Jennifer Wallis reflects on her personal experience of an alcoholic parent and how her expertise as a historian has shaped her understanding of alcoholism.
Earlier this year I stood in the living room of my childhood home. I was angry as I swept empty Special Brew cans into a bin bag, carried plates furred with mould into the kitchen, and prised loose change from the sticky floorboards. The timing was uncanny. I had only recently finished writing a chapter for an edited volume on ‘Intoxicating Experiences’ (forthcoming in the Intoxicating Histories series), in which I discussed how the experience of growing up as the child of an alcoholic intersected with my academic research into the history of drinking in the nineteenth century. I had agreed to deliver a seminar in just over a week about the process of writing that chapter. I hadn’t anticipated that I would be living the subject quite so literally.
N. had been admitted to hospital after a fall.
I use the anonymized ‘N.’ in the chapter and I use it here. It is a poor attempt at anonymization, a token.
The hospital social worker, her voice full of treacly concern, is on the phone several times a day. “Does N. have some spare clothes? Is the heating working? Is there a neighbour who can look after a spare key?” Unspoken: “And why aren’t you, the daughter, here instead of 200 miles away?” I have not been there for many years and was cut off when, 25 years ago, I left that house to save myself.
I am called upon to be the narrator of someone else’s life. This is something I should be good at, all those years of nosing into other people’s stories, interpreting their archival traces, fashioning them into neat historical narratives. But N. leaves no traces and has been a mystery to me and the rest of the family for some time.
I am the only person who N. has not alienated completely, having struck up a relationship with me again which was mostly conducted by letter during lockdown. I travel to the house, which needs to be cleaned before N. is permitted to return home from the hospital. I am feeling oddly positive. In their letters N. seems chatty and happy, and I have come to believe that they must have stopped drinking. There is no sign of the drunken N. between the neat lines of the paper, the simple stories about cats, weather, and gardens.
The children of alcoholics are skilled in the art of self-deception.
It is January and the pavements are slick with a thin dusting of snow. I forget which is the correct bus stop and have to take a longer route to the house than expected. This estate seems much smaller than it once did, its gardens neater and its people friendlier. The house looks unchanged from the outside, but on opening the door my breath catches. The interior has been gutted. Every trace of wallpaper, paint, and carpet has gone, as though N. has been trying to erase the very fabric of the house itself. I walk into the living room and see on a sideboard six empty lager cans, a plastic bowl of the type given to toddlers, a few empty chocolate wrappers.
I have become an unreliable narrator. Now, I remember that I already knew the cans were there, because the social worker had sent me a photograph of the room in advance. Who am I to be writing a memoir, when I can’t even remember the correct sequence of events?
The empty cans go into a bin bag, followed by old magazines, rubbish, and soiled clothes that are beyond repair. By the end of the first day there is a mound of bags in the dining room and very little of substance left in the house. Two days of cleaning reveals a strange absence and survival of objects. My schoolwork, meticulously preserved since nursery days, is gone, along with the doll’s house made for me by my grandfather. Everything from my childhood bedroom has disappeared, except my books: a box of teen romances and pulp horror paperbacks. I have a feeling I will not come back here and I rescue my most fondly remembered titles.
It was inevitable, wasn’t it, that I would one day process my experience through words. “Always reading, that one.” All children of alcoholics have an escape route. I read memoirs by children of alcoholics, school myself in the art of memoir writing, and I write.
I go to the hospital to see N. before I leave, to drop off the paltry bag of clean clothes I have managed to gather in the house: a phone charger, glasses, the Radio Times. I am received with a cold stare, then told a series of stories in quick succession: of inoperable cancers, of an ex-lover coming to collect them, of a house on the moors near the sea where they will live together. I am dismissed within five minutes, and the message not to come back is clear. I transcribe the strange conversation as well as I can remember it, tapping the barbed words into my phone during the train journey home.
I cannot stop analysing, transcribing, recording. The work of a historian is never done.
