Michael Deagler On The Rich Territory Of Sobriety

Dennis Monk is a newly sober twenty-six-year-old figuring out the next steps of his life. When his mother tells him he can’t live at home in the suburbs any longer, Dennis couch surfs with various friends and acquaintances throughout South Philadelphia. Michael Deagler’s wry and incisive Early Sobrieties charts Dennis’s first sober summer as he navigates the complexities of this new phase and cautiously forms a plan for his future. Through it all, Dennis proves to be a winningly perceptive narrator, describing his various housemates with wit and compassion as he makes his way through the ever-changing neighborhoods of South Philadelphia. Critics praised Early Sobrieties, with The New York Times Book Review lauding it as “a moving, comic meditation on the impossibility of imposing narrative structure on our lives.” It was long-listed for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction and a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel. Deagler spoke with us about how achieving distance from his initial manuscript strengthened the novel, writing a book that was funnier than his friends expected, and the dramatically rich terrain of sobriety. Author photo courtesy of Marissa Gawel.
There doesn’t seem to be a lot of depictions of newly sober people in literature, and when we first meet Dennis Monk, he’s relatively early in his journey of sobriety. I was curious to hear you talk about what interested you in exploring a character at this point in his life?
There’s certainly a lot of depictions of active alcoholism, to the extent where I think it’s almost difficult to write about it without treading into certain cliches or familiar beats. I think, as a writer, you’re both trying to grapple with the tensions and dramas of your own life through fiction, but you’re also trying to figure out what hasn’t really been covered before. It’s a lot easier to write something that feels fresh or memorable if you can find an undiscovered or less explored terrain. I had a drinking problem and was writing a lot about that, and reading a lot of writers who were writing about alcoholics and addicts. But then after I got sober, I found the experience of that to be very rich and psychologically interesting in a way that surprised me, maybe in part because I hadn’t read much about it before, and therefore wasn’t as prepared for it.
When you see depictions of sobriety or somebody getting sober, it normally comes at the end of the of a story about addiction. It’s presented as this sort of happy ending. I thought it would be interesting to write about sobriety where the sobriety is the starting point, after the character is already sober. Therefore, whatever problems or conflicts that appear in the narrative necessarily arise from the conditions of sobriety, as opposed to the conditions of active addiction. There was a bit of a learning curve in that [I had to ask] what sort of conflicts would this character have? Because he can’t be wandering around just not drinking, you know? It’s not super interesting. (laughs) So it forced me to really think about what is the existential state of the newly sober person? How does this affect his relationships and the dynamics of his life? That all just seemed like really rich territory.
Part of Dennis’s relationship with sobriety is that he’s getting in touch with his emotions again. I think one of the things as a reader that’s fun to see is Dennis engaging with the world emotionally in a way that maybe he hasn’t been doing since before his drinking.
The alcohol is kind of there to keep you from feeling things completely, or it allows you to control the way that you want to feel your emotions. In some ways, it can even be the way to access your emotions. If you’re a very repressed person in your normal life, alcohol can be the tool that you use to feel the things that you have locked up. Once that’s gone, Dennis has to learn how to feel things again. Or in some ways, feel things for the first time, just on his own, which I think is very confusing. So much of the book is dealing with that recalibration that he has to go through. I think a lot of the dislocation that he feels comes from the fact that it’s like, “Okay, I’m not feeling how I feel like I should feel in this or that situation,” which can kind of be alienating.
Dennis seems keenly aware that sobriety hasn’t fixed his problems. He still has to fix other issues in his life that his alcoholism might have masked.
This is almost extra literary, but when you’re getting sober, sobriety is the end goal, and you need to believe that all your problems will go away. And it’s good for alcoholics to believe that, or else they would never get sober. But when you’re actually sober, and that initial joyous period ends, it’s like, “No, all my problems are still here. They’re no longer getting actively worse, which was what alcohol was doing, but they still need to be resolved.” I think there’s a disillusionment that comes along with that, where it’s like, “Oh no, I still have a bunch of work to do, and I’m not necessarily, equipped to do it.” Or you feel like [these are issues] most other people dealt with five or ten years ago, and you’re just dealing with them now.
One of the things that I really loved about Dennis is how he seems to meet people where they’re at. He doesn’t seem to judge them and he gives them a lot of grace. Can you talk a little bit about how you created the character of Dennis?
He’s a slightly autobiographical character in some ways, or sort of a literary stand-in, in terms of he is someone with a similar, if sort of slightly exaggerated, worldview as me, or at least me at that age. In creating a character who was coming from a similar place as me, it allowed me to work my way through some my own bafflements with the world in a slightly heightened way. I think that made the character easier to run with, because I didn’t have to invent his whole worldview from nothing. At a certain point, you need to separate your fictional protagonist from you, the author, because it doesn’t really serve the story for him to be that close to you.
I think an important aspect of the creation of the character was just getting older and having more distance from him as I initially wrote him. The first draft of this book was written in 2015, 2016 when I was pretty close in age to Dennis. Then I substantially revised the manuscript six or seven years later, when I had grown up quite a bit and was able to look at him more as a fictional creation and play into the differences between us. I think that helped him feel realer in a way, and not just as a stand in for me.
