Illustration · An attic room under the eaves at Blythewood on a winter day in 1939: a little window full of sky, an iron bed, and the manuscript open on the coverlet in its red covers. Not drawn from a photograph.

Greenwich and Brooklyn · Early 1939

The red manuscript

Her doctor handed her a book written by alcoholics; she threw it out the window, found one line in it that stopped her rage, and followed it to a house in Brooklyn where she had come home.

“I could finish their sentences! They could finish my sentences! We talked each other’s language! It was not a room of strangers. These were my people. I had come home.”

Marty M., on her first AA meeting, April 1939, as she told it later · quoted in A Biography of Mrs. Marty Mann, 2001

A book written by people like you

Early in 1939 Marty M. was thirty-four, and she had been a charity patient at Blythewood, a private sanitarium in Greenwich, Connecticut, since the summer before. Her psychiatrist, Dr. Harry Tiebout, had told her she could never drink again. She didn’t believe him. On passes into New York she still came back drunk now and then, and she had learned to hide it. When word came that he wanted to see her at his house, where he was sick in bed, she was sure she was about to be sent away.

Instead she found him propped up on pillows, delighted, with a document lying on the coverlet: “a thick 8½-by-11-inch multilith document with red cardboard covers held together with cord.” It was one of the four hundred loan copies of the book the sober alcoholics of New York and Akron were about to publish. “This is the prepublication manuscript of a book written by people like you,” he told her. On the first page were two words: Alcoholics Anonymous.

For years doctors had called her people like you. Now her illness had a name. “I love the word alcoholic!” Then she hit the capital G’s, four or five to a page. She thought the writing was poor, and the book was all about men; its one story by a woman didn’t speak to her. She threw the manuscript out the window and went off to get drunk. For the next six weeks she read a page or two a day, just enough to argue with Tiebout.

The turn came on a winter day, after a furious row with the sanitarium’s business manager. Up in her attic room under the eaves, she saw red, and planned to buy whiskey, come back and wreck the place. The book was lying open on her bed. One line stood out, as she remembered it: “We cannot live with anger.” The next thing she knew, she was on her knees beside the bed, and the rage was gone. She ran down to Tiebout’s office, afraid she had lost her mind. “I believe you’ve had an authentic spiritual experience,” he told her. She went back up and read the book through “in one gulp.”

On Tuesday, April 11, 1939, the date her biographers give, she took the five o’clock train to New York. After dinner on Sutton Place with an AA member and his wife, she rode the subway to Brooklyn, to the brownstone at 182 Clinton Street where Bill W., one of AA’s two founders, lived with his wife Lois. Some forty people were packed into the rooms downstairs. She ran upstairs and threw herself, crying, on the coats piled on the bed. Lois came up after her: “We’re waiting for you below, and we want you.”

About twenty-five of them were alcoholics, all men. She found herself talking to them as she had never talked to anyone. Afterward she went upstairs with Bill and some of the men and talked about resentments until three in the morning. She said she had never had one, and they laughed. She spent the night at her sister’s apartment in the city, and in the morning a fellow patient at Blythewood, Grennie, telephoned to ask how it had gone. “Grennie, there’s just one thing I can say. We are not alone any more.”

Listen The red manuscript About 1 minute

Compare the accounts

Five tellings

How did the book reach her, and what did she tell Grennie? Here are five accounts, and when each was set down.

Her own story in the Big Book and the words Pass It On quotes are hers. Bill and Lois W. knew her from that night on. Her biographers worked from fifty-one tapes of her talks, her writings and their own interviews. Quotations are short excerpts, shown side by side for comparison.

1955

Her own story

16 years after · written by Marty, unsigned

“That was the point at which my doctor gave me the book Alcoholics Anonymous to read. The first chapters were a revelation to me.”

No manuscript and no window: weeks of balking at God, then a crisis and one line in the open book. Of the evening itself she writes only that “I went trembling into a house in Brooklyn filled with strangers” and found she had come home. No Grennie.

“Women Suffer Too,” in Alcoholics Anonymous, the Big Book, second edition (1955); still in the fourth (2001).

1957

Bill W.

18 years after · his history of AA

“The first reading made her rebellious, but the second convinced her.”

After the meeting she carries the news back to the sanitarium herself: “Grennie, we aren’t alone any more.”

Alcoholics Anonymous Comes of Age (1957), “When A.A. Came of Age.”

1979

Lois W.

40 years after · her memoir

“It is reported that when Marty threw the book out of the window, Dr. Tiebout insisted she get it back …”

Of these five accounts, this is the first with the thrown book, as something Lois heard. The evening she saw for herself: “I well remember the day she came.” Back in Greenwich: “Grennie, we are no longer alone.”

Lois Remembers (1979), chapter 11, “The Clinton Street Boys.”

