Half an hour before kick-off, an ugly grey-yellow cloud drifted over the ground and unleashed a ferocious hailstorm, worsening conditions significantly. But the decision had been made. A large crowd was already inside. The game was going ahead. Charlie Hurley, Sunderland’s revered captain, missed an early penalty. Even 50 years later, he was asking himself whether things might have been different had he converted it. Then, with 27 minutes played, Clough chased a slightly overhit through-ball. Had Sunderland been 1-0 up, might he have been slightly less aggressive?

Clough stretched for the ball and collided with the Bury goalkeeper Chris Harker. As Harker’s shoulder crunched into high right knee, Clough flipped over the top of him and hit his head on the icy ground. For a couple of seconds, there was darkness. Then he tried to get up but his leg would not respond. He crawled hopelessly and then collapsed; both medial and cruciate ligaments were torn. Clough’s career as a centre-forward was over.

This week marks the 20th anniversary of the death of Clough from stomach cancer at the age of 69. Yet he remains a surprisingly constant presence in the mind of English football, the ideal of a particular type of manager, irascible, unpredictable and charismatic, a leader who inspired his teams largely by force of personality. He lives on in countless clips in which he is outrageous, charming and funny, most notably the episode of Calendar on the day he had been sacked by Leeds in which he and his predecessor Don Revie go toe-to-toe.

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It’s extraordinary television and has drawn comparison with the debate between John Kennedy and Richard Nixon in 1960 when those who listened on the radio thought Nixon had come out on top, while those who watched on television believed the handsome Kennedy had run rings around his sweating opponent. Here too, if you actually listen to the words, Revie makes some good points, but it doesn’t matter, because he is ponderous and thickset, while Clough is nimble, sharp and amusingly provocative. He is also, fairly obviously, pissed.

It wasn’t until the late Nineties when the Arsenal captain Tony Adams spoke publicly about his struggles with addiction that football began to take its relationship with booze seriously. That Clough descended into alcoholism is well known but it tends to be an addendum to his story. His appearance in his final season at Nottingham Forest, when he oversaw their relegation 16 years after he’d led them to promotion, couldn’t be ignored, his skin turned now red and blotchy. It happened to be the season of great change in English football when the First Division switched to the Premiership and the sense was that the new football had no place for mavericks like Clough.

It was a convenient framing. The iconoclast who, armed with little more than a sharp wit, dragged himself up from Hartlepools, got Derby promoted and won the league with them, blew up at Leeds, served his time in the wilderness at Brighton and then returned to lead Forest in the space of four seasons to promotion, a league title and two European Cups, before finding the economics of football had rendered obsolete his brand of messianic unorthodoxy.

And it wasn’t untrue. But there is another way of looking at Clough’s story. He was a prolific and brilliant goalscorer for Middlesbrough then Sunderland, scoring 250 goals in 271 league games before the injury, all in the Second Division. His only top-flight goal came in one of the three matches he played as he attempted a comeback in 1964-65 before accepting, aged 29, that his career was over. Even in the second flight, though, he’d forced his way into the England reckoning; there’s a not especially fanciful alternate reality in which he didn’t get injured, Sunderland were promoted in 1962-63 (rather than missing out by a single point having played half a season without his goals) and he was in the England squad when they won the World Cup in 1966.

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Before the injury, Clough was almost teetotal. “He never had a smoke or a drink — well, maybe a half, you know, when he went out,” said his Middlesbrough team-mate Derek McLean. Clough and other Boro players used to go to a café owned by popstar Chris Rea’s father, Camillo, who persuaded him to replace his regular milkshakes with Oxo as a healthier option.

But the injury changed him. After an operation, Clough was in plaster for three months and admitted he would lie on his bed, staring at the ceiling, thinking of how little he had to offer. Brian alone among the eight Clough children who survived to adolescence had failed his 11-plus. He then failed an apprenticeship at ICI. Without his goals, he was just somebody who hadn’t been able to cut it as a turner-and-fitter. He went through arduous rehab, running up the steps in the stadium and along the beach at Roker, but it wasn’t enough. He showed some promise coaching the youth team but Sunderland, desperate for the insurance money that would come when it was confirmed his injury was career-ending, were callous in letting him go. He became embittered and began to drink.

Clough clearly idolised his mother who, at least in his telling of the story, prioritised academic achievement over anything else. Failing his 11-plus clearly hurt, and he seemed never quite to forgive his brother Bill for mocking him over it on the day he got his results. The “immaculate” Bill, he said, “was Mam’s favourite son. I never was. Perhaps it was because he won the teapot in a ‘lovely baby’ competition and I didn’t. Still… I had a reasonable consolation prize by winning the European Cup — twice.”

