One Year Ago Today I Quit Drinking. The Queen’s Gambit Helped Me Get Sober
The show got me to understand, on a deep and visceral level, that I had to end my toxic relationship with alcohol
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*Major spoilers ahead*
One year ago today, I woke up at 6 am with wine-stained lips and a panic attack. The night before at dinner, I had polished off two bottles of Merlot in quick succession — an enormous amount of wine on a weeknight, even for me. Curled up in a fetal position, I could not shake off the visceral feelings of self-loathing and disgust that flowed through my body. The stale, burning taste of alcohol still lingered in the back of my throat, and for the first time in my life, I seriously considered grabbing a beer from the fridge and drinking it, hoping it would ease the anxiety and nurse me back to sleep. So this is how people start drinking in the morning, I realized, with growing despair.
At the time, everyone I knew seemed to be managing their pandemic nerves in one of two ways: drinking a shedload of Chardonnay or learning how to play chess after watching The Queen’s Gambit. If you have no idea what I’m talking about, I implore you to stream the series on Netflix — it’s excellent. But for the purposes of reading this article, here’s all you have to know: The Queen’s Gambit is a coming-of-age story set during the Cold War era. Based on the Walter Tevis novel of the same name, the show centers on Beth Harmon (Anya Taylor-Joy), an orphaned chess prodigy who beats the odds to become the greatest player in the world.
When the show came out in late October 2020, I was already playing chess, not with pawns and bishops, but with the alcohol in my fridge. My drinking had become a problem — I knew that — but I believed I could still learn how to moderate. I had a few moves up my sleeve, like buying miniature bottles of wine (the kind you can get on airplanes). It was supposed to be a clever trick to stop me from drinking 25 ounces of wine per night. But this solution proved unsustainable: I had massively underestimated how quickly I could drink those tiny bottles and how easy it was to walk to the 24/7 corner shop to buy more. Disappointed but far from deterred, I promised myself I would exclusively drink beer, hoping that the lower alcohol content would prevent me from getting too drunk too fast. (Reader, it didn’t work.)
When you have a drinking problem, watching fictional characters abuse alcohol or drugs on TV can be surprisingly unsettling. In The Queen’s Gambit, Beth gets addicted to “vitamins” as a child — tranquilizers that give her the uncanny ability to visualize chest moves in her mind and focus better on her games (or so she believes). But as Beth grows up, she becomes increasingly reliant on another substance: alcohol. Her drinking almost destroys her chess career. During a major tournament in Paris, she goes on an epic bender with her friend Cleo and wakes up the next morning in a bathtub, almost missing her game with Russian Grandmaster Borgov, which she loses. Later in the episode, Beth spirals down further when she gets wasted at home alone in her underwear and vomits in a chess trophy before immediately taking another swig of beer.
I found Beth’s unraveling difficult to watch. By the time I reached my late twenties, drinking at home alone had become my favorite way of drinking alcohol: I could have as much as I wanted without other people judging me. This was true even before the pandemic, but during lockdown, I began to drink larger amounts — and more frequently — than ever before. And yet, while I recognized myself in Beth’s desire to obliterate herself, I had no doubt she would eventually stop drinking. (And she did.)
Things unfold very differently for Alma Wheatley (Marielle Heller), Beth’s adoptive mother. Unlike Beth, Alma doesn’t usually go on binge-drinking benders, though alcohol plays a central role in her life. We watch her sip cocktails on the plane, drink beer in her hotel room, and order wine at dinner. Still, there’s something profoundly ordinary — banal, even — about her drinking. “I’ve flirted with alcohol most of my life,” she tells Beth in Mexico. “If anything I think it’s high time that I consumated the relationship.” This scene is unsettling in that Alma is confessing to a life-long drinking problem that will eventually kill her. And yet, this quote wouldn’t look out of place on a quarantine wine meme.
I had a guttural reaction to Alma getting killed off the show. So much so that I started writing an article where I argued that her abrupt death was just another example of how older female characters rarely receive a compelling story arc. But as I re-watched the episodes where Alma appears, I couldn’t find any meaningful evidence to back this up. I began to see that the opposite was true: Alma’s character is multi-faceted and complex. She’s both remarkably selfish and profoundly compassionate, naturally nurturing and intensely irresponsible, wildly talented at the piano but too scared to play in public. All of which is to say: Alma is intrinsically human. As I realized this, I grappled with the idea that my reaction to Alma’s death had nothing to do with her tragic fate and everything to do with mine. Her character offered a window into my toxic relationship with alcohol, a realization that felt nauseating. I had understood, on a deep and visceral level, that I had to quit drinking. But I desperately didn’t want to.
In the weeks that followed, I tried various moderation strategies, though my moves were getting weaker and weaker. By early December, drinking a whole bottle of wine on a weeknight was no longer a rare occurrence. Then, I started opening second bottles and finishing them. On the night I got drunk on Merlot, I would have opened a third had I not passed out first. Intensely hungover the next morning and craving a beer, I finally started to see, with prescient clarity, that I was about to level up in my drinking career and progress in a game that would become increasingly difficult to exit.
That’s when I resigned.
Shortly after I quit drinking, I was gifted a chess set. As I moved the pieces on the board, I began to remember the rules of a game I had learned at age nine or ten, but had not played in over two decades. Still, I was filled with a gleeful sense of childlike wonder and a deep feeling of self-trust — sensations I used to seek out in a bottle of wine but had never been able to find. For many years, I had tried to outplay my drinking, only to find out that the most satisfying move — the winning gambit — was choosing not to play at all.
This article is part of my sobriety series, where I examine society’s relationship to alcohol, as well as my own. If you’d like stories like this in your inbox, consider subscribing to my newsletter on Medium.
