The Empty Room

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thanks to my agents, David Forrer and Kim Witherspoon at Inkwell.

  Thanks to David Kent, Iris Tupholme, Lorissa Sengara, Maylene Loveland, Noelle Zitzer, Terry Toews, Leo MacDonald and everyone else at HarperCollins Canada, as well as to Allyson Latta and Catherine Dorton.

  Enormous thanks to Maria DiBattista and Michael Rowe for reading early versions and helping me see the path through the trees.

  Thanks to Sister Rita Woehkle for the continuing epiphanies.

  Thanks to Nancy F., and all the other people who walk the sober road with me. One day at a time.

  The epigraph is taken from “Good Morning, Midnight” by Jean Rhys. Originally published 1938. First published as a Norton Paperback 1986; reissued 2000.

  The quote from St. John of the Divine’s “Dark Night of the Soul” was taken from a 1959 public domain translation by Image Books (third edition).

  The lines from Edward Booth Loughran’s poem “Isolation” are from the 1906 edition of An Anthology of Australian Verse edited by Bertram Stevens and published in London by Macmillan & Co. Limited.

  The lines from “the song of mehitabel” are from the 1973 version of archy and mehitabel by Don Marquis, published by Anchor Books, Doubleday & Company, Inc., New York (first published 1916).

  All Bible passages are based on the American Standard Version, public domain.

  A portion of this novel first appeared as the essay “Breaking Down” in Winter Tales II: Women on the Art of Aging, edited by R. A. Rycraft and Leslie What, Serving House Books, 2012.

  About the Auhtor

  LAUREN B. DAVIS is the author of the bestselling and critically acclaimed novels The Stubborn Season, The Radiant City and Our Daily Bread, which was longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and named a best book of the year by both the Globe and Mail and the Boston Globe. Born in Montreal, she now lives in Princeton, New Jersey.

  Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins authors.

  Praise

  “Unflinching and unsentimental, The Empty Room charts a day from hell in the life of Colleen Kerrigan, alone, nearly 50, and spiralling into yet another alcoholic binge. It is a credit to the brilliance and humanity of novelist Lauren B. Davis that, even in this nightmare, we find utter truth, wicked humour and just enough hope to keep on reading.”

  —LAWRENCE HILL, author of The Book of Negroes

  “The Empty Room is a rare act of courage—every page a brilliant, defiant examination of desire, loss, sorrow, triumph and grace. My heart will not soon forget this book.”

  —AMI McKAY, author of The Birth House and The Virgin Cure

  “This is a raw, exciting book—alcoholism from deep inside the jaws of death and denial. To call it ‘honest’ is a disservice: it is scalding.”

  —BHARATI MUKHERJEE, author of Desirable Daughters and Miss New India

  “In The Empty Room, Lauren B. Davis has given us an honest, brave account of self-destruction, one that harrowingly reminds us that recovery from the abyss of alcoholism is never easy, but eloquently hints at what is possible when the self-deception and denial end.”

  —LINDEN MacINTYRE, author of The Bishop’s Man and Why Men Lie

  “Soaked in alcoholism and addiction, this story plumbs the bottomless human genius for self-deception and our singular talent for wandering into hellholes of our own design. Lauren B. Davis writes deftly, never averting her gaze—and never letting go of the fact that threads of grace lie always within our grasp.”

  —ALAN CUMYN, author of The Famished Lover and The Sojourn

  ALSO BY LAUREN B. DAVIS

  Our Daily Bread

  An Unrehearsed Desire

  The Radiant City

  The Stubborn Season

  Rat Medicine & Other Unlikely Curatives

  Copyright

  The Empty Room

  Copyright © 2013 by Lauren B. Davis.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks.

  EPub Edition © APRIL 2013 ISBN: 9781443418317

  Published by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd

  FIRST EDITION

  No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in reviews.

  All the characters in the following pages are entirely fictional creations and do not represent any actual person, living or dead.

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