In my family, when things went wrong, you carried on as if they hadn’t. My father drank, a lot, alone, and persistently. He was never abusive; he just checked out from the world most nights, and you couldn’t get anything resembling intelligent conversation out of him after dinnertime. It was a problem. It was compulsive behavior. It was an illness. It was addiction. It was alcoholism. We pretty much stayed silent about it. If there’s a big furry animal in your family and it has big claws and hibernates in the winter and can swat salmon out of a stream, but no one ever calls it a bear, you can
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