Alcohol and Me: A love affair gone bad

Alcohol and Me: A love affair gone bad
By Ben Naylor

While at first glance I wanted to call this a comic, it really isn’t. It’s illustrated prose, like a children’s picture book about alcohol. Not that this is a bad thing, Naylor has chosen this method to tell the story, and it works well. He letters his narration in large block letters, which look good.

On first reading this story of drunken antics is pretty funny. However the more I read it the sadder it seems to me. Naylor has a problem with alcohol, he drinks too much, embarrasses himself in front of his co-workers and friends, and yeah, we’ve all done that, but do we end up with four hour gaps in our memories? Repeatedly? It kind of reminds me of Disappearance Diary in that it cheerfully talks about horrible and depressing things in a very upbeat manner. He lists the things he’s lost, and places he’s woken up (a cave? Wow), but it all seems fairly scary. I’m sure this is because he’s taken the most extreme examples and collected them all in one place. I’m sure if I did that I’d seem like a raving alcoholic too.

Still, at the end Naylor says he’s drinking less, and when I met him a couple of years after he did this book he wasn’t dead, so hurray!