In the spring of 1983, poet Eileen Miles went for a walk in Manhattan with her friend Tom. There was probably nothing remarkable about this walk, only that the “lights gathered around the buildings” looked particularly beautiful that day. As they sat and smoked and looked across the Hudson River toward New Jersey, two friends in their early thirties felt “overjoyed, overcome with the awareness that we were not dead.” This description of the urban scene is an excerpt from many of Miles’s poems, which are so alive with dailiness and detail for the everyday architecture of our emotions.
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I remember when I first encountered it in Miles’s 1999 essay “Coming Clear”, I was overwhelmed by the description, as it is, this is an essay about Miles’s sobriety, and as I was then, in 2022, recently thirty, and just a few weeks into getting sober myself. I was emotional and full of gratitude during that period, eager to represent this new way of life, this way of not dying.
If recovery meetings were a place to find fellowship, strength, and hope, I thought literature might offer something else, some alternative narrative frame for this first chapter of life without alcohol. Thus, Miles, one of my favorite poets, was delighted to read about the peculiarities of early recovery, how it helps illuminate new forms of meditation, “presenting a whole world … all there waiting for you, in a way it never was before.” I also noticed, in those first few weeks, how the world seemed a little brighter, its colors more vibrant.
This feeling was often exhilarating, and sometimes overwhelming. The closest reference point I had for this was being in love, or being drunk, or taking drugs, as if freedom from destructive cycles was still a part of the ecosystem of addiction. That’s why people at recovery meetings described it, in a more cautious fashion, as a “pink cloud”, something high, pink in color and bound by gravity, eventually to be destroyed.
To drink wine is to enter a labyrinth of romantic, thrilling, even glamorous myths; Giving up alcohol is like giving up them too.
The traditional language of temperance is full of such metaphors; We count recovery in steps, even if the journey is not always a linear one, and work to fill that hole in the soul with a unified image of the reason behind the addictive behavior. The question is how to fill it, what to put in its place when the pink cloud evaporates and you are left with nothing. The work and routine of the 12-Step program provides an important framework, for many of us in recovery. Then there are changes in daily life, decisions about where you go (especially at night), who you hang out with, how you spend your time, ranging from the mundane to the profound.
In “Coming Clear”, Miles describes how “lately they haven’t been going to bars,” nor dinners, but being in the company of really good friends, and spending time looking at the sky through their telescope, and “reading several books together.” Maybe sobriety changes what you read, and even what you write, redirecting creative practice. There are “water poets and wine poets”, Miles recalled being told; “And so I began to consider becoming a water poet – a reluctant lover of clarity.”
I stopped drinking and taking drugs four years ago and during that time I faced many of the same questions. I have often been drawn to incontinence as a subject; This was one of the subjects of my first nonfiction book, fire island. The strange literary history of New York’s eponymous island, which has been a liberating and often-hedonistic destination for the city’s weirdos for more than a century, the experiences in that book brought me face to face with what I already knew were my problematic drinking habits.
This was something I addressed in the book in its first-person sections, yet I was by no means sober when I wrote it, although some readers assumed I was already in recovery when I wrote it. My rock bottom hit, perhaps not accidentally, just a few weeks before it was published. When I launched the book I felt grateful for the candor of sobriety, but I was also apprehensive about the subject of my next project, flamboyant, tapping into an equally wild and unbridled aspect of gay culture.
Word bright Literally means “flaming” (from French flashy), and refers to a person who attracts attention because of his “confidence, stylishness and enthusiasm” (OED). On the surface, it seems to be associated with the glorious and vigorous state of prohibition that we associate with addiction, rather than the meditative peace of sobriety. Alcohol and glamor are indeed closely linked in the cultural imagination. Drink certainly made me less inhibited, I became more able to take advantage of my own flamboyance. When you feel the shame of growing up by shutting down, even if just for a night, it’s easy to believe that what you’re tapping into is your real, unfiltered self. To drink wine is to enter a labyrinth of romantic, thrilling, even glamorous myths; Giving up alcohol is like giving up them too.
“I want to live,” says Emma, the heroine of Duncan MacMillan’s hit 2015 play. people, places and thingsSet in a rehabilitation facility for recovering drug addicts. “I want to live vibrantly and make big, spectacular, heroic mistakes.” Quitting drinking can feel like turning your exciting, chaotic, heroic existence into a dull and joyless one. “Because what else is there?” Emma asks, “This? Shyness and boredom and orange crap?” All this means that abstinence – or at least traditional images of it, before the era of abstinence influencers – is a PR problem in a culture focused on pleasure and excitement. Exchange that flaming shot of absinthe for a mug of tea, the glimpse of a neon-lit bar for an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting in a carpeted church hall. Emma’s resistance to the mundane perfection of recovery spaces reflects a familiar cultural trope in media, films, and television shows; That restraint is where the flamboyance goes away. Elemental opposites, such as water and fire.