It’s a strikingly odd comparison, but it’s one that recurs. “I don’t have any O-levels, I don’t have any A-levels,” he said in a TV interview after his retirement, “and when my children chastise me and give me stick… I put my European Cup medals on the table, my Championship medals. I’ve got a tableful — they’re my O-levels and A-levels.” Throughout his career, Clough was reliably anti-intellectual, and yet his 11-plus clearly haunted him. There’s a sense even that his entire managerial career was an attempt to make up for that failure with his mother.

Clough’s Derby County were controversially beaten by Juventus in the semi-final of the 1973 European Cup. In both his autobiographies and countless interviews, he spoke of his distress that night, coming home and receiving the phone call that his mother had died. But it wasn’t true. She had actually died a month earlier, on the night that Derby had beaten Spartak Trnava in the quarter-final. Is it too much of a stretch to wonder if he conflated the events because he had vowed in his own mind that winning the European Cup would earn his mother’s approbation, and that, as he saw it, cheating Italians had stolen that from him?

If that is the case, if winning the European Cup to honour his mother’s memory became a grail, then suddenly his otherwise incomprehensible decision a year later to take over at Leeds United, a club he had repeatedly attacked, becomes explicable: as league champions, they were in the European Cup and so offered an immediate pathway to his ultimate goal. As it turned out, he lasted just 44 tempestuous days at Leeds and the European Cup wins came in 1979 and 1980, with Nottingham Forest. 

The achievement was remarkable, but behind it all lay booze. When a friend visited him in his hotel in Leeds to help look for a house, Clough preferred to lie on the bed, drinking cans of beer, watching the cricket on television — as though perhaps he knew even then that there was no point buying property there. There was booze to calm everybody’s nerves on the night before major finals, booze to celebrate wins, booze to deal with the eternal grind of one game after another, booze to deal with the pain of his break-up with his old friend and assistant Peter Taylor and, in the end, booze just to get by.

The European Cup in 1980 was Clough’s last great success. There were League Cups after that but by the early Nineties, idiosyncrasy and eccentricity had become unreliability and rudeness, his genius had curdled into cantankerousness. After relegation came treatment, excruciating television appearances, illness and death.

Clough’s brilliance is undeniable. Only three other managers have ever won the league with more than one club, and nobody has done it with two medium-sized provincial sides; he had an extraordinary gift. But he never escaped the shame of his 11-plus, never got over the knee injury that denied him playing glory, never perhaps felt he had earned the love of his mother. And his response was to drown himself in alcohol.

His story was one of greatness, but behind the charisma and the outrageousness, it is also one of tragedy.

Even when, occasionally, the seductive femme fatale figures are expressing joy, it’s more schadenfreude than innocent pleasure. They delight in cavorting with a new lover while their ex paramour skulks miserably in the background. Or else they are resplendently basking in their own physical charms while a rejected man stands sadly nearby.

Unsurprisingly, then, the majority of the paintings featured in Edvard Munch: Masterpieces from Bergen — which opens at the Courtauld next month — are sad scenes. By the Deathbed (1896), for example, shows a family assembled round a prone female figure, their eye sockets deep with misery, their faces gaunt and their mouths agape with wordless grief.

There is a purpose to this misery. In 1932, Munch wrote: “In my art, I have tried to clarify life and its meaning for myself. I also intended to help others explain life for themselves”. Art, then, was used by him as a form of therapy: a way of making sense of sadness and helping others to heal. Confronting us with our own angst and sorrows, he has a knack for reaching out to viewers of every background, in every age. He understands the nuances of relationships — the petty jealousies, the spite — and they manifest in his characters, who appear to us, the viewers, as all too human.

One of the first paintings you see as you enter into the exhibition, which is currently on in Bergen, is Man and Woman (1898). Two figures are seated in a bedroom: a woman sits back on the bed, nude, while the man sits with his head in his hands, in apparent torment. It is clear that a conversation has taken place, one that has upset the man; the woman is seductive, very much in charge in the relationship dynamic.

Munch was born to a bourgeois family in Christiania, the son of a doctor. Although by some measures he had a relatively privileged childhood, grief was at his heels. Both his mother and sister succumbed to tuberculosis, the latter at only 15 years old. Munch himself nearly died of a pulmonary attack as a child: as he coughed up blood, his relatives feared the worst. He survived, but was left with chronic bronchitis, and a permanently altered perception of the world.

