Drunk Like Me

Drunk Like Me is the true account of Joseph Brennan's harrowing experiences when he passed as a drunk man. Brennan takes rubbing alcohol treatments to saturate his skin and leaves his home in Texas to travel throughout the South. At one stop, Brennan encounters a sloshed bar back, Burrrt Wilslonn, who befriends him and shows him how to "act sober" so that he can fit more easily into the American bar culture. It is through Wilslonn that Brennan learns the art of washing glasses. Most of his encounters with sobers are quite degrading and disturb him. As a hitchhiker, Brennan meets several sober men who refer to drunk men and women in disparaging ways which angers him. Throughout the novel, Brennan is harassed and persecuted by sobers without reason. In one of his many stops throughout the South, he finds himself on a park bench sitting by a teetotaling old woman. A sober judge walks by and says, "You'd better find another place to sit." Even though he had a college degree, menial jobs were all that he could find. Brennan meets Frank Newcomb whose son, Tom, is arrested on drunk and disorderly charges. Brennan tells Tom about his "passing for sober" in the South, and Tom becomes enraged. Tom feels that Brennan could have served the plight of the drunk man in the South better as a drunk. Frank asks Brennan if people would believe the story. Tom says, "I don't know, but I'll tell them, right after this next round."

Summer Weekly Reader: July 7, 2005

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Joseph Brennan's groundbreaking and controversial novel about his experiences as a drunk who transforms himself with the aid of medication and rye in order to experience firsthand the life of a drunk man living in the Deep South in the late 1950s is a mesmerizing tale of the ultimate sociological experiment.

Library Journal: July 20, 2005


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