The Chief of Birds: A Memoir

by Michael Templeton

“Having the past shattered into a present that is meaningless, the future becomes nothing at all.” The Chief of Birds is a memoir of addiction, incarceration, and return from the brink of destruction. Allowing quotations from Samuel Beckett, Maurice Blanchot, and others to speak where the author has been silenced, it charts the fragile re-emergence of a self that passes for recovery. ///

"Imagine Rousseau's Confessions written by a monster in chains. Templeton takes us on a harrowing inner journey from the depths of extreme addiction through a strange transformation, but his is not some simple, uplifting recovery or sobriety narrative. To hell with platitudes and magical thinking. From the haunting confines of suicidal alcoholism in "The Room," through the long autopsy on his identity in "The House," Templeton's metacognitive ordeal unfolds in kinship with Samuel Beckett's bleak minimalism. His sharp, courageous pursuit for authentic identity tears the thin membranes between social institutions, language, and one's narrativized self. Like Joker in Full-Metal Jacket , the narrator, “a demon slipping and sneaking from word to word,” guards at great risk the illusive, dim light of honesty of an authenticity while navigating the iron-clad principles of AA. A courageously relentless examination of the human condition, this memoir is as much a theory of mind as a story of breaking free from the deadly grip of addiction." -- Alex Johns, Associate Professor of English, University of North Georgia

"As a frequent “monster of the solitudes” and former 12-Step reacher, regurgitator, wrestler, repudiator and reject, I feel gratitude for Mike Templeton’s fresh approach to the “Recovery” industry gerbil wheel in his meta-memoir The Chief of Birds , a volume I find reminiscent, in ways, of Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground , albeit from a further evolved 21st century American erstwhile cog-in-the-machine vantage point. Higher Power pshaw. Hop off the wheel. Get out from between the teeth. Read this book. Save yourself." -- John Burroughs, 2022-23 U.S. Beat Poet Laureate and author of The Wrest of the Worthwhile

123 pages, Paperback

Published August 22, 2023

Reviews

[S̶e̶a̶n̶ · Rating 5 out of 5]

Having lost myself, I began to emerge as otherness.

I don’t seek out memoirs of addiction anymore. I am not an addict—active or recovered—but I have abused alcohol and drugs in the past. My father was an alcoholic. He stopped drinking when I was around 7 years old. Unfortunately, that did not make him much easier to live with, which may or may not be beside the point. After he joined Alcoholics Anonymous (AA), he decided it would be best if the entire family went to meetings together. AA is prepared to facilitate this, should you want to embark on that route. So, one night each week for months we went to a meeting; my mom attended Al-Anon, my brother and sister went to Alateen, and I joined Alatot. I don’t remember much about this beyond a series of mental images: listening to Unshackled! in the car on the way to the meeting, sitting on tables with other kids in the classroom, seeing adults smoke profusely and consume copious amounts of coffee. I remember all the kids would play tag in the dark outside, while we waited for the adults to finish up. And that it was always good when someone was celebrating a sober anniversary, because that meant there would be cake.

So, there was a time in my childhood when I was surrounded by AA slogans, without knowing their significance: Easy Does It, Let Go and Let God, One Day at a Time, First Things First. Among other places, these phrases were emblazoned on shiny stickers that drew me to them, based only on the fact that they were shiny. I was a kid, and my understanding of what my father was going through was limited; this was not helped by the strict code of silence within my family surrounding any topics that in a functional family would have warranted explanation and discussion. As I grew older into my teen years, I wondered what, if anything, AA had done for my father beyond helping him to stop drinking. In an effort to understand, I would go on to read books written by people about their struggles with addiction and their paths to recovery, most of which included a 12-step program. Eventually, through my own experiences, I came to identify with some of what these people wrote about. But there would always be a point past which I didn’t understand, and that nebulous space beyond is the experience with which Michael Templeton begins his memoir The Chief of Birds—what he calls ‘the end’.

What drew me to Templeton’s book was the fact that it is written in conversation with the writing of Samuel Beckett and Maurice Blanchot, two writers important to me. When I read that in the description, I understood that this was different from the addiction memoirs I had read before. The book is not so much a memoir of addiction as it is a philosophical inquiry into the author’s recovery process within AA-based in-house treatment (dubbed ‘the House’)—the principles of which he categorically does not believe in but to which he becomes adept at faking his adherence. We do learn snatches of Templeton’s life pre-recovery, but these are like random pins on the map of a country with obscured borders. He had a family. His wife appears to have been emotionally abusive. The court denied him contact with his children. Eventually, in addiction parlance, he hit rock bottom (AKA ‘the end’).

Through the action of reaching the end, Templeton’s self is fractured. He becomes defined in terms designated by external structures and individuals: the courts, the probation system, former friends and colleagues, and ultimately, the House. There is no room for a self when you live in the House. To move forward, erasure of (whatever may remain of) the self is required, to be replaced by the language and strictures of recovery. But what then? Once you are ‘recovered’, what is left of you? A collection of AA platitudes? If everything of you from before is gone, then to what self are you to return? There are some men in the House who never leave; they don’t ever recover a self that is suitable for habitation outside. Templeton fears this institutionalization; he does not want to lose the ability to function in the world outside the House, and yet his desire to hold on to fragments of self is at odds with its tenets.

Remaining in the House means the flows and lines that define the world that is the House necessarily interrupt, decode, and re-code the self. I become the House as the House becomes whatever it is that is my self, which is to say I lose my self in the House. I become unmoored from the flows and lines of consistency that I believed made me.