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Munch reportedly suffered from depression and anxiety. The Scream bears the inscription: “Can only have been painted by a madman”. In 1905 the artist wrote, “You know my picture, The Scream […] nature was screaming in my blood — I was at breaking point”. And so he made art, as a form of expulsion. He once wrote that he tried to “paint out [his] fears”, in a way that a classical composer might throng their melodies with angst.

In Bergen, I had the opportunity to see behind the scenes of the exhibition, where several of Munch’s paintings were in the slow process of restoration. Apparently, he had a habit of keeping his finished paintings outdoors to see the effect the weather would have on the drying paint: he had put his canvases on the beach and in snowy gardens. One imagines his collectors furrowing their brows at such activities: surely Munch’s work needed better preservation and care than this? But as an artist he was very much invested in the present moment: he felt emotions intensely and wanted to act on his impulses.

Munch joined an avant-garde group of bohemian intellectuals in Oslo, in 1884, called the Christiania Boheme. They lived by a theory of creativity that maintained that the artist must look exclusively to his or her own feelings and thoughts in order to produce art of the highest order. Members of this group spurned middle class mores, supported sexual equality and free love, and advocated for intellectual freedom.

Around this time, Munch had an affair with a married woman, Milly Thalow, who was to be the (later unrequited) love of his life. He travelled across France, Norway and Denmark, learning from other painters, but his mental illness reared its head once more and led him to drink excessively: by 1908, Munch’s drinking had become uncontrollable, and he was hospitalised for long periods.

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While sectioned in Norway, the hospital advocated for Munch to resume his drawing and painting as occupational therapy: it worked, in that it stopped the artist drinking, and he was able to resume his activities in the outside world. He had by this point, however, renounced his artistic goals. In 1909, he wrote that he no longer wished to paint “individual man’s sorrows and joys seen at close quarters, but rather the great eternal powers”. In his work after this point, there is a new expansiveness, a romanticism.

“What would you say was the archetypal Norwegian temperament?” I asked one of the exhibition managers. Smiling bashfully, he answered: “Shy. We are all shy. We used to all be farmers, you see.” Munch got around his shyness through painting: feelings he felt unable to express in person, he could scratch away onto canvas, their truth resplendent across centuries.

Did art cure him? Ultimately, Munch lived to the ripe old age of 81: his artistic pursuits all but cured his alcoholism, and tempered his melancholia.

As for the viewers, if we are not healed by viewing Munch’s works, we are at the very least consoled by seeing our innermost feelings so painstakingly laid out on canvas.

We might experience an uncanny sensation, like the one described by Munch, when he wrote of the married woman whose memory plagued him for decades:

“I felt as if there were invisible threads connecting us, I felt the invisible strands of her hair still winding round me — and as she disappeared completely beyond the sea, I still felt it, felt the pain where my heart was bleeding — because the threads could not be severed”.

It is wrong to define Munch by despair, by agony, or by two hands fixed to a screaming face. Viewed in its totality, his work makes us feel at one with our fellow man. Our sufferings, though hard to bear, are shared by many. In this great universe we are not alone, say these canvases, but part of something much larger.

The exhibition Edvard Munch: Masterpieces from Bergen, opening at the Courtauld Gallery on 27 May 2022, will feature eighteen works presented together for the very first time outside of Norway.

A Fan’s Notes describes Exley’s “dizzying descent into bumhood”. Witty, handsome, athletic, a graduate of the University of Southern California burning with ambition to write, Exley found himself unable to stop drinking, unable to hold down lucrative public-relations jobs at railroads and missile manufacturers, and unable to rouse himself from his mother’s “davenport” (a quaint American term for a sofa bed) where he sat watching soap operas and eating Oreos by the box. As a result he spent two stints in a mental institution he calls “Avalon Valley”, where he was subjected to insulin shock and electroshock treatments.

Exley’s book is partly a metaphysical conceit of the United States as a giant loony bin. “I believed I could live out my life at Avalon Valley,” he wrote, “live it there as well as live it in any America I had yet discovered.” With a common American provincialism, he often uses “America” to mean “the human condition” or “my state of mind.” Unable to connect with a girl he loves, he decides that “my inability to couple had not been with her but with some aspect of America with which I could not have lived successfully.”

Exley is ambitious to the point of megalomania. “Knowing nothing about writing,” he recalls, “I had no trouble seeing myself famous.” But he is lazy — and, when he conquers his laziness, perverse. He redeems himself by writing a vast and ambitious work over an obsessive year, and then, in a moment of drunken frustration, throws it into a furnace.

