Writer Julia Bainbridge on Sobriety, Loneliness, and Changing Careers

Julia Bainbridge photo by Sam Ortiz

I’ve long been fascinated by the work and perspective of the subject of this week’s interview, writer Julia Bainbridge. Julia is well known for her coverage of the non-alcoholic beverage market – her book of non-alc cocktail recipes, Good Drinks, came out in 2020 – and for her podcast, The Lonely Hour, which delved into the somewhat taboo topic of loneliness. 

Both subjects feel even more pressing now. As the Wall Street Journal explains, according to a somewhat recent survey, women aged 41 to 57 have reported “the sharpest rise in loneliness” during the pandemic. Women’s drinking behavior has also changed. Anecdotally, I know many women who have either quit drinking entirely or have cut way back, but the data shows that drinking has spiked; Dr. Sarah Wakeman, medical director of the Substance Use Disorders Initiative at Massachusetts General Hospital, says that "There's actually been a 41% increase in heavy drinking days among women” since the pandemic began.

I spoke with Julia about not drinking, her interest in loneliness, and about her decision to pivot into a new career.

You have worked at some of the biggest magazines in food. What did the beginning of your career look like?
In undergrad, all my extracurricular time was spent getting clips. I worked for the student newspaper at Boston University, which I cannot believe we put out every day. We reported on campus news as well as Boston city news. 

By the time I graduated, I had a pretty hefty portfolio of published work. [Then] I decided, "I'm going to combine that [media experience] with my interest in food. I'm going to go to culinary school. And that's going to give me a real leg up when I move to New York and try to break into food magazines." Little did I know, of course, many people who write about food have culinary degrees. I did a Le Cordon Bleu program that was a little over a year. 

I've sort of come full circle with the cocktail stuff. My first gig was at Food & Wine as an editorial assistant on the cocktail guide. I spent that year, or just under a year, doing the work, but also starting to network, and luckily got a gig over at Condé Nast Traveler as an editorial assistant. I was there for a little while and then moved onto Bon Appétit.

Why did you launch your podcast, The Lonely Hour? And why that topic versus, say, anger?

That is a question I'm still working out the answer to. I don't know if this is the right way to put it, but I don't have a lot of shame around being human, I guess. There are certain subjects that are taboo to many people that – for nothing I should be rewarded for – just aren't for me. 

It was a combination of things that had been knocking around in my brain for a while [as I] looked at modern life. Urbanization, declining birth rates, high divorce rates, replacement of the traditional multi-generational family with a nuclear family. Before, I don't know, the 19th century, there were these intricate webs of interdependence that I didn't see in my life, certainly not in New York. Then I was looking at my own life and the lives of those around me. More and more people joining the economy of freelancers and gig workers. Union and church and club memberships declining. More and more people living alone than ever before in human history. 

There's this American idealization of individualism and independence. Honestly, capitalism is a driver of large-scale loneliness, exceptionalism too. We have this focus on improvement and forward motion. Many of us have the impression that we need to be extraordinary.

Loneliness is really endemic to being human, and yet it's so taboo in our culture. Maybe the pandemic has shaken this all up and shifted our perspective. 

What I wanted to do with the show initially was to not problematize it. I launched it with a mission to, and this word is so overused now, but destigmatize loneliness in a way. Could I show how entirely normal it is through storytelling? Could there even be joy and humor in the mix?

The poet and philosopher David Whyte has this way of inverting the common understanding of something to reveal an often counterintuitive meaning, but a deeper one. He talks about loneliness as a doorway to becoming. A difficult and vulnerable doorway, one you don't always want to go through, but one that's simplifying our life and bringing us down to a foundational understanding of what we need.

That aloneness is a necessary clearing of the space, and that maybe we shouldn't be in this binary mode of trying to cure loneliness in order to be cemented to others and see it in a seasonal way. That it's necessary for every human being to go through these thresholds of deep loneliness at stages of life. If you didn't, you wouldn't change. I think that is true. Through talking to people over the course of the time of the show, loneliness told some people where they needed to go. But acceptance of loneliness as part of the human condition doesn't mean that chronic loneliness isn't an issue.

It doesn't mean that these fraying social bonds actually aren't of concern to me. As I was making the show, I studied loneliness and read about it on the side. In the years since, Cigna, BBC, and Kaiser published loneliness studies. I think this is part of why [the show got] a lot of press – because those studies came out. 

My thinking got more complicated and, I guess, more sophisticated around it. I am concerned about the ways in which Covid might worsen – this is actually a term that Vivek Murthy came up with – the social recession. Even before the pandemic, we had gig workers, freelancers, people living alone. Arbiters of meaning are changing, and what's replacing them? We have geographic mobility, cool, but we yearn for community and a daily sense of mattering to others. Also, if the point of the show was to destigmatize the everyday loneliness that's a part of the human condition, I don't know that the show has a place anymore, now that we've been through this experience of Covid.

“Lonely” was not a word you heard often, outside of music. I remember a friend talking to me before I launched the show and admitting to loneliness, and it just hit like a ton of bricks. I'd never heard somebody say that before, admit to it. There really was, or is, a taboo around it. We are all a lot more comfortable with that word now.

