Confronting alcoholism honestly led to redemption
Eighty Not Out started life as a novel. The author wanted to write about alcoholism; about its destructive nature and how it affects family life. But she wanted to hide behind a fictitious heroine. The form didn’t work for her, so, deciding on total transparency, her own struggles form part of this frank and fascinating memoir.
Elizabeth starts her tale before her conception, and her eye for humour is immediately apparent. Born in Belfast as her parent’s marriage was in its death throes, she seems born before her time.
“I am precocious, always an outsider, observing, listening, judging, wanting to voice my opinion, to influence events.”
Eighty years on, McCullough is still feisty having lived every one of those years with gusto. When an early marriage to a German refugee ended disastrously, she went to Ghana, to join Fergus, a parasitologist, who was heading up a research study there. They subsequently married, and had three children, raising them in Ghana, Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania, with a brief interlude in Boston. Finally, they settled in France, near the Swiss border, and Geneva, where Fergus worked.
This memoir is written with flair, honesty, and self-deprecation. On the surface McCullough lived a typically expatriate life, with cocktail parties, tennis, and lots of excursions on safari, but a part of her always rebelled.
The family had their share of illness, with constant fevers. McCullough succumbed to malaria, and blackwater fever. There were other dangers, too. She had an encounter with a lion, but it was smaller creatures, like bed-bugs and cockroaches which proved a more constant nuisance.
There were trips back to Belfast; to the mother McCullough had never managed to become close to; but in the seventies, these stopped for a while, because McCullough feared the Troubles were too much of a danger for her growing family.
Drink was always on the menu, but it wasn’t until 1971, when Fergus suffered a heart attack in Mwanza, that it began to be a problem. A doctor said,
“If ye think ye cannae sleep the night, take a guid stiff whisky before ye go to bed.” Soon, McCullough was taking it whenever she felt stressed.
The scary thing is that she saw the dangers. She later told another doctor that she felt her drinking was problematic. He dismissed her, saying he drank as much as she did. The next few years were difficult, as McCullough sank into the abyss. She was drunk driving her’s and other people’s children in the car; she was hiding bottles and buying bigger handbags to accommodate a full bottle of spirits. And her behaviour became increasingly erratic. She started attending AA meetings, and had no problem admitting that she was an alcoholic. But the next stage seemed to elude her. It took several family confrontations, and two stays in a drying out clinic before she finally found the will to kick the habit. And, thanks to Alcoholics Anonymous, she remains ‘in recovery.’
