My mother was buried out of the Congregational Church at Southwest Bend; the church she'd attended in Methodist Corners, where my brother and I grew up, was closed because of the cold. I gave the eulogy. I think I did a pretty good job, considering how drunk I was.
        Alcoholics build defenses like the Dutch build dikes. I spent the first twelve years or so of my married life assuring myself that I "just liked to drink." I also employed the world-famous Hemingway Defense. Although never clearly articulated (it would not be manly to do so), the Hemingway Defense goes something like this: as a writer, I am a very sensitive fellow, but I am also a man, and real men don't give in to their sensitiv-ities. Only sissy-men do that. Therefore I drink. How else can I face the existential horror of it all and continue to work?
        Besides, come on, I can handle it. A real man always can.
        Then, in the early eighties, Maine's legislature enacted a returnable-bottle and -can law. Instead of going into the trash, my sixteen-ounce cans of Miller Lite started going into a plastic container in the garage. One Thursday night I went out there to toss in a few dead soldiers and saw that this con-tainer, which had been empty on Monday night, was now almost full. And since I was the only one in the house who drank Miller Lite-Holy shit, I'm an alcoholic, I thought, and there was no dis-senting opinion from inside my head-I was, after all, the guy who had written The Shining without even realizing (at least until that night) that I was writing about myself. My reaction to this idea wasn't denial or disagreement; it was what I'd call frightened determination. You have to be careful, then, I clearly remember thinking. Because if you fuck up - If I fucked up, rolled my car over on a back road some night or blew an interview on live TV, someone would tell me I ought to get control of my drinking, and telling an alco-holic to control his drinking is like telling a guy suffering the world's most cataclysmic case of diarrhea to control his shit-ting.
        A friend of mine who has been through this tells an amusing story about his first tentative effort to get a grip on his increasingly slippery life. He went to a counsellor and said his wife was worried that he was drinking too much. "How much do you drink?" the counsellor asked. My friend looked at the counsellor with disbelief. "All of it," he said, as if that should have been self-evident.
        I know how he felt. It's been almost twelve years since I took a drink, and I'm still struck by disbelief when I see someone in a restaurant with a half-finished glass of wine near at hand. I want to get up, go over, and yell "Finish that! Why don't you finish that?" into his or her face. I found the idea of social drinking ludicrous-if you didn't want to get drunk, why not just have a Coke?
        My nights during the last five years of my drinking always ended with the same ritual: I'd pour any beers left in the refrigerator down the sink. If I didn't, they'd talk to me as I lay in bed until I got up and had another. And another. And one more.

        Stephen King. “On writing”