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A Writer's Secret Life
For many, sex is an addiction. And as Susan Cheever found out, giving in to the urge is like falling into an hypnotic trance. An excerpt from her new book, Desire: Where Sex Meets Addiction.
“It’s as if an electronic magnet in my solar plexus was switched on. At its most intense I’d go into a kind of trance, dissociated, beamed in from Mars, my mouth dry and my heart pounding, my usual waking consciousness hovering somewhere outside my body while I was taken in by the pull,” writes Michael Ryan.
One of the most mysterious and creepy symptoms of addiction is this kind of trance. An addict will decide not to do something, whether it’s not to use a credit card or not to drink more than one glass of wine or not to go home with the drug dealer. The decision is usually carefully considered and based on previous painful experience. The decision is final. The addict is sure.
Later, when the addict can’t understand how she could have done what she had promoted not to do, it seems in memory to have been a trance.
I made myself comfortable while he got dressed to go out. Then, somehow we were on the bed.
In 1978, City magazine folded, and Newsweek was ready to transfer me to San Francisco. The obstacles to Warren’s and my great love were removed, but I had become deeply involved with the handsome writer who had left his wife and moved in with me.
In moments of precious sanity, I told myself and my friends that, although I would always love Warren, I had realized that I could not build a life with him. My passion for the writer might not be the blazing, excruciatingly painful connection I had with Warren, but he was a wonderful, responsible, witty, and intelligent man, and I loved him too, in a different way.
Warren protested, of course. He came to New York to try to change my mind; it was too late. I was sick of his lateness and his wildness and sick of all that pain. Visiting him in his room at the raffish Chelsea Hotel, I noticed that there was a crumpled cigarette package under the bed. Warren didn’t smoke.
With the writer’s encouragement, I left my job at Newsweek and wrote a novel, Looking for Work, which was published in 1980. I married the writer; we had a wonderful daughter. I didn’t speak to Warren for almost four years. I told myself that I felt lucky to have escaped.
Then one morning, when my husband and I happened to be in San Francisco for a week, I called Warren. He met me in the lobby of the hotel, and in some ways it was as if we had never been apart. We stood in the hotel bar and talked until it was time for me to meet my husband for dinner. Warren said things about writing that surprised me, and as always, his liberal use of profanity was refreshing, like a blast of honesty and anger blowing through my carefully constructed married-lady world.
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Susan Cheever is the author of numerous works of fiction and nonfiction including American Bloomsbury, My Name is Bill, Note Found in a Bottle, As Good as I Could Be, Home Before Dark, and Treetops. She is a Guggenheim Fellow, a director of the Corporation of Yaddo, and a member of the Author’s Guild. Cheever teaches at the Bennington Writing Seminars and at the New School.
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Susan Cheever is the author of numerous works of fiction and nonfiction including American Bloomsbury, My Name is Bill, Note Found in a Bottle, As Good as I Could Be, Home Before Dark, and Treetops. She is a Guggenheim Fellow, a director of the Corporation of Yaddo, and a member of the Author’s Guild. Cheever teaches at the Bennington Writing Seminars and at the New School.
Cheever on Cheever
Susan Cheever is the author of numerous works of fiction and nonfiction including American Bloomsbury, My Name is Bill, Note Found in a Bottle, As Good as I Could Be, Home Before Dark, and Treetops. She is a Guggenheim Fellow, a director of the Corporation of Yaddo, and a member of the Author’s Guild. Cheever teaches at the Bennington Writing Seminars and at the New School.
this article is well writen and some may say "Wow, I never thought of it like that, Im an addict"
In short this article is soooooo childish.
Is this blog for 13 year olds? PLEASEEEEE!!!!
eeeewwww.... she had sex with Warren Hinckle?
not even the skank junk addicted strippers at Mitchell Bros where he used to hang out would ever do that...
you must not be an addict
Trance is right.
You're drawn in, you think, you avoid, you stumble, your drawn, you give in.
You're shopping, you're drinking.
You know you shouldn't be, but you are.
You're in a trance.
I, too, spent decades confusing sex with love, intensity with intimacy, and thinking I was experiencing grand passion when it was really just drama and distraction. Without knowing it (because you're not only in a trance, your perception of the world is off), I was using people. I was getting high. There was no intimacy in my compulsive pattern of destructive relationships. This addiction has cost me in time, energy, and lost dreams. Luckily almost four years ago I wandered into a meeting for people who also have these issues, and instantly I realized I was an addict. The change in perspective woke me up, and launched me on a path toward recovery, and true connection with others. I applaud Susan Cheever for writing this elegant, comprehensive, brave book,and Sue Silverman too, for her courage and honesty. The time seems fertile
for people to learn about this complex, elusive, pervasive addiction. After all, aren't we a culture that is in love with obsessive "love"? I wrote a very personal narrative about all this that's coming out in a month with Bloomsbury. It's called LOVE JUNKIE: A MEMOIR. I hope it adds to the discourse, and that people who're skeptical open their minds and hearts -- and maybe even see themselves reflected.
Warren Hinckle, you've got to be kidding! That's like metamphedamine to an addict...soon you're a toothless skank.
Thank you.
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