MODEL CITIZEN
A Memoir
By Joshua Mohr
Joshua Mohr is not a regretful man. He doesn’t regret the time he mugged a stranger for a couple hundred dollars, or the time he cracked the bathroom sink in a fancy restaurant by attempting to have sex on it, or all the times he dropped acid, snorted cocaine, smoked heroin, shot Special K or guzzled Fernet like water. He isn’t proud, per se, but these misdeeds — or, in some cases, actual crimes — have provided him the perspective necessary to appreciate how he’s aged into a stable, sober, married father who doesn’t do any of that, and hasn’t in a very long time.
“I’m not one of those sober cats who looks back and demonizes everything from when they were dirty,” he writes early on in “Model Citizen,” a memoir chronicling his struggles with addiction. “I’m glad I embarrassed myself all those nights because I learned what shame was. What shame is. It’s impossible to describe real shame to somebody who hasn’t thrived on self-destruction.”
Self-destruction is recurrent through “Model Citizen,” which traces the recovering addict’s life from his days as a wine-stealing fifth grader, through a first marriage ruined by his alcohol dependence, toward the moments of clarity that forced him into rehab and onto a happier, healthier path.
For a while, at least. When the memoir opens, he’s trying to enjoy a blissful moment in bed with his wife and young daughter when he suddenly suffers what we learn is his third stroke, an incident that understandably unleashes a wave of bitter and helpless feelings over how far he’s come, only to find his present permanently jeopardized by his past. “I wish I’d never gotten sober, never tried to be a better person,” he writes in the aftermath. “Why endure so much harrowing improvement to die like this at 38 years old?”
Mohr is the author of five novels and a previous memoir, 2017’s “Sirens,” an early seed of this book. The expansion allows for a larger context to his journey, the chronicle of his substance abuse now nestled within a contemporary narrative about sobriety, and the effort to reverse some of the cumulative havoc he’s wreaked on his body. Mohr’s fiction has garnered comparisons to Charles Bukowski, and there’s a similar romantic urgency in his autobiographical storytelling, in the way his impulses lead him toward excess. “You can be Henry Miller, and I’m Anaïs Nin,” his first wife says, a quote he repeats twice in the book.
The repetition is a telling belief in the power of writing — or, more specifically, in the power of Mohr’s identity as a writer — to dredge clarity from self-reflection, no matter one’s transgressions. For much of “Model Citizen,” Mohr is a charismatic narrator, a role he relishes in life, too. “You were a good boyfriend,” Mohr’s second wife, Lelo, says when he asks why she never left him when his addiction was at its worst. “Generous. You were nice and funny and charming, just like you are now.”
At one point, Mohr and a friend are naked and drunk in Las Vegas, stapling each other’s chest, and while in hindsight he recognizes this was stupid behavior, to the reader it still sounds like a wild night out. Like most of these memories, the sequence pushes toward a bracing series of revelations: Because he does stuff like staple his friend’s chest, Mohr’s first wife judges him unfit for parenting, which then reminds him of the behaviors of his own alcoholic mother and absent father. He imagines a tearful heart-to-heart with his father, now dead, in which they’d finally address his abandonment issues, before admitting he probably wouldn’t have received any satisfying answers anyway. “I’ve spent so much of my life wondering why, and yet that’s not really the right question. Most of life is just a boiled paste of what, a pulp of stewed facts,” he writes. “We loved each other and barely knew each other and there’s no reason to drag why into this. Let’s leave it at the pulpy what.”
I’m not a therapist, so I can’t say if this realization is healthy. As a reader, I felt frustrated by the way Mohr pitches hard toward some emotionally tidy conclusions, and delicately pulls back from others. Unlike some other recent addiction memoirs that have tweaked the genre by locating alcoholism within a literary lineage (Leslie Jamison’s “The Recovering”), or by writing in third person (Will Self’s “Will: A Memoir”), “Model Citizen” is remarkably self-contained — his impressions of his immediate world are the primary takeaway. Sometimes, he addresses an apology directly to one of the people he’s written about, as though he’s fulfilling a step in a 12-step program before our eyes.
Mohr defines empathy as “being chummed by the blood of somebody else’s mistakes and betrayals, baptized by these blunders and never offering condemnation or judgment. All you do is wipe the chum from your face and kiss them.” His attempt at this messy prostration is sincere, but toward the end he drops a revelation that fundamentally changes the entire book: The doctors predict he won’t live through his 40s. (Today he is 44.) By this point, they’ve made so many unfulfilled promises that he manages to take this dismal projection in stride: “I’ve coined a phrase, in this new era after Stroke 4, and here it is: cheery nihilism.” Not the kind that’ll push him to relapse again, but “one that’s like — life can be meaningless, sure, unless you only put time into what you love, letting the rest of the niggling, narcissistic worries slough away.”
For him, that means making art and being a good father and husband. I confess to feeling mostly sympathetic, and a little bit startled by this sense of resignation. Knowing that “Model Citizen” was conceived, in some part, as a potentially final literary document of Mohr’s life explains the gauzy, nostalgic patina tinting the entire text. He doesn’t regret anything because it all brought him here, to a place where he can attempt to live well even with the end in sight — a redemption story that’s easy to root for, if not always convincing to read. I hope he keeps writing for as long as he can.
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Book Review: ‘Model Citizen,’ by Joshua Mohr - The New York Times
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