ROBYN FLEMMING Skinful. Reviewed by Mary Garden
Robyn Flemming’s memoir encompasses the adventure of being a global nomad within a story of addiction and healing.
Over the past several decades, there have been countless books falling under the umbrella of ‘addiction memoir’, most of them focusing on alcohol addiction. In Australia, these include the bestselling Woman of Substances by Jenny Valentish and High Sobriety by Jill Stark. Robyn Flemming’s Skinful is an important and timely addition.
The book is divided into four parts, each signalling turning points in Flemming’s life. The first covers her years in Hong Kong from 1986 to 1993; the second describes her 15 years back in Australia; the third her time as a global nomad; the fourth is the beginning of a new life, free of alcohol.
It is a riveting, fast-paced read as we journey along with Flemming, not only on her roller-coaster ride with alcohol, but as she explores many countries, including New Guinea, Nepal, Bali, the European Alps, and New York. She travels for work in her job as a freelance editor as well as to participate in marathons and other challenges she sets herself.
In Hong Kong, her growing and hidden dependency on alcohol begins to impact on her physically, mentally, and emotionally. She has a near-breakdown, feels something in her ‘cracking apart’. At the same time, she has an important realisation:
For the first time, I understood just how much fear and panic lay beneath the lid I was keeping precariously in place by anaesthetising myself every night …
She decides to return to Australia to find a way to put herself back together. As many have before her, she turns to Alcoholics Anonymous and manages 11 alcohol-free months before, out of nowhere it seems, she wants to drink again. This time, she decides, she’ll drink moderately. ‘Why should alcohol be the boss of me?’
Recalling the sense of wellbeing and joy it has given her in the past, she takes up long distance running and sets extreme physical challenges for herself to gain control of her addiction. She also begins to examine her past, her childhood and teenage years. Her father was authoritarian, his discipline harsh and unpredictable, a victim of his own upbringing. Her mother was a typical housewife of the 1950s and 1960s ‒ powerless and lacking self-confidence, hesitant to intercede.
The many happy times in my childhood and teenage years moderated the effects of the difficult ones. But damaged people damage people, and I, too, emerged from childhood a damaged person, if not a resourceful one. My character was formed in part by the perception that love was elusive and life somehow unsafe.
It was that emotional void, she realises, that she sought to fill with alcohol.
In 2010, she decides to become a global nomad:
It seemed that I was good at travelling; that it mostly brought out the best in me. What if I upped the ante right off the scale and detached myself from the ties that keep me tethered, and just sailed free?
Drinking follows her. The reader may despair when once again Flemming resorts to another bottle of white wine, at night, alone, numbing her feelings. But that is the nature of addiction. And as Flemming points out, there are many addictions and commonalities. For example, some women look for ‘a man to fill the gap’ (or vice versa) and end up in unhealthy relationships. (There’s a subplot in the book involving an on-again off-again relationship with a commitment-phobic, self-centred man called Tom. He is a very strange character, and one wonders what on earth the attraction is, aside from hot sex!)
Finally, after four decades of struggle, during a hurricane in New York City, Flemming finally finds the courage to stop drinking alcohol.
Now that I no longer awoke in fear after a night of drinking, anxious about what I might find or recall, I was more aware of my surroundings, of things that were not me. I was better able to see beauty in the ordinary, everyday world, and to consciously acknowledge the pleasure I felt in noticing small things: a shaft of light in the market hall, the taste of hot banana, the wrinkles on the face of the flower seller, the sound of laughter.
Running is a thread throughout most of the book. Fleming sees it, too, as an addiction and wonders whether all addictions are just different manifestations of the same thing ‒ an attempt to fill the empty space inside. Yet running not only has many health benefits, it also brings her a network, a world of friendship and camaraderie. This thread lifts the book out of being a mere misery memoir.
The most important feature of Skinful is its focus on what is known as grey-area drinking. This is when people consume more than a moderate amount of alcohol but don’t meet the criteria for dependence. There is emerging evidence that some people have increased their drinking during the pandemic. This notion of grey-area drinking also helps us understand how Flemming could struggle for so long.
Healing addiction is a lifelong journey. Flemming explains in the Afterword that only recently has she become aware of the true nature of her experience of addiction and how it relates to family dynamics in her childhood.
Despite the plethora of memoirs on alcohol addiction, there can never be too many. If even one person is inspired to stop drinking, then that book has value and has been worth publishing. Journalist Caroline Knapp, who wrote Drinking: A Love Story, has said how another memoir – Pete Hamill’s A Drinking Life – set her on the road to recovery. In reading other people’s stories, we can recognise our own.
Skinful is compelling, insightful, and honest. It is beautifully written and has a strong message of hope. I am sure it will inspire others who stumble along the lonely road of alcohol addiction.
Robyn Flemming Skinful Brio Books 2022 PB 320pp $32.99
Mary Garden is an author and freelance journalist, with a PhD in Journalism. Her latest book Sundowner of the Skies was shortlisted for the NSW Premier’s History Award 2020, and her memoir The Serpent Rising: a journey of spiritual seduction, first published in 1988 and a new edition released in 2020, has just won the High Country Indie Book Award 2021. Her essays and articles have appeared in a range of journals, newspapers, and magazines, including The Humanist, The Australian Financial Review, The Australian, The Guardian, The Northern Times, and New Zealand Geographic, Born in New Zealand, after 45 years in Queensland she has recently moved to regional Victoria. You can find her on Twitter @marygarden
You can buy Skinful from Abbey’s at a 10% discount by quoting the promotion code NEWTOWNREVIEW.
Or see if it is available from Newtown Library.
If you’d like to help keep the Newtown Review of Books a free and independent site for book reviews, please consider making a donation. Your support is greatly appreciated.
