En av böckerna jag läser just nu är Stephen Kings facklitterära On writing, som tjänar både som biografi och insyn i ett av vår tids mest flitiga författarskap – full av tips för den som gitte lyssna. Med tiden har hans verk bleknat för mig, men jag minns fortfarande hur jag slukade det mesta av honom när jag var tolv, tretton, fjorton, tonårsmorbid.

Kings synbart lättsamma ordflöde är resultatet av arbete, arbete och åter arbete, lär vi oss under resan genom On writing. Men det är ett arbete som kunde kommit till ett tidigt slut. Redan i början av karriären fann han flaskan, sedermera pulvret och tabletterna. Jagad av det konstanta ruset skrev han roman efter roman, tills väggen närmade sig med okontrollerbar hastighet.

Orden han använder för att beskriva uppvaknandet – insikten – får mig att kallsvettas av igenkänning. Mitt eget missbruk gick aldrig lika långt som hans, men mentaliteten var densamma.

Är densamma.

”Holy shit, I’m an alcoholic,” I thought, and there was no dissenting 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 alcoholic to control his drinking is like telling a guy suffering the world’s most cataclysmic case of diarrhea to control his shitting. 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 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, 2000, s. 88-89