Books saved my life. Those four words seem absurd. And yet I believe them to be true as much as or more than I believe anything else that I can’t prove.

In the early summer of 2005, removed from my participation in the fiasco that was the war in Iraq, I took my unspent pay and plunked it down for a year’s rent on a small apartment across from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond. I was living without intention then, and though that may sound like some self-help mantra, what I mean is that I was utterly adrift and more or less uninterested in either sailing or getting back to shore. My needs were few and simple. The door locked. The shades came down. And a 7-Eleven two blocks away sold cold beer from morning to midnight.

Certainly the war was one of the things I wanted to shut the door against, but the fact that the whole world got shut out along with it felt like a fortuitous turn of events. Whether my distress was the result of brain chemistry or some malformed gene or what I saw in Iraq or entirely brought on by my own actions, it was real enough that I was willing to do almost anything to make it stop.

I was fairly successful in that effort for a while. The side effects of prescribing yourself a case of Milwaukee’s Best every day are unpleasant, but if the goal is not to feel at all, the efficacy of the dose is unparalleled. I had been drinking to excess with some regularity since I was 14. I would spend nearly six months of 2005 drunk. The only human contact I had were the brief words I exchanged with the cashier as she rang up two 12 packs, two big bite hot dogs and two packs of smokes. That was my life, and I began to wonder if it deserved the name.