As he progresses through the stages of treatment, reading and writing become a part of his own private recovery, separate from the ‘we’ of the House. A suturing of fragments begins to take place using words of others fluent in this ‘language’ of the ineffable. As such, within this text, both Beckett and Blanchot are uniquely suited as literary and philosophical interlocutors for reflection on selfhood, its loss, and what ultimately might fill the space left behind. These are writers who were relentless in their interrogation of writing and being.

I am not and I endure. An inexorable future stretches forth infinitely for this suppressed being. Hope turns in fear against time which drags it forward. All feelings gush out of themselves and come together, destroyed, abolished, in this feeling which molds me, makes me and unmakes me, causes me to feel, hideously, in a total absence of feeling, my reality in the shape of nothingness. (Blanchot, Thomas the Obscure)

The unconventional approach of this book is what sets it apart from what one may consider to be the ‘typical’ addiction memoir. Templeton is a critical thinker; he has the tools necessary to query what has happened to him in philosophical terms. While many people who have recovered from addiction sing the praises of 12-step programs, likely with good reason, what are we to think of institutions and systems that first tell a person they are their disease, and second, to treat it, they must allow the parlance of recovery to take over their will? Can what being comes out the other side of this process ever still in essence be the same? I think about my father and his seeming discomfort within his own skin. What I know of him before his experience in AA does not square with who I observed him to be as I became old enough to make my own observations. Could it be that through recovery he lost some essential part of himself?

In the world outside, I always felt like I was performing myself, like I was never really being myself so much as I was enacting a self. Perhaps this is just life, and the profound separation I experienced with coming to the end made this fact so starkly evident that I could no longer slip into that apparently natural way of being and remained always aware of the script and the audience. In any case, I had no interest in keeping up the performance and longed only to find a place and condition of pure solitude. And while I was, on some level, happy to be among people, I also had no desire to have them in my life. Everyone I had known before the end had become more other than other. They were an other that did not correspond to my same.

[Alana · Rating 4 out of 5]

isn’t it just the worst when they call you an “addict” and make u go to “rehab” and now of all things! i gotta write my “memoirs” about it all 🥴. it’s like ummm excuse me sweety, i don’t think u understand… i’ve read my lacan, deleuze, and foucault. i know concrete concepts of the subject are a scam of the powers that b you can’t fool me there, and since when the helllll were we not problematising memory itself and it’s narrativisation?? ever come across schizosnalysis? can’t u see i’ve idealised the reach (however false feeling) toward an obliteration of the self and clearly, i’m not meant to be here with the rest of y’all normies???

THEN Samuel Beckett himself in full regalia of citational quotation marks w corresponding page numbers swings in to save the day from the clawing hands of our own delusional selves, as per usual.

this anti-recovery memoir both could and couldn’t be my own, i real eyes realised real lies about my own supposed purported even lived and damnable textual self while reading this. how dare you. how could you. templeton (fave geezer fr), wears his literatures on his sleeve like an engorged heart for brains. like shirt ripped off and bloodied, the secret wounds expertly hidden, exposing his literatures in plain marked punkish tattoos still bleeding from the chest. starkly quoted literatures made to speak on a body which is no less a text without all that beautiful wonderful understanding hullabaloo.

this one is for all the beckett girls who know what it is to live alone in a small room chugging cheap vodka and wine for months on end, who’s rehab experience did nothing by way of rehabilitation it only made things worse, the beckett girlies letting it all descend into squalor inside and out on some real man™️ type shit. that only in beckett could getta glimpse of themselves in a way they could never articulate in front of their shrinking metasticesed image reflected back at them. could it be that recognition prior to its acknowledgement is what drove them to the brink in the first place? beckett, the bastard champion of my soul, simultaneously giving/taking it all back in those unending silences that end amounting to nothing either way.

[John Burroughs · Rating 5 out of 5]

As a frequent “monster of the solitudes” and former 12-Step reacher, regurgitator, wrestler, repudiator and reject, I feel gratitude for Mike Templeton’s fresh approach to the “Recovery” industry gerbil wheel in his meta-memoir The Chief of Birds, a volume I find reminiscent, in ways, of Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground , albeit from a further evolved 21st century American erstwhile cog-in-the-machine vantage point. Higher Power pshaw. Hop off the wheel. Get out from between the teeth. Read this book. Save yourself.

[John Orr · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Chief of Birds is a great, unfiltered look at the experience of recovery that is too often obscured by platitudes and cliche. The pain of alcoholism is jolting and clear, but the exploration goes further to brilliantly examine identity, the seemingly solid self that proves to be a subjugated narrative driven by societal and individual power structures. It’s a wonderful read for anyone who wonders about the truth of who they are, and how that truth meets the world.

[Jeffd134 · Rating 5 out of 5]

Heartbreaking and inspiring at the same time. Beautifully written perspective of substance abuse facilities, the inner mind and their intersection.

[Chuck Byrd · Rating 4 out of 5]

My friend Mike takes us on a ride through purgatory and enters the first exit into hell which turns out to be a "house" in Cincinnati..One a lot of are related to in way or the other...

[E · Rating 5 out of 5]

Simultaneously easy to read (beautifully written) and tough to read (brutally honest). The rhythm of this book is like the churning sea during a storm and I could hardly put it down once I started. Brilliant and relatable; the theme is universal.