“Drunk Dreams,” Emerging from the Pandemic and Destigmatizing Addiction with Political Commentator Molly Jong-Fast

For the 20th episode of Heart of the Matter, Elizabeth Vargas is joined by her friend, writer and political commentator Molly Jong-Fast. Despite entering recovery almost 24 years ago at the age of 19, Molly still regularly attends Alcoholics Anonymous meetings – but her routine was disrupted in the past year due to COVID-19. Together, Elizabeth and Molly discuss how they maintained their mental health throughout the pandemic, their approaches to parenting, the lifelong struggle of addiction, as well as their thoughts on civility, politics, stress and so much more. 

Related reading: 

After you listen, explore these resources from Partnership to End Addiction to learn more about the topics and themes discussed in this episode:  

• Stress and Drug Use: What Every Parent Should Know 
• Risk Factors for Addiction 
• What Types of Addiction Treatment are Available? 

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 

Molly, welcome to Heart of the Matter. I am so happy to have you here. One of my favorite people. 

Molly: 

I'm excited to be here. Thanks for having me. 

Speaker 1: 

Well, we've got so much to talk about. We are now sort of, dare I even say, I feel like I'm tempting fate when I talk about the end of the pandemic. I don't know if you do this, but I find myself worrying that we're all relaxing too soon and that some horrible thing is going to come hit us and wipe out humanity. 

Molly: 

I mean- 

Speaker 1: 

I need to talk to a therapist about all my apocalyptic reasons. 

Molly: 

I think everyone is worried, is a little worried about that. The truth is we still don't... I mean, for so far, we've done well with the variants and the vaccines, but that we don't know yet. 

Speaker 1: 

Yeah. We don't know. 

Molly: 

But there could still be more. 

Speaker 1: 

We don't know. How have you fair through the pandemic? 

Molly: 

I mean, I think I've been good. I felt pretty good, but it's definitely been hard. I think it's been really hard. There have been different phases that have been hard for different reasons. 

Speaker 1: 

Right. You wrote a couple essays actually for Vogue magazine about parenting in the pandemic, surviving in the pandemic, staying sober in the pandemic. One of the things I liked that I read that you wrote, was, "It's been a year that at least for the privilege vacillated between extreme suffering, intense grief and mind numbing boredom. It's been both the saddest year of my life, and also one of the most revealing. This juxtaposition has been strange but I appreciate the hell out of things I used to take for granted. I hope that my appreciation for the small and mundane never goes away." What did you mean by that? 

Molly: 

Well, I mean, I think it is true that we are kind of... Certain things... I mean, a good example is going to movies. We couldn't go to the movies. Things that were easy, that we took for granted, like going to grocery store. I mean, a good example is back then I would say, during the height of the pandemic I would say, "Well, I don't know if it's worth the risk of going grocery store," because we didn't know how you got it. We didn't know whether or not it was safe to grocery store. I mean, there was so much virus coursing through the air, we did not know if we'd be okay. Now we are in this, because I'm fully vaccinated I go to the grocery store and I don't think at all, is it worth me possibly getting this virus? 

I think that's a pretty enormous change. I definitely felt like it, we didn't go on airplanes, we couldn't go in taxis and buses. They stopped the subway. I mean you'd see these airplanes, pictures of airplanes, empty airplanes flying around. I mean, it was just a very different time. 

Speaker 1: 

You made another point in another one of your essays about staying sober during the pandemic. That you write, "If a pandemic doesn't make you feel like drinking, nothing will. I still want to turn off my head and check out. Yes. I had stayed sober through 9/11, but this was different. This was slow and scary and kept going." 

Molly: 

Yeah. I mean, 9/11 was so interesting because I was two and a half, three years sober. Watched the planes hit the towers on television and my stepfather called me up and said, "You got to go grocery shopping because they're going to close all the stores," which they didn't. I mean, but they did close all the streets. For a day, 24 hours, there was no traffic, no in, no out. Manhattan was completely cut off. 