This notion is depicted quite literally in one scene rocket Man2019 biopic about Elton John. As the film begins, we see the musician (played by Taron Egerton) in one of his signature gaudy outfits: bright orange lycra, shaped like the wings of a burning bird. It looks like he’s just walked off the stage, but we see that he’s going to a recovery meeting. He sits in a folded chair and cries out sadly, seemingly resistant, but knows through tears that he needs help, that he is in the right place. It’s a neat juxtaposition between the glamorous, excessive life of a famous rock star, his attire luxurious down to the literal detail, and the quiet stillness of this ordinary room, a visual mismatch, its inhabitants sitting in a circle, ready to listen.
I thought about this scene a few summers ago when I saw Elton John headline the Glastonbury Festival. It was an emotional set, a crowning performance of their career, and reportedly their final UK performance. I was captivated by the show and what it depicted; A strange elder and cultural icon, a living man in a shining gold suit. In my mind I thought about what it took to get this far, to live long enough to see your legacy celebrated in this way, to see fireworks light up the sky in your honor. This made John’s tribute to lost stars like Marilyn Monroe and friends like George Michael all the more poignant. I thought about the work that goes on in a living room, offstage, behind the scenes, behind their elaborate costumes, under the flamboyant spectacle.
Miles writes, “The thing I’ve come to understand about being a water poet is that if I’m writing this film score, I have to be in it. Even with how it feels.” The film of my first few years of sobriety includes scenes I had never imagined before. To still be able to go to concerts and have experiences like this, powered only by caffeinated soda and excitement about the experience, is a very joyful, deep feeling place. Although it is not always easy to survive in a crowd of people chasing different heights, it is possible. When I first stopped drinking, I felt a sense of pre-emptive grief for the strange nightlife venues I would lose from my life, believing that they would be too difficult to navigate without the aid of substances.
Happily that hasn’t been the case, although it’s an ongoing journey, and one that has informed my latest book, Flamboyance: The power to live boldly.Which is as much a memoir as it is a cultural history of its central subject. Among other things, it explores what a cool snapper might look like, whether it’s Eileen Miles observing the special texture of a sunset, or Elton John leading Glastonbury as the sun goes down. Flamboyance, as the poet Harriet Monroe once said, is “at least the beginning of art”, the expansion of our imagination; A way of harnessing not only superficial external, but also internal potential, creative attention.
I have also been consoled by the examples of serious artists who have shown that such candor has a luster in itself.
I recently had another example to add to this makeshift canon when, a few weeks ago, I watched Lily Allen sing her heart out on stage in front of a crowd of 30,000 in a park in South London. Of the group of candid and often outspoken songs that make up Allen’s widely acclaimed comeback album west end girlThe song, inspired by her marriage to actor David Harbor and his divorce, particularly sent shock waves through the crowd. “If I ever slip up again,” she sings on it, her voice in a sad, auto-tuned tone that sounds almost haunting, “I know I could lose it all.” Like many tracks on the album, “Relapse” points to aspects of Allen’s life that are well documented elsewhere; In this case, his drug and alcohol addictions, his six years of sobriety. What gives the song emotional impact is the sense of the ground slipping, of the safety net being stretched, as a moment of emotional turmoil threatens to topple the hard-won balance of recovery. “I-Need a Drink,” Allen sings on a loop against a garage beat, a relatable sentiment for anyone who’s ever lost control.
On a stylistic level, there was nothing obviously flamboyant about Allen’s music, nor his stage presence, nor the cool, sharp composition of his delivery. That said, her bright pink and custom-made bib, imprinted with the word “CUCK”, attracted attention, as well as the high glamor of her various stage outfits, from feather-lined night-gowns to a particularly vengeful wrap dress printed with receipts from her husband’s purchases for other women. There was also a palpable sense of defiance in her ability to bare so much, to sing in front of a crowd of thousands about her fear of what would happen again. Hearing these words sung live to a crowd dressed in leather, feathers and a pink cowboy hat, the dress code standard for London’s premier LGBTQ+ music festival Mighty Hoopla, where Allen was performing, I too felt something shift within me.
Kay Allen west end girl Made sense as a headliner for a festival like the Mighty Hoopla. After all, the gay community has always been biased against artists who embrace filth and drama in this way, if only because they disregard the shame many of us have been raised to feel. With tears in my eyes, I reflected on how closely candor is related to clarity; How both are forms of “coming out clearly”, to use Miles’s phrase; How sobriety demands that we ultimately know ourselves honestly, making that knowledge shareable with each other without fear. I’ve definitely felt intimidated about sharing my experiences with drinking in my work and writing these words. But I’ve also found solace in the examples of quiet artists who have shown that such candor has a spark in itself.
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Flamboyance: The power to live boldly. by Jack Parlett is available from Hanover Square Press, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.
