New Baby, Old Vice

One of the slimmest, most elliptically poignant modern short stories, “Escapes,” by Joy Williams, from a collection of the same title, is about a fractious relationship between a child and her alcoholic mother. To the narrator, a young girl, the ever-pervasive vodka fumes signify “daring and deception, hopes and little lies.” The mother smells “like the glass … always in the sink in the morning.” (Note to alcoholics who drink vodka because they think it does not smell: it does.) “Escapes” is not only about the humiliation and confusion of seeing a parent drunk, but also about bearing witness to a parent’s abandonment and self-destruction.

I mention the vodka fumes, the deception and the parent-child relationship in “Escapes” because I imagine that Jowita Bydlowska’s Drunk Mom: A Memoir is roughly the same story told from the mother’s point of view. At one point during the...