembling Milton's Satan. Yikes. But alas, he brings redemption (which indeed I have been granted by others as well, including God) by the end and points the finger back at himself as the brother of the prodigal (to which I often compare myself). No, I did not mind the comparison; it just frightened me to think of the pain and suffering I so thoughtlessly caused those who loved and trusted me. Thank God those days and months of existing are over and done with. I know I've been forgiven by the humans in my life (well, most of them). Rebuilding trust, however, takes much longer.
I am very grateful for his review and hope you with read the book and write one of your own.
Judith www.addictionovercome.com
Posted by Judith Ann Hillard | Posted at 07/18/2007 11:30 AM