Written by famed dark comedy writer Jonathan Ames and drawn by Marvel and DC Comics artist Dean Haspiel, The Alcoholic depicts the contemplative and neurotic Jonathan A. from teenhood through middle age and his compulsive hankerings for booze and unrequited love.
Haspiel originally approached his friend Ames with the idea of collaborating on a graphic novel. After meeting with Haspiel's editor from Vertigo, the two set to work on the book. Although Ames had never written for comics before, Haspiel commended his partner's creative adaptability in a May 2008 Publisher's Weekly article. "Ames has the unique gift to command any storytelling medium," he said.
Addiction
The adult Jonathan who shares his life story is ironically self-aware yet self-annihilating. Baffled by his vindictive cravings, Jonathan attempts to make sense of them as doggedly as he indulges them. He describes how he spent weekends as a teenager binge drinking and purging "like a bulimic," and how in college at an Ivy League school, he "probably vomited forty times in four years" due to drinking, which was definitely "not quite normal." On the morning he woke up in a trash can of his own vomit, he decided he needed to check into rehab.
Although he manages to stay sober for thirteen years, Jonathan merely substitutes one addiction for another by pursuing emotionally unavailable romantic partners. He carries a torch for his somewhat unlikely first lover—his best friend Sal, who is so burdened with shame about his own homosexuality that he is unable to maintain a friendship with Jonathan.
Jonathan is also obsessed with a flighty young woman who plays him like a violin and whom he names after the various cities she later takes up residence in. When he stumbles upon her in the arms of another man, Jonathan falls off the wagon and returns to his inebriated lifestyle as if he had never left it behind.
On an impromptu business trip to the island of Bequia, Jonathan's understanding of himself deepens. "There has always been this germ of self-loathing in me, this desire deep down to destroy myself," he says. He then discusses a "terrible guilt" associated with his drinking and realizes it has more to do with the harm he has caused himself than anyone else.
Elements of Autobiography
One would assume that since the book reads like a confessional memoir, and especially as the name of the protagonist is Jonathan A., The Alcoholic is wholly autobiographical. Not exactly, Ames assures Amazon in a Best Books of 2008 interview. He says of himself and his protagonist: "We share a lot of the same emotional DNA and we've had some similar experiences, but we are quite different in many ways."
But Haspiel himself mentions in the same interview how Ames gave the artist an "extensive photo reference" of himself "throughout his 40+ history, from feathered hair to bald pate" to model the protagonist after. In addition, Ames confesses to Publisher's Weekly that several of the events presented in the book—including an impromptu lunch with Monica Lewinsky and a chance interaction with Bill Clinton just after 9/11—did actually occur.
If a good percentage of The Alcoholic is a real-life account of Ames's life, it seems he's purposely evasive about it. Known for blurring the line between fiction and non-fiction in his novels, Ames might prefer to err on the side of caution by declaring a work that is 95 percent true a fictional account in order to avert some of the conflict that writers James Frey and Augusten Burroughs have been infamously faced with.
Hence, Ames adheres to a simple and rather noble rule of thumb: "As soon as I make something up, I call it fiction," he tells Michael Lorah of Newsarama. "If I don't make anything up, I call it non-fiction." He adds that he decided to have his protagonist share a similar name "to make myself close to him, to get at raw things," yet "so much [of the book] is made up that it can't be called a memoir."
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