Another excerpt from my very drafty novel

Well, then I was really depressed. I tried to become an alcoholic. Another thing that seems to work so well on TV, I mean, there are all these very funny, not funny, but charismatic characters who are alcoholics, even if they kill their families in the end or destroy their lives or the lives of others, they are good characters, often funny, often sad, certainly dramatic in a yelling and throwing chairs and falling over kind of way, sometimes they are even very witty. Like you, Clem. They both smiled. And I had this feeling that, this hope that everything would be better, would feel better, if only I were a drinker. When you are sad, you drink to drown your troubles, don't you? So I went on a campaign of drinking. I knew I'd have to move out of wine and into hard liquor if I really wanted this to work. So I went and got a bunch of blended whiskey – Clem made a yech face – and started with that. Well I hate whiskey, but I didn't know that yet at the time, it just seemed to be the thing you were supposed to drink if you were an alcoholic in a  movie. I drank a tumbler of the stuff every night for a week. Every night and every morning I felt ill, and while I was drinking, I just felt sadder. I quit after a week. There was just no making headway with it.

            What you didn't understand, said Clem, is that when you feel ill, you have to take that as a sign that you haven't drank enough yet, and eventually it becomes true. That's the trick to being an alcoholic.

            Is it, said Lucy, and downed her glass of wine like a poker player in an old western. They laughed like maniacs.