Speaker 1: 

Right, bridge to town's closed. 

Molly: 

Right. We walked down an avenue to go to a meeting. We had an AA meeting. It was scary, but it was very squeak. You smelled the smoke and you saw the smoldering ash. I remember that in October I took a flight and we flew over it and it was still smoldering. It was certainly traumatic and [inaudible 00:04:51], but this is the difference between living somewhere where there are 2,500, 3,000 people dying and 25,000, 33,000 people. Tens of thousands of people dying is a large difference in scale. And then also it just went on and on and on, not the way 9/11 did. 

Speaker 1: 

Right. It feels like partly I'm exhaling and doing things. You talked about grocery shopping, I'm no longer going and wiping down those. I mean, my God grocery shopping became an epic. You put on a hazmat suit and go into a tiny store in Manhattan where it's impossible to socially distance with your mask and your rubber gloves, and try and remember not to touch anything on yourself and then go home and wipe everything. It was this chronic steady stress. [crosstalk 00:05:46] of stress of it, it was really something. I worried about my kids. I know I definitely worried about my kids. Statistics show that there is a huge jump in mental health issues, depression, anxiety, as a result of the pandemic. 

Molly: 

No question. 

Speaker 1: 

The age group that it affects the most is young adults. 

Molly: 

Yeah. I definitely think it's been the hardest for my older team than for my little teens, because my little teens are just more elastic at that age. But I also think some of it is that for younger people, for teenagers, they don't have the same frame of reference. I've had 42 summers and 42 Christmases and I've seen what a down year can look like. When you've only had 17 Christmases, you have a different frame of reference. But I also think some of it is because America was so polarized and the virus, there was a whole part of the country that was saying it's the lockdowns that are making people depressed, not the pandemic. When the reality is, you had to have the lockdowns because otherwise you would just have what we have in India right now, or what we've had, what we saw in Sweden, where they just couldn't control the numbers of the pandemic. 

Speaker 1: 

Because they didn't lockdown. 

Molly: 

Yes, they didn't lock down. 

Speaker 1: 

Sweden was the great experiment. Let's just not lock down, everybody live your life, do your thing [crosstalk 00:07:26] get it. 

Molly: 

Yeah. They died in larger numbers than they did in Norway and in whatever the other neighboring country is, Finland. I mean, and that was a choice. That was a government choice. In the UK, it was a similar thing, and UK has ended up with much longer lockdowns. Now they've really gotten on it with the vaccines, but it was hard. I think it was very hard. I think that it's very stressful and there's a raw, there's a real mental health crisis that we see now. I mean, it's funny because it's like, I think that the way media reports, we don't want to blame mental health for problems. We want to blame other things. 

For example, here we have a situation now where there's a labor shortage. These 23 Republican governors have decided that it's because the enhanced unemployment is too generous. I mean, okay, I've had economist on my pockets have said, that's not really what's going on. But all right, even say that's true. They've decided to cut the enhanced unemployment in the hope of getting people back to these frontline worker jobs. But the frontline workers were the people who died in the largest quantity, and they're the people who are hesitating to go back to work. The minimum wage is the lowest in America of any affluent country. So you have to wonder, if you're a frontline worker and you've had a person die who you worked with, or more than one person die who you've worked with, why you would want to go and risk your life for a job that doesn't pay you enough to stay above the poverty line? 

Speaker 1: 

Right. It's interesting, I saw a piece on, I think CNN, last night about all these people during the NBA championships who are throwing things at the players and all the horrible behavior we're seeing onboard airplanes with people punching teeth out of flight attendants now. 

Molly: 

Yeah. 

Speaker 1: 

They showed a picture of a woman spitting at a, speaking of a minimum wage job, at a fast food worker because they asked her to wear her mask inside the establishment and she refused, and then she spat on them. They were talking to a mental health expert about, what's going on, what happened to civility? What happened to the ability to have different points of view and still co-exist and respectfully not attack people with the venom and lash out physically? They said that people are so stressed out right now that this pandemic has rung it out of people. The patients they're exhausted, they're stressed, they're anxious, and it's all leading to supremely bad behavior. Do you buy that? 