While his USC contemporary, the football star Frank Gifford, became a model of manliness to his fellow countrymen, Exley came to think he was destined merely “to sit in the stands with most men and acclaim others. It was my fate, my destiny, my end, to be a fan”. Exley would wind up more than that, and partly out of luck. He was a misfit oppressed by the America of Hiroshima and McCarthy, but his book was published in the America of Haight-Ashbury and Woodstock. It wound up beloved of William Styron, John Cheever, Nick Hornby and pretty much any male writer born before the year 1980.

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In light of present-day medical knowledge, A Fan’s Notes can be seen as a book about alcoholism. Everything in it derives from booze: the metaphysics, the moods, the hallucinations, the ambitions, the scrapes. Exley does not reflect on the ethics of the arms trade, say, and then leave his cushy PR job. No: He gets fired from his job for drinking and then lashes out — always saving his worst cruelty for those he resents having to accept charity from. When his mother expresses horror that a family acquaintance has been arrested for the statutory rape of a fourteen-year-old girl, he replies: “Lovely age, fourteen.” His fantasies are violent, sometimes even murderous, and frequently pornographic.

Exley is a broken and occasionally misogynistic man. “The world of the soap opera,” he reflects, after months of watching them on his mother’s TV, “is the world of the Emancipated American Woman, a creature whose idleness is employed to no other purpose than creating mischief.” But it would be a mistake to ascribe Exley’s misogyny only to his brokenness. The book’s political incorrectness is more in what he observes than in what he believes. It was written in the Age of Freud, with its dogma that bringing everything to the surface is best, embarrassing though it may be.

Exley introduces us to Mr. Blue, a mythomaniac aluminium-siding salesman obsessed with calisthenics and cunnilingus. “I was immensely fond of the pussy-bedazzled old bastard,” the author recalls, “biases, bullshit, and all…” His own rich and sadistic brother-in-law Bunny, who probably possesses the first television-equipped “man cave” in Western literature, speeds along the roads of northern Westchester County with a car full of shotguns, drinking beer out of a cardboard cup and looking for stray cats to blast, his conversation a “tornado of monstrous smut”.

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Exley’s society has a texture that will call to mind the society of the Covid lockdown: there are certainly interesting characters in it, like Mr. Blue, Bunny, and Exley himself, but they are never really “out in the world”, making commitments and forging relationships. They are sidelined solipsists, perhaps exposed to the same events and stimuli, but each living them in isolation, not as part of a community — and this is as true in bar rooms as it is in insane asylums: “The patrons of Louis’ did not like each other very much,” Exley recalls of one literary haunt. “It is only now that I can see that we represented to one another wasted time and crippling dreams.”

Post-lockdown may recognise the truth in another insight of Exley’s: because time moves, and because we are mortal, it is never really the case that “nothing is happening”, or that we are “doing nothing”. There is almost no place in the United States more remote (“steppelike” is Exley’s word) than Watertown, New York, where Exley idled away the last years of the Eisenhower administration on his mother’s davenport. Yet this was somehow an active idling. The time was needed so that “one man might make his peace with a new and different man… I then believed that nothing whatever was at work, that I was drifting quite aimlessly on a davenport, when in fact that davenport was taking me on an unwavering, rousing, and often melancholy journey.”

Television looms over Exley’s life with a force analogous to that of alcohol. He recognises “its deceit, its outright lies, its spinelessness, its weak-mindedness, its pointless violence,” yet he needs it for sleep. Exley was ahead of his time. Today everyone has some kind of love-hate relationship with TV, and one of the West’s great cultural contradictions involves mediation. Media, in the Burkean sense of small institutions, make possible a democratic society by buffering controversies.

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But media, in the McLuhanesque sense of opinion-organisers, undermine that democracy by grooming citizens ideologically and then isolating them from one another. The star-fan relationship and the commissar-subject relationship replace the mentor-student relationship and the friend-friend relationship. In the 1950s, the United States was the only country where television had developed this way, and only a minority of adults had developed the pathological relationship to it that Exley had. Over time, the rest of the world has grown more American, more Exleyesque, and Covid has given this world another fillip.

Exley built an extraordinary set of virtues appropriate to his hard-luck state. Those virtues often saw him through, even if — rather like The Band, or the Republic of Ireland — he was unable to maintain them in the face of success and relative enrichment. He wrote two more books that sold poorly and failed to excite critics. Still, A Fan’s Notes remains a brilliant reminder, in a trapped and desperate time, that life goes on, even when it appears to have stopped. “That the fear of death still owns me,” Exley writes, “is, in its way, a beginning.”

