What happens when artists sober up

[David Morris]

http://tomshone.blogspot.com/2011/04/when-artists-sober-up.html

The headaches are biggest for the bad boys, whether bad boy poets
(Bukowksi), bad boy painters (Hirst), or bad boy actors (Sheen).
Theirs is the most humbling of climb-downs. Dark sides tend to shrivel
beneath the pitiless fluorescent glare of the rehab; nothing shrinks
the gonads more than the prospect of drawing up an amends list to the
bats whose heads you’ve bitten off. Stephen King used to drink a case
of sixteen-ounce tallboys a night—he can barely remember writing Cujo,
he was so loaded—but after a family intervention in 1987, he finally
sobered up, although arguably his work knew before he did. One of the
things that makes The Shining one of the best books ever written about
alcoholism is that it doesn’t know what it is about. It was an act of
urgent self-diagnosis, conducted in the pitch dark. Once King shone a
light into the closet and found out what the real monster was, his
work took on a much baggier, more therapeutic feel, with less overly
supernatural elements and more in the way psychological demons,
metaphorical ghosts. His novels self-exorcised."