Bill W.

✍ Scribed by Thomsen, Robert

• Book ID: 109554289
• Publisher: Harper & Row
• Year: 1975
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 251 KB
• Category: Fiction
• ISBN-13: 9781568383439

✦ Synopsis

It is an act of presumption for any man to write the life of another. How can any of us be so sure of our own perceptions to say in print "this is what so-and-so was really like"? When the subject of a biography is a man whose life has had a revolutionary effect on hundreds of thousands of others, that presumption may seem a kind of impertinence.

Bill W. told his own story many times; he also wrote about it. Possibly because of New England reticence, the emphasis was always on the second half of his life. He gave few details of his childhood, his youth or the early years of his marriage. However, it was my privilege - my blessing, if you will - to have known and worked beside Bill during the last twelve years of his life, when he had begun to understand that his biography would be written one day, and he made many attempts in notes, in letters, and on tape recordings "to set the record somewhere near straight."
Bill Wilson was an alcoholic and believed his alcoholism a three-pronged illness, physical, mental and spiritual. Because of this he knew that a drunk's true story must be told subjectively; otherwise it would be only an endless series of ridiculous, unmotivated episodes. I agreed. (I was younger then, and many things seemed easier and less presumptuous.)

Also Bill wanted his story aimed at the general reader, not at the academician or professional worker in the field.

Apart from Bill's letters and the notes and transcriptions of recordings which he left, the primary source of material has been the first-hand recollections of relativesnotably his sister Dorothy and her husband, Dr. Leonard Strong, Jr.friends and colleagues. But because of a peculiar circumstancethe AA tradition of anonymitymost of these must remain unacknowledged here.