Louise Penny’s A Trick of the Light: The Transformative Power of Sobriety

Louise Penny’s Three Pines/Gamache series features a cast of idiosyncratic local characters, with perhaps the most memorable being the redoubtable Ruth Zardo, Governor General’s Award-winning poet and an elderly, unrepentant drunk.

Ruth covets other people’s alcohol; she emanates fumes of whisky. Put a glass down on the table, and Ruth will drink the dregs.

I’ve been doing some reading about alcoholism as part of writing about my mother and grandmother, who were both profoundly affected by drinking: my grandmother for decades, before she began her final commitment to recovery; my mother in the wake of profound loss. She died when my daughter was two and a half.

My mother was fiercely independent. When I didn’t want to learn to drive as a teenager, terrified that I’d hit someone, she was frustrated: “How will you ever get away if you can’t drive?”

For my mother, who had driven from the age of fourteen, who had gotten a job at a gas station to support the purchase of her first vehicle at sixteen, being able to get away was crucial. Her family life was dramatic and sometimes violent; her own mother’s drinking and blackouts imposed both social and psychological costs on all of her children.

Writing about the loneliness of my mother’s death has been difficult. Ethically and aesthetically.

This past weekend, stuck, I tried something I’d once done as a creative writing exercise and drafted scenes of her life from her point of view, fuelled by several dozen of the family letters she sent from the 1970s to the 1990s. It was easier, with this writing aid, to capture her voice, but I couldn’t convvey her pain. The wretched thing about emotional suffering is how solitary it feels, how untouchable by others.

We had a number of fraught phone conversations in the months before her death, but the content of those feels too intimate to use, and that’s also limiting me. Families have secrets, and the ones that my mother was grappling with just before she died were acutely painful ones.

While drinking, my mother was, at first, an exaggerated version of her life-of-the-party self. Zelda without F. Scott: witty and engaged, musically gifted and hilarious.

Then she would drop into despair and rage.

It felt to me like she was driven to push away anyone who had expressed, more or less gently, concern about her drinking. Until there would be no one left to see her, or care.

And I was preoccupied with the needs of a toddler who needed to be taken to daycare, students who clamoured for reference letters. I had applied for a renewal of my contract job, a very good job, and I was working, working, working.

I didn’t have very much time for my mother. Or patience.

When she left rehab, twice, I gave up. The news of her death was unwelcome but not surprising.

And there was some relief, because being raged at had been so difficult. Alcoholics leave a wake of pain, rippling for decades.

The source of Ruth’s pain has not been fully revealed in the nineteen novels in the series to date, but there are hints. She titles a book of poetry I’m FINE and later explains: “FINE stands for Fucked up, Insecure, Neurotic and Egotistical. I’m FINE.”

One of the strengths of Penny’s writing is how very fucked up her characters must eventually acknowledge themselves to be. Peter Morrow must recognize, in the novel I’m re-reading, that his admiration and love for his wife has always been tinged by a sense of superiority, of contempt towards her art. Now that Clara’s first solo show is on at a prestigious Montreal gallery, Peter is stricken: he’s jealous and resentful, and he knows that Clara, if they were celebrating Peter’s artistic success (as they have, so frequently) would only be supportive.

Worse, Clara realizes it. Peter confesses, but Clara recognizes that his resentment is deep and wide. Their marriage has a hole in it.

In the wake of Clara’s triumphant Montreal vernissage, followed by a celebration back in Three Pines, she wakes to a sunny and anxious morning of anticipating the reviews. But when Peter and their friend Gabri return with the array of daily newspapers (this already feels anachronistic), they discover a corpse in the garden, hidden from Clara’s view.

And it turns out to be someone Clara knew many decades earlier, a false friend. Like Peter, Lillian had competed with and resented Clara, rather than appreciating her.

Famous for a cutting review that she wrote early in her career–“He’s a natural, producing art like it’s a bodily function”–Lillian went on to scrape out an art-adjacent career in New York for three decades.

But then she returned to Montreal, and her delighted and oblivious parents, and decided to get sober.

Lillian’s immersion in AA, and her new sobriety, transformed her. Instead of being sarcastic, critical, and manipulative, she became warm and caring. And her art was equally touched by her new generosity of spirit. Instead of a critic, Lillian had become an artist, and that made all the difference.

But did Lillian really change?

Gamache wonders.

When he consults with Myrna, a former forensic psychologist, she agrees that all people grow, and, for some, dramatic transformation is possible.

But it’s sometimes for the worse.

The sobriety coin found in the ground near Lillian’s body appears to be a crucial clue to her murder. So was Lillian murdered because of what she did and said when she was drinking–or after she’d stopped?

More than any of Penny’s novels, Trick of the Light is deeply immersed in the world of alcoholism, which has substantially meaning for Penny herself.

She came out the other side–like Lillian appear to have, too.

I so appreciate the care with which Penny conveys why people drink, and why they find it so hard to stop: all of the feelings and past shameful actions that have to be faced as part of sobriety. It’s a daily struggle for many, and a heroic one.

But I think that just as we need to be careful not to use the language of battle and failure to describe those who die of cancer, we can also be sensitive to the plight of the very many people who struggle and fail to get sober.

Myrna tells Gamache, “People change when they have no choice. It’s change or die.” A little later, she comments that “When people hit bottom . . . they can lie there and die, most do. Or they can try to pick themselves up.”

I live in the downtown of a city where we are failing the people who need help picking themselves up: the victims of the opiate crisis are everywhere, and it’s tragic and enraging. BC is many years into the declaration of a public health emergency.

And in the shadows of the visible misery on the street are the well-dressed people slipping into a different liquor store each week, so that even the store clerks won’t notice how much scotch and wine they’re purchasing. Who hide their glass bottles in the neighbours’ recycling.

Louise Penny can be credited for many things as a writer. As a person, she’s made the valuable and socially necessary choice to share her struggle with alcohol and convey alcoholism in her fiction. Cara Fabre has described in her excellent book, Challenging Addiction in Canadian Literature and Classrooms, how portraying struggles with alcohol helps connect the dots between alcohol use, settler colonialism, patriarchy, trauma, and racism.

Writing about drinking, Fabre points out, helps us examine the social and not just the personal circumstances of those we lose to alcohol. And then we can start to develop more holistic and empathetic treatment approaches.