Prof. Don McLeese (UI photo)
A University of Iowa journalism professor is sharing the story of his journey to sobriety by reading from his memoir in Cedar Falls tonight.
Don McLeese says his tale is -not- about the typical to-hell-and-back struggle. He’s read plenty of other people’s memoirs about the challenges of alcoholism and he says they tend to follow a pattern.
“Your entire life has to fall apart. You lose your job, you lose your marriage, you’re crawling around on the streets. My life was never like that,” McLeese says. “I’d never really considered myself an alcoholic until well after I had quit drinking in order to save my marriage.”
In his book, “Slippery Steps: Rolling & Tumbling Toward Sobriety,” McLeese says you don’t have to wait for everything to crash into pieces in your life before things can be put back together. In a 2022 Radio Iowa interview, McLeese said one of the worst days of his life ended up being among the best, as it was a turning point.
“I ended up passed out in my backyard, letting the dog out, the dog came in, I did not,” McLeese says. “My wife had called the ambulance and it looked like what had happened was just a kind of alcoholic collapse, meltdown, whatever.”
McLeese says that was the wake-up call he needed to simply stop drinking, as one day became two, then a week and a month. Soon, he says being sober was his preferred way of living, and it didn’t require an intervention.
“Alcoholics Anonymous asks you to admit that you are insane, that your life has become unmanageable, and I used alcohol to manage my life,” McLeese says. “I used it to help me go to sleep every night so I could wake up and do my job. I thought it was part of the necessary grease to oil the machinery.”
Is his book a cautionary tale? In some ways, yes, though he also says if you worry about whether you have a problem with alcohol, you probably do.
“I’m not telling anybody else that they have a problem,” he says, “but I suspect the book might resonate with some people who have not had this total collapse experience.”
McLeese says freedom from drinking has enriched his life in ways he’d never imagined. McLeese’s book is available through the North Liberty-based Ice Cube Press. He’ll be appearing at 7:30 PM at the Hearst Center for the Arts in Cedar Falls. The reading can also be streamed live via Zoom. Sign up for a Zoom link HERE.