Alcohol is not available to me — I am sober almost 20 years — but there are other things to mutilate with. One of them is fear. I should be used to it by now, but I still wake each morning surprised by it. I fall to fear, like a cartoon woman, and I cry in my study.

I see alcoholism as a parasite — people used to think that alcoholics were possessed by demons — and although this idea absolves me of everything I have done, and is romantic, I believe it. I have to, or I couldn’t go on. If alcoholism thrives on fear, it also thrives on isolation. It courts it: if you have ever wondered why alcoholics behave so badly it is because we want, on an unconscious level, to be alone.

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The alcoholic can build misery in happy times, and usually does because it feels safe with the familiar. What would it do with pandemic? I always thought that, as someone anxious in ordinary times, I would be calm and useful in extraordinary times. The curse would be reversed. It wasn’t like that; or at least, it hasn’t been so far.

I was crushed by Covid-19, and I didn’t even have it. I imagined everyone I love unable to breathe. Then I imagined myself unable to breathe. I imagined the global economy crashing. Then I imagined all the hundreds of millions of pieces of individual despair that would follow from the crashing of the economy. I read about the poverty, the callousness, the untaught children and the domestic murders. I read the foolishness. I read the lies: what equaliser? I imagined our world falling into an abyss from which it would not return, because this is only the first act of our ending. And on, and on.

Two things reliably rescue me from these kinds of thoughts and both of them, with pandemic, are withdrawn. The first is writing and I find it difficult, at the moment, to write. I cannot write because I cannot think. There’s nothing to write about anyway, except the view from the window and I am not good at landscape.

I want to write about people and, just now, there aren’t any. What do I have to say about pandemic that a frightened child couldn’t say? My husband turned to me last week and said, with almost desperate joy, “it’s bin night”. “I’ll do the recycling bags,” I said. That was it. I can’t outwrite a parasite. Not this one, though I had some success with the other one. I like it neatly imprisoned in paragraphs from which it can’t escape. Prometheus on its small rock, chained with words. It makes me feel safe.

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The second is Alcoholics Anonymous, where I have gone for 20 years to know I am not alone. I don’t go for the speech. I don’t understand the AA steps — what character defects and what God? I only tidally believe in a God of my understanding and, like a child, when I believe I really believe and when I don’t, I don’t. I don’t think alcoholics have more depressive emotions than non-alcoholics; we just have more emotions generally. We are like pianos with 12 octaves. We crash up and down: the most joyful, the most despairing, the most afraid.

I go for the animal warmth, to find other creatures like me. It’s not the worst mental illness by any means, alcoholism — it’s potentially arrestable — but most people consider it self-murder. They cannot understand it. It is anathema to the creed of mankind, which likes to act in its own interests; or thinks it does. That leaves the alcoholic with only another alcoholic for the comfort of being known. It’s wonderful and it works, when you can find it. The condition cannot be wished or thought away. It can only be diminished with love, often topped-up in church halls and municipal meeting rooms. It’s strange and prosaic, a metaphor for life.

But the AA meetings closed, with everything else, and I am alone with the monster and our long, repetitive conversations, which leave me prostrate, because the voice is so practised, and convincing, and it knows me so well. Then I recover to mania, which is the opposite of peace and, though easier for me — no one weeps in mania — is harder for those around me.

I know it’s a luxury nowadays, not having Covid-19, which compounds the guilt of just having alcoholism and a glut of isolation and fear, which magnifies the voice. I was told that I could log on to any meeting in the world. I could go to a meeting in Alaska, or New York City. But, at first, I didn’t. It took me many years to go to AA, and many more years to listen when I did, and I need the warmth. It’s possible to skulk on Zoom, but I prefer to skulk in person.

Eventually, last week, I went. I can’t write about AA but what is said is true. It’s not the same in lockdown — more accurately lock-in — as it is not the same for the non-alcoholic seeking love. I do not know when they will return. I know what drinking alcoholics are facing now, and I am fearful for them, but, without AA, I cannot reach them. I can only imagine them. My sponsor says that to survive alcoholism you have to learn to live in the day, like a spaniel. I have never really managed this; perhaps pandemic will teach it to me.

I don’t often wonder why this happened to me. I have learnt not to, because asking why will consume you. But I sense that the alcoholic has a genetic predisposition, which is triggered, or not, in childhood. If it is triggered, they will find it almost impossible to stop drinking, and they will know agony. I know people who have died or are dying from alcoholism.

