Three days into rehab, I knew I wasn’t going to make it. My hands shook constantly from alcohol withdrawal, I had hourly bouts of bone-deep depression that left me sobbing in despair, and the total lack of privacy — even while sleeping — was just too tough to take.
As a young journalist, hard drinking and celebrity parties had been part of my lifestyle. Graduating to crime-writing in my 30s, keeping my own hours made it easy to hide my addiction to alcohol.
Now that was at an end — along with my freedom. For me, the minute-by-minute scheduling as excruciating as withdrawal.
Having made the decision to leave, I slipped out of group therapy, and went to the bathrooms to cry. Entering the loos I heard the swish of a mop. I sighed. Cleaning, mostly carried out by patients, was a key part of recovery. Even here, I couldn’t be alone.
A woman came into view, and I forced myself not to do a double take as, bizarrely, a soap actress I recognized from TV — I’ll call her Emily — was holding a cleaning spray.
‘I’m really struggling with the lack of privacy,’ I blurted. ‘I don’t know if I can handle it any more.’
She looked at me. ‘This is normal for me,’ she said. ‘Better than normal.’
She waited for that to sink in. My lack of privacy, as tough as it was, would be over within weeks. Hers — if she continued her career — was never-ending.
Crime novelist Cate Quinn used alcohol to numb the pain after a personal tragedy left her suffering nightmares and unable to write
Picking up a cloth to buff the mirrors, she related how photographers followed her to restaurants and nightclubs. She’d once lost a relationship in its early stages because she’d checked into a hotel to sleep off a hangover, and stories had emerged suggesting she’d met a man inside.
‘How do you deal with that?’ I asked her.
‘I don’t,’ she said bluntly. ‘That’s why I’m here.’
Addicts often say you check into rehab twice: once when you walk through the door, and a second time when you truly commit to it.
That conversation with Emily was my second check-in, when I realised I was going to see it through.
My first check-in was the lowest point in my life. Sobbing uncontrollably, I couldn’t understand how I, a successful crime novelist, had ended up here; how I’d let my drinking escalate so badly.
But a year earlier, a horrific personal tragedy had left me reeling. Twelve months on, I still suffered nightmares and my creative well had run dry. Hopeless and useless, I used alcohol to numb the pain.
Desperate, I scoured the internet for private rehab, and signed up with a credit card.
As I navigated the arrivals process — complete with full body search — the manager explained I shouldn’t be surprised to see people I recognised. Because of their dedication to privacy, this particular facility attracted the famous.
Slowly I got into the rhythm of group therapy, counselling, personal journaling sessions, plus cooking and cleaning chores, and the small group of fellow addicts became like a second family.
I began to realise the reasons I drank actually went back to my childhood with an alcoholic parent. An overly sensitive child, I’d unknowingly internalised a great deal of pain, learned to put other people’s feelings first, and — as an adult — drowned my own needs in drink.
Personal insight was fascinating, but so was the insight into the people who could afford the clinic’s £10,000-a-month fees. My fellow in-patients were disproportionately wealthy, with demands to match. Particular brands of water, visitation rights for pets and very specific dietary requirements were standard.
And with rehab a closely guarded secret for most of them, outlandish requests for deception were also commonplace.
Like the agent who negotiated his own private meeting room so he could hold Zoom calls without anyone knowing where he was. He’d arrive for breakfast drenched in sweat, and begging for stronger medication, then went to his ‘office’ to field work calls. As far as I know, besides his long-suffering wife, no one ever knew he was in rehab.
Author Cate Quinn was inspired by the famous faces and bizarre experiences that made up her detox journey when writing her ninth novel, The Clinic – a murder mystery with a celebrity cast
Perhaps surprisingly, celebrities tended to be the best behaved — maybe because constant scheduling was normal for them. Take the well-known model who had a reputation for being demanding. She turned out to be the nicest person there, never asking for anything and regularly offering to fetch things for others.
The bravery of those resident celebrities entering rehab and tackling that shame head on had a profound effect on my recovery. It also made me realise how others might see me: not a broken wreck, but a flawed human being doing my best to change.
Back in the real world, sober for the first time in 20 years, I worried that I wouldn’t be able to write without alcohol. But actually, the famous faces and bizarre experiences that made up my detox journey inspired my ninth novel, The Clinic, a murder-mystery with a celebrity cast.
The book was another kind of therapy, allowing me to also write about my own deeply personal trauma anonymously. To me, that makes the experiences more real, not less. Exactly as I hope my future without alcohol will be.
Cate Quinn’s novel The Clinic is out now in hardback.
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