Addiction has been theorized historically as a disease of denial, which has profound implications for narratives of addiction. Whereas much scholarship at the intersection of addiction and literature holds to conventional wisdom that symptoms like denial should be hidden within such narratives, Stepping Backward suggests that these are precisely the narratives that we need to attend to and learn from, rather than dismiss.
In Stepping Backward Laurel Taylor focuses on twentieth-century addiction literature, demonstrating the political significance of fictional forms developed by writers known publicly for their drug and alcohol use. By exploring a diverse set of transatlantic novels that span the period between the founding of Alcoholics Anonymous in the mid-1930s and the height of the War on Drugs in the 1990s, Taylor shows how therapeutic and punitive approaches to addiction have often functioned as mutually reinforcing strategies of social control.
In novels such as Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited (1945), William Burroughs’s Naked Lunch (1959), Joan Didion’s Play It As It Lays (1970), and Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead (1991), Taylor traces what she calls “paying attention,” an emerging alternative approach to addiction, represented not in fully imagined social policies and practices surrounding drug-using characters but rather in certain ethical and affective postures modeled by fictional people who use drugs. Stepping Backward is the first book at the intersection of literary criticism and addiction studies to engage explicitly and extensively with emerging harm reduction approaches to addiction and to navigate a path between ideology critique and radical attention, prioritizing care rather than cure when it comes to individuals’ material, embodied realities.