The Lost Weekend is a novel by Charles R. Jackson that was published by Farrar & Rinehart in 1944. It was produced as a motion picture in 1945, directed by Billy Wilder and starring Ray Milland as the protagonist, Don Birnam.
Plot summary
The novel, set in a rundown neighborhood of Manhattan during the early 1930s, broke various taboos for its time by exploring a five-day alcoholic binge. Birnam, a binge drinker mostly of rye, fancies himself a would-be writer, lapsing into foreign phrases and Shakespeare quotes even while he attempts to steal a woman's purse, tries to pawn a typewriter for drinking money, and smashes his face on a banister, an accident which gets him checked into an "alcoholic ward". There, a counselor advises Birnam on the nature of alcoholism:
There isn't any cure, besides just stopping. And how many of them can do that? They don't want to, you see. When they feel bad like this fellow here, they think they want to stop, but they don't, really. They can't bring themselves to admit they're alcoholics, or that liquor's got them licked. They believe they can take it or leave it alone--so they take it. If they do stop, out of fear or whatever, they go at once into such a state of euphoria and well-being that they become over-confident. They're rid of drink, and feel sure enough of themselves to be able to start again, promising they'll take one, or at the most two, and--well, then it becomes the same old story over again.
Perhaps the only thing keeping Birnam from drinking himself to death is his love-interest Helen, an almost unbelievably selfless and incorruptible woman who tolerates his behavior out of love. (Helen does, however, upbraid him with the words: "I haven't got time to be neurotic.") But no sooner has he begun to recover from his "Lost Weekend" than he is contemplating killing Helen's maid to get from her the key to the liquor cabinet. The novel ends with him crawling into bed after a few hairs of the dog, wondering, "Why did they make such a fuss?"
Critical Reception and Analysis
The book was a best-seller and received rave reviews. Philip Wylie wrote in The New York Times Book Review that "Charles Jackson has made the most compelling gift to the literature of addiction since De Quincey. His character is a masterpiece of psychological precision." Sinclair Lewis called it "the only unflinching story of an alcoholic that I have ever read". It is sometimes seen as the seminal addiction memoir in American literature, a precursor to such works as Augusten Burroughs' Dry or David Carr's The Night of the Gun. Malcolm Lowry, whose own Under the Volcano relates a day in the life of a dipsomaniac, worried at the time that The Lost Weekend had scooped him.
Film Adaptation
Although the movie adaptation hews closely to the novel, the novel differed in one crucial respect: Birnam is described in the novel as being tormented by a homosexual incident in college. That is omitted from the film.
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