the Chair who used to be somebody else — "he spoke about himself like he…"
he spoke about himself like he used to be somebody else. Like a whole different person. He said he used to wear a four-piece suit and the fourth piece was him.
Context
The meeting's testimony as Joelle reports it: a Commitment speaker with a quiet, broken, fatherly authority who talks about his old self as a wholly different person — the four-piece-suit joke (the fourth piece was him) that an Allston Group guy tells all the time. This is the Program's core narrative shape, the before-and-after conversion in which the drinking self is spoken of in the third person, and the authority the doctrine confers is specifically a broken one, power that comes from having been wrecked.