EXPRESS YOURSELF

Why Writers Drink — and This One Doesn’t

Alcohol offers a devil’s bargain: inspiration through disinhibition, at the cost of a few I.Q. points, maybe even an early grave. Why are writers, more than other artists, so willing to take that risk?

Mark Dery
Human Parts
Published in
9 min readMay 16, 2022

--

Jack Nicholson as Jack Torrance, an alcoholic novelist falling off the wagon in Stanley Kubrick’s “The Shining” (1980).

--

--