I write from inside the programme of Alcoholics Anonymous [AA] of which I have been a member for more than 20 years. I am not supposed to tell you this. AA was established in 1935 in Acron, Ohio, before victimhood was coveted. To write about AA is to perjure it. It is a different place for everyone. No collection of alcoholics can ever be the same; and it is almost impossible to describe alcoholism to anyone who does not have it. Its potential constituency is vulnerable. They do not need my opinions. That is why you will never see an advert for AA.

AA’s 12-step programme is used by most rehabilitation centres and it has imitators in Narcotics Anonymous (NA), Overeaters Anonymous (OA) and more. It is, in recovery terms, the Establishment, and so it is inevitable that it would, eventually, be attacked for being the Establishment, even if it is an Establishment of former drunks.

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Holly Whitaker was briefly a member of AA. She has written a book called Quit Like a Woman, in which she writes her rage over many pages. She accuses AA of being a tool of the patriarchy, of oppressing women and minorities and of inventing a false condition — alcoholism — to subjugate its members into humility and compliance under God. If you are a woman, she says, you do not need to be made compliant, for you are already.

She has a suggestion though. People who drink too much — and she believes all alcohol is poison — should go to her recovery website which requires a fee, although you can, if you demonstrate vulnerability, apply for a kind of scholarship. (AA, meanwhile, is dependent on voluntary contributions.) It used to be called Hip Recovery — hip as in the fashionable, not as in the joint. It won’t be for everyone, as AA is. If you think first of branding, you will probably not make it to recovery. You are probably not that ill.

“I knew,” she writes, “I was supposed to start a revolution around alcohol, addiction and recovery.” She continues, “I discovered that I not only had to claw my way out of hell and construct my own system for recovery, but that also, perhaps, it was my duty to create something more so the women who come after me, women who are dying in broad daylight while we look the other way, might not have to face the same bullshit I had to endure.”

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If you don’t think you have alcoholism — you can’t have something you don’t believe exists — you can’t ask yourself why you have it. Whitaker seems to think that people drink too much because of the wider culture and this is probably true. But I don’t think alcoholism can be caused by a wider culture.

She is right that alcohol is dangerous for everyone, but she refuses to believe that alcoholics just drink differently.

She would probably say I write from a cult, but much of the dogma of AA flows above me, and I don’t believe in a lot of it. I have never been able to fit the retrieval of my sanity into a series of steps, but I am calm watching others do it. For me, the function of the dogma — the steps and the traditions — is to provide a framework for people who arrive insane and have to find something to do with themselves. I see AA as a self-help group, where I meet people I understand and love. That is AA, for me – love — which I believe is the only effective antidote to alcoholism. Whitaker found none of this and so established her own website, which is styled like a private members club — which is it — and for a fee. Tempest, it is now called, and that is apt, for she is angry.

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Although many of Whitaker’s opinions about AA are ludicrous, not all are. She has a diarist’s skill for leaping into cracks and winnowing them out.

For instance, she calls AA a male space. She is quick to name its founders white and male as if, while dying, they could also foretell, and cater to, the inclusivity of the future; this reads like opportunism. “It was created by the oppressing party for the oppressing party,” she writes, “for men who were sick from an overdeveloped sense of owning the world, from believing they were God”. That is not my experience of any alcoholic.

It is a male space; men have a tendency to take space for themselves. All men — all people — are capable of being oppressors, but I don’t find alcoholic men to be very functional oppressors. Rather, they are among the gentlest I know and if one group irritates me, I will find another.

The Big Book — the primary text of AA, full of stories and advice — is masculine in tone, and old-fashioned; there is a chapter called “To Wives”, as Whitaker complains. This bothers me when I think too hard about it, but it doesn’t bother me nearly as much as facing alcoholism alone. It should be amended, and I think that it will be. I have sometimes thought that AA does not provide, in its dogma, enough room for grief, but perhaps there is no time for that at first: you must get up and start again. In any case, grief cannot be stopped. Grief will out.

I do sympathise with Whitaker; she is allowed to hate AA. But to damn it, and alcoholics who may not consider going, with a polemic is cruel.

There are all-female AA meetings where she could discuss the patriarchy and I would listen. AA, I want to tell her, is like the world; you will always find someone to hate, and someone to love. AA does not seek to annihilate “the self” as she claims, but to liberate it. Whitaker can’t hear that, and I am sorry.