The conversation in the hospital is a conundrum that will never be solved. There is no sense to be made of the claims of cancer, ex-lovers, and houses on windswept moors, all of these confirmed by the ward staff to be fabrications. The alcohol has begun to erase N. and I am furious with N. for allowing this. I am very aware of my anger as, back at work, I sit in a seminar room to deliver the talk about my chapter. I make light of the weird synchronicity that when I agreed to do this talk, I did not know I would have just returned from N.’s house. I display some of the photographs I took there. I leave out the part about the conversation in the hospital.
I am still writing and re-writing this story. Memoir is not only about oneself, but also about other people, and already – in reading drafts of the chapter – people have told me that they remember some things differently. As Paul Eakin points out, identity is relational and we tell parts of other people’s stories in order to tell and understand our own (Eakin 1999, 157). Writing about this aspect of my life makes me nervous: will I be viewed as less rigorous as an academic? Will I be accused of wallowing in miserable detail, and of compromising the privacy of others? Eakin again interrogates this: “Should respect for the privacy of others [take] precedence over an otherwise commendable allegiance to telling the truth?” (Eakin 2001, 119).
I decided to tell the story of my own experiences because I had been musing for a long time on how history had made me think differently about N. I read nineteenth-century accounts of problematic alcohol use and began to draw parallels, to transfer the empathy I felt for historical actors to N. I thought more deeply about the reasons for N.’s alcoholism, because this was what I was doing with the historical records: interrogating and analysing, seeing the multiple stresses and strains, structural inequalities, and unrecognised problems that lead a person to develop a dependence on alcohol. Historical accounts allowed insights into N.’s experiences that were difficult, indeed impossible, to pursue directly. N. would not talk about their experiences; the doctor, mystified, rings me to ask why N. speaks to him “as though [he is] a solicitor or a police officer”. I know almost nothing about N.’s life and their penchant for lying – confirmed by other family members – makes it unlikely I ever will.
There is something about working within the history of psychiatry that has led me towards experimenting with memoir as an adjunct to history. The history of psychiatry is, above all, a history of stories, often told by patient’s families and friends to rationalize committal to hospital. Stories related by patients to doctors, then reinterpreted in casebooks, journal articles, and conference papers. There was also, perhaps, something in the air in the period when I did my PhD at Queen Mary University of London. I look at my bibliography and find myself referencing fellow students and colleagues repeatedly: Barbara Taylor’s The Last Asylum (Taylor 2014), Sarah Chaney’s work on objectivity and identity politics in history (Chaney 2020), Chris Millard’s The Politics of Personal Experience (Millard 2026). Our stories and the way we tell them cannot help but be shaped by other people.
This can only ever be a partial history, of course. N. does not, cannot, tell their story here. And here the reader might rightly ask: so what? What is the point of divulging personal stories like this? Jaume Aurell argues that “the history inside [ourselves]” can serve a historiographical purpose (Aurell 2015, 264). There is, I believe, value in the personal, in acknowledging the interplay between personal experience and our academic work. I only worry that, now that I have started, I will never be able to stop.
Support resource recommended by the author:
NACOA: National Association for Children of Alcoholics: https://nacoa.org.uk/
About the author
Dr Jennifer Wallis is a Senior Teaching Fellow in Medical Humanities, and Teaching Fellow in the History of Science and Medicine, at Imperial College London. She is currently working on the history of post-mortem practice and considering further experiments in memoir writing.
References
Aurell, Jaume. 2015. “Making History by Contextualizing Oneself: Autobiography as Historiographical Intervention.” History and Theory 54, no. 2: 244–68.
Chaney, Sarah. 2020. “Am I a Researcher or a Self-Harmer? Mental Health, Objectivity and Identity Politics in History.” Social Theory & Health 18: 152–68.
Eakin, Paul John. 1999. How Our Lives Become Stories: Making Selves. Cornell University Press.
Eakin, Paul John. 2001. “Breaking Rules: The Consequences of Self-Narration.” Biography 24, no. 1: 113–27.
Millard, Chris. 2026. The Politics of Personal Experience: Writing a History of Munchausen Syndromes. Routledge.
Taylor, Barbara. 2014. The Last Asylum: A Memoir of Madness in Our Times. Hamish Hamilton.