Molly: 

Yes. 

Speaker 1: 

Yeah. 

Molly: 

I mean, I think people are very stressed out and they don't know how to... I think we have a mental health crisis. You have people who have been in their houses for a year. And then there's a statistic that 19% of all Americans have had a close friend or family member die of the pandemic. 

Speaker 1: 

Wow. 

Molly: 

It's humongous. You have a country of mourners, and there's no world in which this country of mourners is going to stop being... You don't snap out of grief. I think that you have this weird combination of factors. You have the loss of all these people, hundreds of thousands dead. And then you have this weird polarization in America, political polarization. And then you have we don't know what percentage of these Americans are long haul COVID survivors. So I mean that, and so you have all these different factors. 

And then you have another thing, which I don't know what the statistics on it are yet, but then you have people who are sick, who didn't get medical care during the pandemic. So you have people who have cancer, didn't get chemotherapy, and people who might've had their heart disease treated, but because they were scared to go to the doctor, have not. You're going to have all these other kinds of illnesses of not going to hospitals, not going to doctors, which is another phenomenon. I mean, so I think it's very tough. I think it's going back to normal but it's also like addressing a year of loss. 

Speaker 1: 

When we talk about the lack of civility and dialogue today, I'm struck by something that you wrote an essay, but actually an op-ed titled, When Joe Biden Spoke of Hunter's Struggles With Addiction, He Also Spoke of My Own. You write, "When I look at Hunter Biden, I see myself. I did enormous quantities of cocaine in my teens, eventually getting sober at 19. To the normal, compassionate, human being, bringing up the troubled 50 year old son of a man who'd already lost two children tragically, might seem excessively cruel. President Trump lost his own brother, Fred Jr., to alcoholism in 1981, something President Trump has only rarely talked about. What Trump didn't understand is that most normal people have empathy for the brutal protracted, sometimes lifelong struggle that is addiction. The exchange highlighted that one presidential candidate had empathy, and the other thinks addiction is a moral failing." Talk about that moment, because I remember sitting on my couch, watching that debate and thinking and cringing every time he brought up Hunter as someone in recovery, because it felt like taking a club and bashing somebody where they're bruised. 

Molly: 

Yeah. I mean, I interviewed Hunter for my part and I mean, addiction is such a norm, it's always the same story. You have it, you ruin your life. You either get sober or you don't. I don't know. I mean, the idea that Trump would do anything that isn't the most disgusting thing, it seems impossible to me, but yeah, I mean, I think it was a dumb play. I mean, if you're an addict, you're a sick person getting well, you're not a bad person getting good. So the idea that he would- 

Speaker 1: 

Politicize it. 

Molly: 

Right. And also just make a case that somehow the son was evil because he was sick, it didn't work for him. I think that it didn't work. People in America don't hate their addicts. We don't reject our sick and put them on an ice flow. We treat them. I think that it clearly did not work for him. 

Speaker 1: 

You know though that a third of all Americans believe addiction is a moral failing or a character flaw? 

Molly: 

Yeah. I mean, that's not. I mean, it's not but I mean, they're flat earthers. Right now America's have covering self with belief glory right now. 

Speaker 1: 

You have written very openly and honestly about your own recovery, you actually even wrote a novel. You wrote a novel, a fictional, how autobiographical was the novel? 

Molly: 

I mean, it is autobiographical. I wrote it when I was 19. I wrote it so I didn't have to go to college because I had dropped out of college. My mom had told me I had to go back to college and then I had decided that if I wrote a novel I wouldn't have to go back to college. I mean, it's pretty dumb, but I did do that. It's a little bit autobiographical. I mean, in some ways, not as much, but I certainly did a lot of drugs and did a lot of drinking. Novels are fun. It was like in the vein of that kind of like a bright lights big city kind of thing. They're fun to do. Also like, I don't think I would write that novel now, but it's been like 20 million years. 

