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The Daily Stoic
A memoir about being in an insane asylum as a non-insane person trying to get clean from alcoholism.
We have this book in the bookstore that I think about all the time. It's this book called Asylum by this guy William Seabrook.
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A memoir about being in an insane asylum as a non-insane person trying to get clean from alcoholism.
We have this book in the bookstore that I think about all the time. It's this book called Asylum by this guy William Seabrook.
And he's an alcoholic, but before alcoholism is a thing. So he's a drunk, which is what they would call them. And there's no place he can go or thing he can do to not be a drunk.
And he writes this memoir, like a travel memoir about being in this insane asylum as a non-insane person trying to get clean.
The book, spoiler, it ends somewhat tragically, but there's this sadness that I felt after I finished it, because it's like, if he had lived long enough for the invention of Alcoholics Anonymous or 12-step or recovery, the story might've ended differently.
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Asylum is an incredible memoir by William Seabrook about his struggle with alcoholism and his time in an insane asylum. It was originally lost to print but has recently been brought back.
Asylum... by the way this is an incredible little memoir he has.
I first heard about it from Fitzgerald's The Crackup which was about his own struggle with alcoholism and this was a book that was basically totally lost to print and then it recently got brought back out.
Like I had to buy an old expensive copy on Amazon and then it started to become popular again.
I can take some partial credit from having talked about it in the reading list over the years. So there's a new edition of it.
We carry it in the painted porch. You should read it.
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This book is a memoir about an alcoholic journalist who checked himself into an insane asylum to treat his alcoholism in the 1920s, before AA existed. It was recommended for being a fascinating memoir about a man struggling with something that nobody understood at the time.
That's really good. I never know where they are.
Oh, have you read, um, have you read this book? Do you know who Jan Morris is? The historian?
I'm looking at this book, Asylum.
So this guy's name is William Seabrook. He was like the biggest journalist in the world in the twenties, but he's an alcoholic and um, so that's not a thing.
Like you, like there wasn't, there's a pre AA.
And so he checks himself into an insane asylum to treat his alcoholism and he writes about the whole thing.
And it's, it's like this fascinating memoir of this person struggling with this thing, kind of like that, that nobody understands is the thing.
He, he, um, he was this crazy travel journalist.
Like he, he's the one who brought the word zombie to America.
Like he would go, he wrote all these books that were, you know, you read about like, Oh, this book sold 200,000 copies in 1917 and you've never heard of it.
Uh, but yeah, asylum is another one that when I found it, uh, and started talking about it, there were basically like no copies left and then this publisher brought it back in print.
Uh, and then we seemed to not be able to keep it in stock.