The Downside Drinker (Conflict Books; June 2026) took me on one heck of a journey, a journey that resulted in a loud burst of uproarious laughter when I discovered a blurb from Kouri’s girlfriend, CJ Leede, famed creator of Maeve Fly, that reads, “Greatest ebook I’ve ever learn. Writer’s tremendous sizzling.”

Objectives.

Kouri’s memoir, as lyrical a story as they arrive, opens with a two-paragraph-long chapter. Kouri has discovered that his sister, B, nearly died from an alcohol overdose. (The chapter’s title is .6, B’s blood alcohol degree at her collapse.) Kouri states, “I make myself a drink. I’m not the one with an issue.” Instantly, my bullshit detector goes off. Am I about to learn 2 hundred pages of oxymoronic denial? Or is that this going to be a type of dreadfully boring (to me) restoration memoirs with frequent invocations to the next energy and mentions of AA conferences?

However then the second paragraph arrives: “Generally I get so shut, I really feel like I’m you.”

Dammit. Empathy triggered in eleven phrases.

The Downside Drinker, even absent the alcohol (which, I admit, is an unfair subtraction, even within the hypothetical), is a tough ebook for different writers to learn. The ache of agent rejections and submission rejections is so vivid I think about a few of my colleagues asking for a set off warning. Kouri depicts that exact trauma so harshly, compounded by the success of his girlfriend’s writing, that I caught myself nodding alongside, grimacing. It’s realizing that Theodore Roosevelt had it flawed. Comparability isn’t the thief of pleasure. Comparability shoots pleasure within the coronary heart after which comes again with one other shot to the pinnacle for good measure.

Add to that litany of rejections the dysfunction of Kouri’s nuclear household, his grief from his father’s loss of life compounded with grief of a heart-friend, his girlfriend’s brother, after which, close to the ebook’s conclusion, the Palisades Fireplace tragedy in 2025, and you may be forgiven for assuming that The Downside Drinker is a raft borne alongside solely on the bleakest of currents.

It isn’t.

Two issues save Kouri’s memoir from utter bathos. The primary is his ongoing dedication to his personal goodness and his pleasure, as random as they arrive, as briefly as they continue to be. Early on in Kouri’s relationship with Leede, she experiences a panic assault in midtown Manhattan, late at night time. Kouri sits down along with her on the steps of the Saint John the Divine cathedral and holds her, reassures her, talks her by way of the anxiousness.

In the course of the memoir, a pair of tragedies — Kouri’s sister is close to loss of life after the 0.6 blood alcohol overdose and Leede’s cousin Nick, somebody Kouri can also be notably near — pushes Kouri right into a interval of heavy dependence on his consuming. When Kouri and Leede journey to Copenhagen earlier than needing to fly again to Texas for Nick’s funeral, their grieving habits stand in stark distinction: Kouri leans closely on whiskey at night time; in the course of the day, Leede walks for miles. As a result of Kouri’s consuming leads him to go out one night time, he misses that Leede skilled one other panic assault. “I used to be out chilly and couldn’t do something about it,” Kouri writes. “Like an asshole.” When, in Texas for the funeral,  Kouri asks Leede what she wants, and he or she asks him to “not get too drunk tonight,” Kouri agrees, “as a result of I’d do something for her.”

I’m undecided whether or not I gravitated to the great thing about the scene due to the readability with which Leede describes her isolation when Kouri is handed out after his whiskey or as a result of, drawback drinker although Kouri is, he nonetheless maintains the love for Leede, the will to guard her, to rein his consuming in and honor her. After 100 pages of questioning whether or not Kouri was certainly that asshole — albeit one I had developed empathy for — I get to see him act on love. Wow.

The second salvation is in Kouri’s writing. Once I, somebody physiologically prevented from utilizing extreme quantities of alcohol, nonetheless puzzled, on web page 64, what sort of redemptive arc would possibly lie in wait, I learn:

“Possibly this challenge is my reckoning, my intervention with my drawback, not a consuming drawback, however an issue with style, with idolizing, with romanticizing one thing that didn’t pan out. Identical to cigarettes and male fantasies.”

Writing as an intervention. Hell, sure.

There are the quirky spellings that the editor at CLASH left intact as a result of, sure, they’re a sign of Kouri’s voice: “…each single particular person is consuming a martini and alone, staring on the bar like anamatons, anamatrons? You already know, the robotic factor.”

There’s additionally the chapter titled “The Grief Tune,” which begins with a resonating and true remark: “Of all our failures in America this one is maybe the worst: we don’t know tips on how to grieve.” I’ve written and proceed to put in writing hundreds of phrases on this subject alone, from the dearth of true grief go away from our jobs to the crushing incapability of fogeys to foster wholesome grieving behaviors of their offspring. Individuals are mocked for his or her empty smiles, however worse than their vapidity, these smiles carry the burden of grief evasion. Kouri went on, a web page later, to share a sentiment I also can inhabit: “As a result of the reality, at the very least for me, is that experiencing loss of life younger didn’t make something higher for me, didn’t make me stronger, it simply sucked.”

After which there’s this (secretly, but if I’m being sincere, practically utterly) relatable want:

“I need my books to be as unique as potential, completely esoteric and elitist, solely relatable to a privileged few, pissing on the remainder of the world after which setting fireplace to it, laughing whereas everyone burns and whines about it.”

Close to the top, there comes a three-paragraph chapter titled “Philosophy.” All the second paragraph is Kouri quoting his mom, in response to his concern over how his household seems in his pages. She provides the best phrases any memoirist can hope to listen to from a relative.

“Oh I’m not anxious about it. It’s your story to inform, Kyle. That’s the character of writing nonfiction. I’ve my story, my perspective…. If I don’t like what you wrote, I’ll dwell with it, and we’ll speak about it. In fact… I haven’t learn it but, ha! However my feeling is, an artist’s job is to create, settle for the results of their creation, and exist with a specific amount of melancholy.”

No reliance on Anne Lamott’s quip about individuals behaving higher. Simply the truth that every of us has our tales. Their publication does incur penalties, does invoke melancholy, however that’s what we join once we write. And if nothing else rings true after studying The Downside Drinker, we should acknowledge melancholy’s energy to encourage good writing.

Brian Watson’s essays on queerness and Japan have been revealed in The Queer Love Undertaking, The Audacity’s Rising Author collection, and TriQuarterly, amongst different locations. They have been named a fellow for the 2026 Lambda Literary Digital Writers’ Retreat for Rising LGBTQ+ Authors and a winner within the 2025 Pacific Northwest Writers Affiliation’s Unpublished Guide contest. They share OUT OF JAPAN, their Substack publication, with greater than 900 followers. Their agent is Alisha West at Corvisiero.