All those years I had chimed to Raymond Carver as a Pacific Northwest writer, as my Pacific Northwest writer, there was something else I recognized as well: the lost man, the drunk man. I was him. I loved him most when I was in my twenties, my party-drinking era—when once every year or so, or maybe every financial quarter, I would wake up and wonder if I should be going to AA. Carver was my avatar, though I refused to see it at the time; refused to see it until that strange sunlit morning when suddenly a new kind of knowledge was available to me; who knows why.

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The recovery movement tells us we are more than the worst thing we’ve ever done. If we believed otherwise, wouldn’t the alcoholic just stay in the gutter, an XXX bottle tipped to her lips like a cartoon drunkard? What would be the point of even trying, if we’re only going to be defined by our shittiest moment?
The idea of redemption is crucial to the survival of the drunk, the addict, who must believe in a future that is at least a little free of what she was.