Speaker 1: 

You wrote in The Atlantic about getting sober. "I joined AA at 19, mostly because I loved cocaine, truly loved cocaine, but also because I loved vodka and cheap white wine, and diet pills, and Valium in enormous quantities. I wanted to not die so joining was easy, helped along by the knowledge that I came from a family of female alcoholics. My mother had written novels about her drinking. My grandmother was famous for her drunken vomiting at various fine restaurants throughout Manhattan. So in November 1st, 1997, I boarded a plane for Hazelden Treatment Center in Minnesota. AA saved me." What was that like? How did you make that decision at 19? Because you were one of the... Honestly, I think you're one of the rare people in the rooms that got sober the first time you tried, right? 

Molly: 

Well, there are, I don't know what the percentages are because there's really no good polling about this, but there's a group of people who got sober in their teens who stayed sober. It's a pretty known phenomenon in a certain way of people who get sober as teenagers. And because they don't have the same pathways in the brain, because they're a little younger, it up being they tend, and this is all not always true for sure and there's no scientific evidence to back this up. So it is what you will, this is mostly anecdotal what I've heard. But there are certainly are a group of people who get sober in their teens and stay sober. And that it may be even a little easier because they don't have the same kind of habituation. I mean, I drank and took drugs for like maybe six years versus- 

Speaker 1: 

[crosstalk 00:18:16] 

Molly: 

Yeah. So there are definitely people who get sober in college and stay. I don't know what percentage it is of people in AA though. I mean, it may be small, but but it's a phenomenon. 

Speaker 1: 

You worried about the fact that you were like, wait a second, I'm going to turn 21, sober? I'm going to go to college, sober. I'm going to get married, sober. How am I going to be sober through all these things? 

Molly: 

Yeah. But it's better than the alternative of watching my grandmother drank. I mean, as you stay sober longer and longer, it gets easier and easier. I mean, I go to meetings every day, but [crosstalk 00:18:58]. 

Speaker 1: 

After 24 years? 

Molly: 

23. 

Speaker 1: 

23. 

Molly: 

But it gets easier. I don't feel like drinking anyway. Mostly I don't feel like, we can sometimes I do. I mostly feel pretty good, most of the time I don't. I mean, there were a couple of times when I was first getting sober where I really felt like drinking. For the first five years, I would have moments where I'd be like, oh my God, I need to have a drink. How am I going to survive this? But now I really don't have that except sometimes, but almost ever. I used to have drunk dreams all the time. I don't have drunk dreams anymore. I mean, occasionally I'll have one if I'm traveling. 

Speaker 1: 

Those are the worst. 

Molly: 

The worst. Now I just have anxiety dreams, or dreams about buying an apartment that has... Not the same kind of dreams. But it gets much easier. I mean, I think that is the thing I would say is, as you stay sober it gets easier and you get more even, and more able to take your own. I can have conversations with people and not think they're about me. Just, I'm a little more checked in. I don't have to act out as much emotionally, which is really cool. So yeah, I am a big fan of being sober and I would like to not, not be sober, I would like to stay sober. 

Speaker 1: 

You wrote an essay for The Fix about that time in rehab. You said, "I'd always fantasized about going to rehab. Since I grew up with a vision of myself as a fuck up and as a degenerate drug addict, it made sense to me that I would eventually end up in rehab. Plus it seemed like a very posh thing to do. Liza Minnelli went, so did Elizabeth Taylor, everyone who was anyone went. And actually it turned out I was pretty good at rehab. At first, I had an aptitude for brown nosing the counselors in my wing at Hazelden. I was adept at telling them and the other patients what they wanted to hear. I had the vocabulary of recovery long before I had the recovery. And then the miracle came. I hate to use that word miracle, but it really describes what happened to me. Anyway, the miracle happened one day when I woke up in my bed and I just got it. I got that I had a disease and that if I wasn't honest, and if I didn't do everything they told me, I was very likely going to die or worse, not die." 

