How to Be a Model Citizen

An interview with Joshua Mohr about his new relapse memoir

One of the biggest misconceptions about drug and alcohol addiction is that it can be beaten, that after a certain period of time, you’re no longer an addict or alcoholic. That’s not the way it works. More often than not, treating the disease of addiction as something that can be conquered or defeated is a fast track to a relapse, which is the most vulnerable place you can be.

Joshua Mohr knows about relapse. In his new memoir, Model Citizen, Mohr explores the ramifications of relapsing in his no-holds-barred prose. Model Citizen received a nice review in the New York Times yesterday, but the headline is hopelessly wrong: “For a Former Addict, Recovery Brings Only Temporary Relief.” There’s no such thing as a former addict. That’s like being a former Capricorn. Once an addict, always an addict.

I spoke with Josh earlier this week about his new book, which gets its title from a line in Van Halen’s Panama: Model citizen/zero discipline.

Jim Ruland: Let’s talk about relapse. There's this weird thing in recovery, this all or nothing aspect to it, that’s comforting when you're on the sunny side of the street, but can feel a lot less supportive when you slip up. It's like the church: either you're in a state of grace or you're not and when you’re not it's kind of stigmatizing. How does your book take that on?

Joshua Mohr: I composed the book not to be an addiction memoir. I composed the book to be a relapse memoir, which is something that I didn't think existed, or if it was out on the marketplace, I hadn't interacted with it yet. And what I mean by a relapse memoir is I wanted to tackle that binary that you’re getting that: either I'm dirty or I'm clean. I always say that any idiot can get clean. You know I can go withdraw in the woods for 30 days. It's the maintenance, it's the staying clean, day after day, that's really problematic.

Jim Ruland: It really is.

Joshua Mohr: So, what I wanted to do with the book is I wanted to put the reader in this very uncomfortable situation where she's inhabiting the consciousness of somebody who's tempted every day to fuck up his life again. Even though I have a very good life, every single day there's a part of me that wants to tear that down. And I wanted to put the reader in that position, not so they could experience necessarily what it's like to be me, but I wanted to force them to occupy that space, so they could see what it was like for the person in their family, who struggles with booze or drugs or gambling or sex and food or whatever, they can understand how brittle it is, how fragile sobriety is and how hard we have to work on a daily basis to stay on the sunny side of the street. I think part of this lack of understanding comes from a good place. They want to believe the person they love got better, and that everything is going to be swell. They don't want to think about them being susceptible to relapse. And I wanted them to know that we're grappling with it every day. Every day I asked myself, Do I want to stay clean? And the first voice in my head says, Absolutely. And then the second voice in my head says, Absolutely not. And it's that dissonance that I wanted to investigate in the memoir.

Jim Ruland: You do it without minimizing the seriousness of the job of recovery because relapse is dangerous. For people in an advanced state of their disease, it can kill you. And if you use and relapse too often it can really tear apart other systems like your liver and your heart that just can't handle it anymore. Can you talk about your own like special circumstances that made writing a second part of the book necessary?

Joshua Mohr: It kind of reminds me of Aaron Sorkin’s Facebook movie. He wrote his Facebook movie over 10 years ago now, right? And don't you believe that if he put that movie out today it would have quite a different ending, knowing what happened in the digital ecosystem during the Trump years? So, the reason I'm mentioning that as an analog is because when I published the first half of this book independently, it was called Sirens. It was investigating that I had three strokes. And then I had heart surgery that was supposed to fix that. And I thought that was the end of the story. So I thought the book was done, much like Sorkin thought his movie was done. And then you fast forward about 18 months or two years after my heart surgery that was supposed to fix me, and then I had another stroke. And it was a very serious one like my arm didn't work for three or four days afterward. And so the story obviously wasn't over. I needed to keep the story going and it became this really interesting framing device, like these doctors told me—in much the same way that when I came out of rehab—that I was "fixed," whatever the fuck that word means, only to realize that's not true. They still to this day don't know why I'm having these strokes. And I got to live with that, and I got to take the medication and I got to hope for the best. The same way that I have to do every day when I wake up with booze and drugs. Every day is this idea that in one way or another, we are all unrepairable. And I wanted to use my life as a test case, then readers and audience members that kind of superimpose their own family members onto that template, and hopefully that will give them a little bit more experiential empathy, because they've been forced to test drive my weird thought process, and hopefully that makes them a little bit more understanding with other people.

Jim Ruland: One thing that I really love about your approach to memoir, is that the protagonist engages in dialogue with entities that aren't "real." Can you talk about bringing speculative aspects into memoir and nonfiction?

Joshua Mohr: Absolutely. I'm the sort of person who sees the world in this topsy turvy funhouse mirror way. I have a very vibrant borderline deranged imagination. And I believe that a good piece of nonfiction should be representative of how that person or that artist sees the world. It should sound like how that person talks. If you don't use the word lugubrious in casual conversation, it shouldn't be in your memoir, and also you shouldn't use the word lugubrious in casual conversation. 

