newcomers romanticize the longer-sober
Joelle doesn’t know that newly sober people are awfully vulnerable to the delusion that people with more sober time than them are romantic and heroic, instead of clueless and terrified and just muddling through day-by-day like everybody else in AA is
Context
The narrator diagnosing the bedside romance as a recovery hazard: the newcomer's admiration of anyone with more sober time is itself a symptom, a projection onto the day-by-day muddler of a heroism nobody in the rooms actually feels. It is the disease's transfer of dependency from the Substance to a person — the same reach for something outside the self to lean the whole weight on — and the book names it as delusion even as it renders it tenderly.