Molly: 

Yeah. 

Speaker 1: 

I love that last line because that's the worst. The worst is sometimes not dying and struggling with [crosstalk 00:21:37]. 

Molly: 

Really grim. 

Speaker 1: 

Tell me about that miracle, that moment, that moment of clarity, that life changing thing. 

Molly: 

I mean, I would say I decided I wanted to stay sober. I mean, I think I always wanted to stay sober, but it just until you really get... I don't know. Just something changed in my DNA, where I went from person who was willing to ruin their lives to person who wants to give sobriety a chance. 

Speaker 1: 

[crosstalk 00:22:19] point, like something someone said or something you saw or read. 

Molly: 

No. 

Speaker 1: 

It was just, something. 

Molly: 

Yeah. I mean, I don't know. I mean, it's like the most... I mean, for lack of a better word of, God like intervention. 

Speaker 1: 

I read that book, Moments of Clarity, about essays from all these different people, about that moment that they had that made them suddenly realize, I got to stop this. It's so interesting because some people's moments of clarity are big, huge crashes, and some are what you described, which is just a tiny gift of commitment that happens apropos of nothing in particular. But without it, you can't do it, right? 

Molly: 

Yeah. I think that's right. 

Speaker 1: 

I also like that in The Atlantic, you wrote about a conversation with your first sponsor where you asked her, "How am I going to stay sober forever?" I asked, "How am I going to stay sober and go back to college? How am I going to stay sober and live in the dorms? How am I going to stay sober and turn 21? How am I going to stay sober at my wedding?" She simply said, "You're going to stay sober today. Just right now." I paused. I thought she was kidding. "Sure, sure. But what about tomorrow?" "Maybe we'll drink tomorrow, " she said, "Maybe there'll be a nuclear apocalypse tomorrow and then you and I can drink, but for today, just for today, let's just not." 

Molly: 

Yeah. 

Speaker 1: 

And that's the thing, I had that moment back when I was trying to get sober, I remember there was this woman, I saw her at a meeting out in Long Island and then I started meeting up in your neck of the woods. She was really had strict sobriety, is what I would say. She was intimidating to me. I remember saying something to her, like, "I can't imagine not drinking for the rest of my life." She said, "You don't have to, you're not drinking today." That really, really helped me. Did it help you in that moment when she said that, when she broke it down to just today? 

Molly: 

Yeah. I mean, I think also just, I've gotten to understand that a little better as I've stayed sober. But yeah, for sure. A hundred percent. Yeah. [inaudible 00:24:35] 

Speaker 1: 

So day after day, you just commit to just one day, or is it not something you have to do every day anymore? 

Molly: 

Now I just am like, it's not even... I mean, now I feel like I can use it in a different way, which is I feel like all I have to worry about is right now. I don't have to... I just have right now, which I don't have to be like, well, how am I going to... I can break time down in a little bit of a different way. But for sure, in the beginning, knowing that it wasn't forever was really helpful. 

Speaker 1: 

You have chosen to write a lot about your sobriety and about the fact that you're in AA. Have you gotten any blowback for that? 

Molly: 

Yeah, I mean years ago I got more. When I wrote about my sobriety in the '90s, I got more blowback. In the '90s I used to say, "I'm not an AA." I wouldn't say I'm not in AA because I didn't want to lie. I would say, "I haven't taken a drug or a drink since November 2nd, 1987," and then I wouldn't say, I wouldn't go into the AA stuff. Now it's 20 years later, I just say I'm in AA. I say I'm in AA largely because I just feel like the culture has shifted, and before I got sober, I didn't even know they existed, even though my mother had been in and out of AA. I didn't know. 

So I think it's very helpful for people to know that's how you get sober and stay sober because there's a lot of things like rational recovery or whatever, these crazy things where they California sober, sobriety that's not really sober. Those things are being advertised all time, but just because we are Alcoholics Anonymous, we think we're not supposed to advertise what we do, but what we do actually works. I mean, it doesn't work for everyone and it requires some amount of commitment, but I don't think I would rather have... I would rather people get mad at me and help get a person sober, than people be happy with me and we lose a drunk. 