Jim Ruland: That's a good word man, and I'm not going to let you take it from me.

Joshua Mohr: Ha! I wanted to lock into a certain sound. So I worked really hard on establishing a cadence and a time signature on the line level, using language to be as evocative as it can be. But then, to your point, I didn't want to tell it straight, because I don't like to read books like that and we're always kind of supposed to be writing the book that we want to read. I love surrealism. I love magical realism. Even though I'm telling a part of my story, I wanted to do it in the most postmodern, fantastical way that I could, because that was the way to honor the brain, the heart, the me on the page, rather than making it sound like a book somebody else could compose. I wanted to make this sound like nobody else on earth could have put this story together.

Jim Ruland: I'm going to Amazon right now to write my review of the lugubrious new memoir by Joshua Mohr.

Joshua Mohr: Very lugubrious! 

Jim Ruland: But writing a memoir is harrowing. So here's a question, how do you make yourself vulnerable to the past without putting your future in jeopardy?

Joshua Mohr: That's a good question and I'm not sure that I know the answer to that. What I can say is that typically artists are reacting and generating work based on their own system of life experiences. So, I never really knew my father. You know, like he died when I was in my early 20s, and he was just this magnificent liar. Like I knew the persona, I knew the code, but I never got to meet the man behind that mythos. And so as a father now myself and having a young daughter I have a choice. My neurologist and my cardiologist told me that there's a likelihood that I'm not going to live out of my 40s. I choose to overcorrect intentionally because my father kept me obfuscated from the specifics of his life. I want to give my kid unfettered access, a kind of warts and all access to who I was during my short time here. So she's going to learn some things that she doesn't want to know, but that's for her to decide what to do with it. I got this drought of information. And I want to lavish her in information and then she can choose. So it's interesting to think about being informed by your own story and then how do you bring that to life on the page. I know that you and I both like punk rock. I edited this book differently than I would edit a novel. If this was a novel there are things that I would have cleaned up that I wanted to leave in this book, in the sense that I wanted it to seem like the guitar was out of tune, to go to the punk analogy, or the drummer was on cocaine and speeding up and slowing down. I wanted the artifact to be representative of the life. I've lived a very punk rock life.

Jim Ruland: Tell me about your next project coming up with Two Dollar Radio.

Joshua Mohr: Next year we're going to rerelease the Mission Trilogy. So at the beginning of my writing career, I published three novels in three consecutive years. In 2009, I published Some Things That Meant the World to Me. The next year I published Termite Parade and in 2011 I published Damascus, which was kind of the culminating piece of the trilogy. They were all independent narratives, and they came out as I was writing them. But to kind of commemorate the 10-year anniversary, Two Dollar Radio is going to release the entire Mission Trilogy as one artifact late next year in concert with the animated movie that I'm making that's pulling information from all three novels. I'm thrilled to have the entire trilogy collected into one collection. And I think it's gonna be really fun for people to see the movie, and then juxtapose that with the narratives in the book.

Jim Ruland: Oh, very good. Is there anything you want to recommend?

Joshua Mohr: I just watched a movie called Blindspotting that I thought was really amazing. I've been going through a lot of old records. Last night, I was playing board games with my daughter we were listening to old Spaceman 3 records on vinyl, which is really fun to get to share those things with her. She's only seven. She knows Rancid by name and Seven Year Bitch. I'm going to turn her into a punk rocker whether she likes it or not.

Jim Ruland: Yeah, well good luck with that.

Joshua Mohr: Everybody says that as soon as she turns a teenager, it's gonna all blow up in my face, but I'm gonna hold on to this splendid delusion for as long as I possibly can.

PssSST…

In honor of the publication of Model Citizen, I present Model Citizen (SST 350) the first and only album by Bias, which was one of Greg Ginn’s many side projects in the 1990s. Bias serves up instrumental electronic rock with Greg Ginn on guitar, Dale Nixon on bass (ahem), and Andy Batwinas manning the drum machines and electronic effects.

At one point Black Flag was a raging five-piece unit that hauled it’s own P.A. system across the country for months and months at a time with a veritable circus of freaks. But by 1997, Ginn had dispensed with the bass player, the singer, and the drummer. He played the guitars himself and let machines do the rest. He was basically done with other people’s bullshit.

Is Bias any good? It’s not danceable, but it will get your heart rate going. Under the right circumstances (circa 1997 and rolling on Red Bull and ecstasy) this record could be part of a remarkable night on the town. It reminds me of the score of a video game where the carnage never ends, and I have to say its growing on me.

March Plaidness

Thanks everyone who voted for my essay. Unfortunately, I didn’t advance to the next round. I had no idea there were so many STP haters out there and I even received some hate mail from an aggrieved Steve Perry fan. I hope you’ll continue to follow the contest and check out some amazing essays. Until next week…

(I’m sorry. I didn’t realize this song was 117 minutes long. Jesus.)