No Cloistered Life

A roller coaster memoir charting a course through addiction, recovery and the search for meaning. Readers are taken through one aborted vocation to the priesthood, a season as a hippy, several failed marriages plus a return to academia. Early in life, John McMahon wanted to escape the parochialism and religious bigotry of 60s small-town Scotland. Alcohol is shown to put two traits into tension: the 'egotist' who behaves like he's God's gift to women versus the 'loser' who insists that nobody could possibly love him. As an addict, he is seen to obsess over various distorted images of the self and then acting up. The hinge of the story is how life situations reframed John's self-talk. After at first rejecting the 'well-meaning Alcoholics Anonymous' he came to experience 'that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.' Later John found meaning in academia, developing recovery resources and a new found faith and marriage.