Speaker 1: 

Do you think that we're starting to... I firmly believe stigma is one of the biggest things that keeps people from getting help and asking for help and admitting they need help because it's so stigmatizing. Do you think that by talking more openly about your own recovery and about AA, that you're helping de-stigmatize that? Because certainly we're seeing that when it comes to mental health, a lot more people are being open and honest about it, whether it's Naomi Osaka who pulls out of the French Open because she admits she's suffering terrible depression or Prince Harry talking a lot about his mental health. A lot of people are talking more openly about these things that we used to keep secret and private. 

Molly: 

Yeah. I mean, I hope so. I mean, I certainly try really hard to de-stigmatize addiction as much as possible, especially because it's so clearly a, at least for me, and I think largely true, an inherited illness. So I mean, it's the same thing as a genetic disease. Right. I mean, you don't blame people for having Canavans or [inaudible 00:28:35]. You don't blame them for having whatever [crosstalk 00:28:42]. 

Speaker 1: 

They get cancer. Nevermind the genetic thing. 

Molly: 

Right. 

Speaker 1: 

Nobody says, "Oh my God, your cancer came back, we're going to fire you. We're not going to pay for any more of your cancer treatment because this is the second round of it." 

Molly: 

Right, exactly. So that's why I feel like ultimately we are... I try really hard to talk about it, I really do. I'm happy to talk about it. I feel like it's been really important in my life to be able to talk about that. 

Speaker 1: 

Finally, I know you're a mom of three. How do you talk about it with your kids? Because you have talked about the fact that there is a genetic link that you can see clearly in your family, with your mom and your grandmother. So what do you say to your kids? 

Molly: 

I talk about it probably too much. 

Speaker 1: 

Is there such a thing? 

Molly: 

I don't know if it's too much, but I do say, "I got sober when I was 19. It's genetic. I hope that for you guys..." I mean, I basically say like, "Look, alcoholism runs in your family." My kids have all sat in on AA meetings at this point. I say like, this is.. I explain to them about it. I also say like, "My husband has all this lung cancer in his family." So I say like, "You really need to not smoke." I mean, and I don't know. I mean, we'll see what happens. We don't really know yet how that turns out, right? 

Speaker 1: 

Right. I talk to my kids a lot about it and neither one of them says they've had a drink or tried anything. I believe them actually, but I fully expect there'll come a time when peer... I don't know. It's interesting. I think it's hard to be a kid. 

Molly: 

Very. 

Speaker 1: 

And to resist peer pressure. I think that probably when they go away to college, it would be a little naive of me to think they might not try this stuff. I mean, I guess. But it's so important that they know. Certainly my two sons know my story, my oldest son read my book. I mean, he had a front row seat to my little journey. Anyway, Molly, it's great to talk to you today. 

Molly: 

Thank you [crosstalk 00:31:18]. 

Speaker 1: 

So much. Thank you. You were great. We have survived so far the pandemic, and I hope you have a fantastic summer. 

Molly: 

Hopefully I will see you soon. 

Speaker 1: 

Well, I hope so. 

Molly: 

Yeah. Let me know because I'll meet you and I'll bring you wine. 

Speaker 1: 

Yeah. 

Molly: 

I would love it. 

Speaker 1: 

Fantastic. 

Molly: 

Yeah. We can go for a walk. 

Speaker 1: 

[crosstalk 00:31:39] thank you. 

Molly: 

Thank you so much for having me you guys. 

Speaker 1: 

Thank you so much for listening today to Heart of the Matter. You can find this podcast on Apple podcasts, Spotify, and on our website at drugfree.org/podcast. As a reminder, if you need help with a loved one who is struggling with substance use, you can text 55753, or visit drugfree.org. We'll talk to you soon.