Book interview: Robyn Flemming on addiction and the stranger's comment that changed her life

Embarking on an open-ended adventure to defeat addiction

Author Robyn Flemming: “I have this idea that there should be a dating app for senior citizens called ‘tender’ as opposed to tindr.”

Proving that ageing is not a barrier to reinvention, 69-year-old Robyn Flemming, an Australian freelance editor, has never lost her adventurous spirit. The author of Skinful: A Memoir of Addiction has written a captivating and honest account of what it is like to be in thrall to alcohol, why she drank to excess and how she got sober.

Flemming’s book is also about travel, meeting new people, and challenging herself to run five marathons and 48 half marathons as well as long distance treks in a dozen different countries — primarily as a way to force her to control her drinking. If she had a marathon the next day, she might only allow herself two of glasses of wine the night before or at most, four. It was a mainly delusional strategy. But all part of the author’s journey of self-discovery.

Speaking to Flemming on a WhatsApp call, she tells me she’s in bed in Sydney where she is promoting her book. It is 6.30am where she is. She usually rises at 5am.

When Flemming left Australia when she was nearing 60 to wander the world as a nomadic freelance editor, she was (and still is) single. She hopes to “renew my global travels as soon as I can figure out where to go”.

Planning to be on the move in the next couple of months, Flemming wants to return to Europe. She has residency in Hungary and will use it as a base.

“I want to see Budapest, Ireland, and Athens again. I want to go to the Sarajevo Film Festival and I want to return to New York. I’d love to spend the Chinese New Year in Kuching (in Malaysia).”

She tells me she also has “a rendezvous” coming up with Tom (not his real name), her on and off lover who treats her with a certain amount of disdain. He can be an infuriating presence in the book, hooking up with Flemming whenever it suits him, as he has been doing for 44 years. If Flemming hints at commitment (she really loves him), he tells her she is not his girlfriend. Perhaps his emotional evasiveness is an echo of the relationship Flemming had with her late father.

Coming from a family of six, Flemming says that at the age of about four, “there was no hand free for me to hold. That’s a very young age to feel unsupported. Basically, I felt different from the rest of my family. I was going to have to make my own way.”

It takes a while before Flemming discloses what her father used to do to her. Along with her siblings, he used to “cane” her. There is no rancour in her voice when she reveals this. And she has tried to understand this violent man.

“I know that my father thought he was doing the right thing and I know that he loved me. But damaged people like him damage others. It has consequences. He died in 2020. The last time I saw him was in 2018. I was still uncomfortable around him. That feeling was imprinted on me as a child. This man wasn’t a safe person. My mother had no power to intervene. She used to sit in front of the television chewing from a bowl of ice-cubes. It was, I now realise, her way of numbing her feelings.”

Flemming was with her mother when she died, also in 2020. She flew back from Budapest to be at her bedside. Her mother was in a coma after suffering a stroke.

“I haven’t cried. We did have love for each other. It was a very different type of love on both sides.”

Flemming’s parents had divorced when she was 40. “We all thought it was well overdue.”

Having been off drink for 10 years, Flemming feels unencumbered and ready to take to the skies again. “I’m not anchored by grandchildren. That’s a big thing.”

What does it feel like to be footloose and freelance in a competitive market as a 69-year-old?

“Sometimes I feel as if I’m hanging off a cliff edge by my fingernails. The publishing industry I worked in for 35 years as a freelancer is very different now. Text books were my bread and butter. I’d be booked to edit five or six of them in a year. Now it’s more like one a year. I’m savvy enough to get by with the technology that’s required for this work. But when I’m travelling, I don’t have much support. This whole area of online materials to support text books for students is just beyond me. So I do a lot of work in areas that I don’t enjoy — just because it’s regular and I need the money.”

Flemming, who worked as a successful freelance editor in Hong Kong between 1986 and 1993, somehow managed to juggle her work with quite a dedication to alcohol. She describes the first sip of cold white wine as being “like a transfusion”. She left Hong Kong to return to Australia, fearing that she was on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Flemming enjoyed her drink — for a while.

But she was a guilty drinker who set herself extreme physical challenges to try to master her addiction. However, the gap between the person she presented to the world and the one she kept hidden from view grew. One night, a casual comment from a stranger led to a turning point.

“I could stay where I was, huddled in my upstairs bedroom every night, numbing my feelings with white wine and trying to straddle the growing gap between my inner and outer selves. Or I could embark on an open-ended adventure, a hero’s journey, and perhaps become the woman I had the potential to be.”

The book ends four years after Flemming’s last drink. She attended AA meetings having initially given up drink on her own. That lasted for 11 months. Flemming’s second successful attempt, 17 years later, to quit booze came about because of “the toll it was taking on me. I had to trade off so much to keep drink in my life. The trade off was mounting”.

As she says, there was no dignity in “skulking around back streets” in a place in Borneo trying to get rid of empty wine bottles so the cleaner of her hotel room wouldn’t know about her drinking.

Looking back on periods of her life, Flemming says she “behaved very badly. I was very promiscuous in the 1970s. Sex, food, smoking, and the social drug were me self-medicating.”

Now, Flemming is full of gratitude for what she has. She regularly thanks the universe. And being the pro-active woman she has become, she has no qualms about saying that she would “like to partner up”. She puts herself “out there” although she prefers the more “organic” approach to dating than the online version.

It seems there is no stopping Flemming who would like to combine her talent for writing with her passion for street photography for the next 10 years. She writes a column for a seniors’ website. “It’s about how we look after ourselves in our senior years. I have this idea that there should be a dating app for senior citizens called ‘tender’ as opposed to tindr.”

Flemming isn’t entirely unflappable. “I have the start of health issues. I have osteoporosis. I’m feeling a vulnerability that I didn’t feel in 2010 when I set out to live this life.”

While she doesn’t have a pension, Flemming is hoping to interest a film director that she has spoken to about her book. With her entrepreneurial spirit, anything is possible.

• Skinful: A Memoir of Addiction by  Robyn Flemming
• Lantern Publishing, €13.99