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could let go—even just a little—I had to
    discover what I’d been holding on to. And sometimes we can’t
    discover what we’ve been holding on to before we’re utterly
    ready. In other words, before we’re so miserable that we must .
    When I was twenty-five, I moved from Santa Fe to San Fran-
    cisco, where I, in fact, ended up living just blocks from that same San Francisco Zen Center where both Steve and Pat had studied.
    Out of loneliness I went there once to see if I could feel some-
    thing—a connection to my aunt Pat (although she hadn’t been
    there since the seventies), a great inspiration to study Zen—but
    I still felt lonely.
    During my last two years of the four years I lived in San
    Francisco, I would ride my bike across the park to the Richmond
    District on Tuesday afternoons and sit in a therapist’s office. It
    cost seventy dol ars an hour, roughly the tips from a night of
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    T h e o P a u l i n e N e s t o r
    waitressing. I had a problem I couldn’t name. I didn’t even know
    where to dig to unearth the thing. After a year of discussing all
    my everyday anxieties—over money, over relationships, over
    finding my way in the world—I final y touched a soft spot, the
    sinkhole I’d spun circles around for so long.
    “Do you think your mother’s an alcoholic?” my therapist
    asked. She was ten years older than me, with frizzy brown hair
    and a last name like an Italian mountain town.
    An alcoholic? I thought of an expression—one of my moth-
    er’s, in fact—“a falling-down drunk.” My mother wasn’t that.
    Yes, there was a glass of wine beside her in the evenings; and yes, the sound of two ice cubes hitting a glass and clicking against
    each other summoned up her image. Every time. But she wasn’t
    a drunk.
    I thought of my real father then too. He was an alcoholic,
    and I was allowed to call him that because he’d named himself
    that when he joined AA when I was twenty-one. I could call
    him that because when he drank he was loud and obnoxious.
    I even had a scar on my hand from where he burned me acci-
    dental y with his cigarette when I was eight. He’d been trying to
    what—hug me? tickle me?—when the cigarette singed my skin.
    I’d jumped back, and we’d both looked at each other, wary. The
    scar is a small circle, still here although ever so faint. I think of it as a sun, a child’s perfectly round sun.
    Yes, I could name him as an alcoholic easily, even casual y:
    My dad’s an alcoholic. Because he’d said it himself, called it out, given it a name and a place in the world. Naming him an alcoholic involved no betrayal on my part. I could also say it because
    he was dead.
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    W r i t i n g i s M y D r i n k
    But my mother?
    “An alcoholic? No, I don’t think so,” I said, eager to end the
    session and get out of there.
    “Would you be willing to explore the idea that your mother
    has a problem with alcohol? That her drinking has affected your
    relationship with her?”
    I looked out the open window, to the backs of the Victorian
    houses of yellow, white and blue with their fire escapes lacing
    down their sides. It was a city built on disaster, on hope, on a
    history of buildings col apsing, a city of people needing a way
    out in a hurry.
    “Maybe,” I said, and the session was over.
    But final y the day would come: the day when I would take
    the word “alcoholic” and my mother and put them together in a
    sentence. And that—that was a changing day.
    In some important way, that was the day I became a writer.
    I say it began that day even though I had been writing sporad-
    ical y in a creative way and routinely in an academic way for
    years. I say it began that day even though the writing I would
    come to think of as my “real writing” was still years down the
    road. I say it began that day because that was the day I jumped
    off the cliff and