Member-only story
This Is Us
The Eroticism of Brutality
On Mary Trump’s ‘Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man’
1.Several years ago, after a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous, I took a walk in Central Park with a woman I’d met only a few weeks before. We were mourning a mutual friend who had recently died of alcoholism.
She and Alan had been friends since childhood; I’d only known him for a year. We both knew that he’d tried several times to stop drinking and despite being very distinguished in his career had somehow “failed” at sobriety.
We were also aware of a section in the AA literature that states in plain terms: Some people are simply unable to get sober. It doesn’t matter how many degrees someone’s earned or how much money and prestige they have; wealthy, accomplished addicts die every day. It also isn’t a matter of willpower. What matters most is a person’s relationship to the truth. It is impossible to recover from alcoholism and hold onto myths about yourself.
We knew he valued his career above everything else, and telling people at work that his drinking was out of control mortified him. We also knew he had attended a military school for most of his childhood and into his teens. Perhaps asking for help when he’d been…