1984

Marty, in Pass It On

45 years after · quoting her own recollections

“I couldn’t stand all those capital G’s … I didn’t want to read a book that was all about God.”

Pass It On adds that she refused to read it at first, and that the arguing went on for months. In her words, by the night of the meeting: “I had read the book about 20 times by then.” For Grennie, the book follows Lois’s wording.

Pass It On (1984), AA’s biography of Bill W., chapter 12. The book doesn’t say when or where she said them.

2001

Her biographers

62 years after · from her tapes, writings and interviews

“Grennie, there’s just one thing I can say. We are not alone any more.”

The fullest telling, and the latest. Tiebout hands her the manuscript at his own house, from his sickbed. She throws it out the window and goes drinking. Six weeks of a page or two a day; then the rage, the line, and the whole book in one sitting. By the meeting she has read it three or four times. Grennie hears the news by telephone the next morning, while she is at her sister’s apartment in New York.

Sally Brown and David R. Brown, A Biography of Mrs. Marty Mann (2001), chapters 12 and 13.

Not alone any more

Every telling keeps the doctor, the book and the house in Brooklyn, and every one ends in the same place: she wasn’t alone any more. They part on the details. The thrown book appears only in Lois’s secondhand report and in her biographers’ account, built from her own talks and writings. She read it twice, three or four times, or about twenty. And Grennie hears the news at the sanitarium or by telephone.

For a closer look

Go deeper

The line she remembered, the only woman in the room, and the doctor who handed her the book.

The line that wasn’t there

She told it much the same way all her life. In her Big Book story the sentence catches her eye from the book lying open on her bed. In the recollections Pass It On quotes, the whole page had gone red but that one line: “It was jet black. And it stood out as if it was cut out of wood.”

But the chapter she was reading, “How It Works,” never said it. In the manuscript she was given, the line read, “If we are to live, we must be free of anger.” The printed book changed the tense: “If we were to live, we had to be free of anger.” Pass It On gives the printed line in a footnote; her biographers give the manuscript’s. What she remembered was what the line meant to her.

The only woman

“Aren’t there any AA women in this group?” she asked that night. There weren’t. About twenty-five of the people at Clinton Street were alcoholics, all men; the rest were wives and children. Some of the men doubted that a woman, young and plainly well brought up, could be a real alcoholic.

Others had come before her. Florence R. came to AA in New York in 1937, and her story, “A Feminine Victory,” was the only story by a woman alcoholic in the manuscript. It opens on her “rather doubtful distinction” of being the only woman alcoholic among them. Marty couldn’t see herself in it. Florence went to Washington, D.C., drank again, and died there before Marty’s first anniversary in AA.

One small thing told her she was in. The first printed copies of the book had just come, and the members were signing them. “I knew I was in, when I was asked to sign the book, along with the rest.”

The doctor’s side

Harry Tiebout wasn’t an alcoholic. Before the manuscript came, he had told her after one bad binge, “I’ve done everything I know how to do.” He used to say that Marty “was the victim of his ignorance.” She answered that she hoped many others would be his victims too.

In 1944 he wrote about her, without her name, in the American Journal of Psychiatry: “My first contact with the group came through the medium of a thirty-four-year-old woman patient who had been under my care at Blythewood for several months.” Giving her the book, he wrote, was “an effort to jar her a bit.” He counted her among the patients who changed gradually, not all at once, though she always told it as a sudden change.

Bill W. wrote that the two recoveries, Marty’s and Grennie’s, left Tiebout “electrified.” For years afterward he urged other psychiatrists to take AA seriously. In 1955 he told AA’s twentieth-anniversary convention, “I joined A.A. by proxy in 1939 when a patient of mine became a member of the New York group.”

Sources

Sally Brown and David R. Brown, A Biography of Mrs. Marty Mann. Hazelden, 2001. Chapters 11–13. Its unattributed quotes of her come from fifty-one tapes of her talks or from her writings.
“Women Suffer Too,” in Alcoholics Anonymous (the Big Book), second edition, 1955; quoted from the fourth edition, 2001.
Alcoholics Anonymous Comes of Age. AA World Services, 1957. “When A.A. Came of Age”; Dr. Harry Tiebout’s talk at St. Louis, 1955; and Appendix E:b, his paper “Therapeutic Mechanism of Alcoholics Anonymous,” American Journal of Psychiatry, January 1944.
Lois Remembers. Al-Anon Family Groups, 1979. Chapter 11, “The Clinton Street Boys.”
Pass It On. AA World Services, 1984. Chapter 12, quoting Marty’s recollections.
Alcoholics Anonymous, first edition. Works Publishing, 1939. “How It Works” and “A Feminine Victory.” The manuscript’s wording is from an online transcription of a copy of the loan manuscript, with later changes marked.