Summary

Chapter Seven, "Thirst" opens with Jamison's increasing frustration and difficulty with sobriety. Everything makes Jamison think about alcohol. When she thinks of her nephew in San Francisco, she imagines all the drinking he will get to do someday. He is only a year old. One afternoon, she watches a strange run her regular coffee shop sit with their beer half drink for hours, and experiences a great overwhelming frustration. She cannot stand sobriety. It is “shaping up to hold precisely the blankness” she had feared it would (232). Jamison does not feel like the new person she imagined she would feel. Instead, her life feels out of control. At the same time, she feels dull and repetitive. Her thoughts exhaust her. Jamison informs us that the question of producing interesting conversation in sobriety has always been tricky. In Junkie, William Burroughs describes patients who talk...