[Now] I'm looking to formalize my knowledge around even basic human psychology. Can I take these conversations I've been having into a more private realm where they can be ongoing and potentially more directly impactful? I don't know. Can I, down the line, find ways to challenge some of the cultural norms that got us to this disconnected place [like] our placement of value on individualism? [Or] our definition of success as the pursuit of power, wealth, and fame? Even the ways in which we live and work. How might I help promote community-building practices? How does systemic inequality contribute to isolation?

That last piece is why social work, in particular, versus other paths towards doing clinical therapy, is the track that I'm on.

[It] mirrors my journey, because I started out with concerns about loneliness and isolation, and yet I decided that the show would be made in a particular way to normalize this feeling. And then the more I read up on, I don't know, some of the downsides of modern life for our mental well-being and the intersection of that with loneliness and isolation, I changed my tune. I think we should accept loneliness as part of the human experience, but I'm not talking about chronic loneliness or these larger cultural problems. I guess there's room for both, but it took me a while of making the show to work these things out. Does that make sense?

Yes. We are not in a good place. People are struggling. 

And loneliness is subjective. It's a feeling that we don't have enough social connection in our life. I guess isolation is an object of measure of how many people we have around us.  Loneliness is that sense of being unmoored and unanchored. It's really that sense that you won't be seen or found by the world in the way you want to be found, or by another person. 

Actually I have no sophisticated thoughts here. I just think that something about the pandemic did bring us down to the bone and the essentials, and it reminded people maybe of their mortality perhaps, but certainly that deep want to be seen by another person.

I want to talk about drinking, or rather, not drinking. One of your first jobs was working on cocktail guides.

Oh, I did the most research, let me tell you. It's interesting because I have a drinking problem.

You published a book on non-alcoholic cocktails, Good Drinks, before the non-alc beverage trend really took off. What made you want to write the book?

I misuse and abuse alcohol and come from a long line of people who do. And I did not yet know that I had alcohol-use disorder at the time, so my doing my hefty research, as I put it to you earlier, was not necessarily problematic, or not problematic yet. But it became clear over the course of the next eight years or so that my relationship to alcohol was unhealthy. I wish I could say that this was all strategic, but it was just lucky that I happened to reckon with my own relationship, and subsequently remove alcohol from my life for the first time. I say that because it's been in and out, and it has not been a linear journey. 

I'm lucky that my alcohol-use disorder doesn't present in such a way, even from the time I was newly sober, that makes me uncomfortable being in bar and restaurant environments. Lucky because my work required me to be in bar and restaurant environments a lot. So I was out and had an interest in knowing what was going on on menus and what ingredients were trending and whatnot, but also now had a personal interest in there being delicious things for me to drink that didn't have alcohol in them. It was clear that something was happening, because it was no longer simply soda. More energy was being put into this category. Not everywhere, but it was happening.

The book and my writing about this is a journalistic endeavor. In the beginning of the book, I almost struggled to say that I wrote it, because it's really a compendium. It rests on the work of other people, and I had the joy of putting it together and celebrating their work.

My interest in this category of drinks absolutely comes out of my sobriety. And that sobriety is not just a lifestyle choice or for health reasons that have to do with weight, or beauty, my skin, or anything else. It absolutely comes out of a struggle with alcohol. But I'm so glad that that's not the only story, that this conversation around sober curiosity, whatever we want to call it, is happening. I think things like Dry January lower the barrier to entry into these conversations about our relationships to alcohol. I'm all for it, but I'm also not about demonizing alcohol.

I'm not anti alcohol. I think it's great for those who can manage it. It's a social aid. It triggers the endorphin system that lowers anxiety. It allows for the forming of bonds. And I miss it sometimes. But it's also a highly addictive substance, and not everyone can manage it. And if you look at the popularity of things like Dry January, the argument could be made that it shows just how difficult it is to consume alcohol in a healthy way. People need a break or a reset. But I love that there are people who choose not to drink for all kinds of reasons.

And so for them and for me and other people with alcohol-use disorder, I'm just all about celebrating the delicious adult things there are now for us to drink. You're right about there being more products on the market. Seedlip was the only one that was around at the time that I filed my manuscript, so a lot of the recipes in my book are built from the ground up and require a good bit of labor. But what a joy it's been to taste through all these bottles that are around now.

Tell me about your decision to go back to school for social work. Are you still going to work on media projects? What was that pivot, if you want to call it a pivot?

I think school is solving two problems [for me]. One is how to move the work around loneliness forward. And look, loneliness and the drinking stuff are not unrelated. Looking back at the past decade of my professional life, [I’m] someone who wants to help people feel less alone. I think that's foundational to social work.

I was one of the lucky ones who was given a little free time by the pandemic, meaning that once my social calendar was stricken from the record, that space was free to me. I could use it to put on the front burner that thing that had been on the back burner. 

The volume and the pace is crazy, and I'm just staying above water. So unfortunately, though I wanted to be doing reporting at the same time and continuing to write about alcohol-free drinks and I launched this newsletter, I have found it impossible to do that on top of my field placement. I'm a little nervous about that. I do feel like I got myself into this place where I'm one of the big voices on that topic. It's been fulfilling in a lot of different ways. I hope school doesn't make it such that I lose my footing there. But the intention would be, hopefully, once I get a handle on this new pace, to keep writing and staying in media in some way, shape, or form.