What was that experience like of looking at that earlier draft with the wisdom of the passing years?
It was interesting. I had become a better writer, I think. I had read a lot more, I had written more. Some the problems that had seemed intractable earlier on, I now knew how to solve. Or problems that I just was unaware of I was now able to see. Six or seven years is a good amount of time for the stuff that is a little too of-the-moment to reveal itself, where it’s sort of like, “This is a very 2016 type of thing to write. I’m going to take this out,” versus, “This holds up pretty well, so maybe this gets at something a little more universal.”
I think there’s always the fear when you look at something old that you wrote that it’s going to be terrible. When some of it is pretty good, you’re like, “Oh, this is a relief.” (laughs) It was always a manuscript I really liked, and I always wanted to figure out a way to make it work. If you can read something from a while ago and it still sort of speaks to you, that’s probably a good a good sign that something is working in it.
I want to talk about the other characters that Dennis meets because we follow him as he’s couch surfing around Philadelphia. The people that he crashes with are friends or acquaintances from various parts of his past, and it seems that they force him to confront some aspect of life that he’s struggling with, whether it’s relationships or family or sobriety. In constructing the novel, how did you decide who the people are that Dennis should come up against?
A lot of them were based on interactions that I had when I was newly sober that I felt highlighted the trickier aspects of sobriety. Like meeting someone who was also sober, but sober in a different way than me, or meeting someone who was still in the depths of alcoholism and not really knowing how to help them with that. Or the general thing that we all go through, where you run into people you haven’t seen in a while, and your lives have diverged, and theirs is more impressive than yours.
I had been writing these Monk stories for a while and had written a bunch before he got sober. He had closer friends, people who were more immediately in his life. I felt like I had already written the stories about them. In this book, he’s dealing with a lot of people who he’s one [person] removed from. They’re not his best friends, they’re new people, or siblings of his friends, or cousins. I think that slight gulf in intimacy was accidental. But because I had already written about the people who are closer to him, it helped create this sense of apartness. The people he really cares about are mostly no longer in his life anymore, and what’s left are people at a slightly greater remove. Because of that, there’s an opportunity to create new, interesting relationships.
That remove Monk has with others seems to be where a lot of the book’s humor comes from. Monk is very perceptive and wry, and that lends itself to itself to a lot of the book’s funnier moments. Can you talk about how you struck the tone with your novel in terms of bringing humor into what can sometimes be a dark place?
The main comment I got from friends who read the book when it came out was that it was funnier than they were expecting it to be. I was a little confused by that honestly. (laughs) I think what they meant was that because it’s a heavy subject, they were expecting a heavier book. Maybe I feel this out of insecurity, but if you’re going to write something and you want people to read it, it should be a little funny, at least. You need to do some audience service. I guess I figure if the reader is amused, they’ll probably keep reading, and you can take them wherever you want to go.
But also, there’s just a lot of humor in sobriety. In the same way that for anybody doing something new, there’s a lot of room for mistakes and absurdity and things just not going the way you think they’re going to go. If you know your characters well, if you enjoy your own characters, then there’s a lot of a lot of humor that will just naturally bubble to the surface.
The book really immerses the reader in the different neighborhoods of Philadelphia and South Philadelphia in particular. Why was South Philadelphia the ideal setting for this book?
It’s funny, I think of the book as about a guy who does not live in South Philadelphia, which is kind of my relationship to South Philadelphia, and has always been. Philadelphia, like different cities, has different parts of the city that are the cool place to live at different times. When I was initially living there, it was Fishtown, which is a part of North Philadelphia. Then I moved away from the city. I moved home to the suburbs, to my parents’ house, to get sober. While I was gone, all my friends moved to South Philadelphia. South Philadelphia became the cool part of the city, and I felt very left out of that shift.
I still don’t even know that I like South Philadelphia that much. It’s sort of ironic to me that of all the parts of the city that I’ve lived in or have legitimate affection for, South Philadelphia is not really one of them. But I think that’s actually a better relationship for a character to have with a setting. Monk is kind of a South Philadelphia skeptic. I think that led to an interesting tension, because writing about a place where the character really loves the place can often be saccharine. I think him being someone who doesn’t live there, who wants to live there, who’s jealous of his friends that live there, and is also kind of resentful of the place, that just gives him a more critical eye.
Your book has now been out for a year. What has your experience been in terms of the feedback that you’ve gotten from readers?
It’s been almost universally positive. If people don’t like it, they don’t tell you. (laughs) But it’s fun to get random emails from people who liked it. Also it’s surprising how many people read it, because you write for a long time and nobody reads anything. You publish stories and it’s kind of like hurling them into the abyss. This book was not a bestseller by any means, but people have read it and reached out. A lot of sober people have read it, which has been very validating to hear that they felt seen by it.
It’s cool to an extent that I never really anticipated. It kind of feels like a child, where it’s no longer part of me, and it’s out in the world having its own adventures. I’m related to it, but it has a separate life to me, which is maybe the most rewarding part. People who don’t know who I am, who are not interested in me at all can read the book and get something out of it, and it can be a part of their lives. It just has its own existence.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Tags: Michael Deagler