Blake Bailey, Farther and Wilder: The Lost Weekends and Literary Dreams of Charles Jackson (New York: Knopf, 2013).
Charles Jackson, The Lost Weekend: A Novel, with an Introduction by Blake Bailey (New York: Vintage, 1944, 2013) ("And from there, the next one was" Why did you drink?" "Like the others, the question was rhetorical, abstract, anything but pragmatic; as vain to ask as his own clever question had been vain. It was far too late to pose such a problem with any reasonable hope for an answer--or, an answer forthcoming, any reasonable hope that it would be worth listening to or prove anything at all. It had long since ceased to matter. Why. You were a drunk; that's all there was to it. You drank; period. And once you took a drink, once you got under way, what difference did it make Why? There were so many dozen reasons that didn't count at all; none that did. Maybe you drank because you were unhappy, or too happy; or too hot, or too cold; or you didn't like the Partisan Review, or you loved the Partisan Review. It was as groundless as that. To hell with the causes--absent father, fraternity shock, too much mother, too much money, or the dozen other reasons you fell back on to justify yourself. They counted for nothing in the face of the one fact: you drank and it was killing you. Why? Because alcohol was something you couldn't handle. It had you licked. Why? Because you had reached the point where one drink was too many and a hundred not enough." Id. at 224-225.).
