That Weekend with Jane Barnes

Nicole Jeffords (2021)

I’ve known this wild, crazy, wonderful firecracker of a woman, Jane Barnes, since graduate school a million years ago, and will forever be in her debt for saving me from the ravages — a word I don’t use lightly — of alcoholism. We lived across the street from one another in Cambridge and had more drunken adventures than I can count until I finally uprooted myself and moved back to New York where I thought life would perhaps get better. It didn’t. I drank myself into oblivion in a lonely apartment every night, without hope of ever kicking my terrible habit. And then one night Jane called, saying she was coming to visit over the weekend to discuss “our alcoholism.” We spent the entire weekend talking about booze and what it had done to us, and after that neither of us drank again. That was forty years ago, and here we are, two old writers who still have plenty to say about the world and what it’s taught us.