Gately's staff snippets (pp. 562–563)

Joelle describes the Commitment's Chair — a former nuclear auditor — and the word she reaches for is "fatherly," twice, hedged both times by "broken." Gately I.D.s it instantly: "The sponsor type. My sponsor's like that, Joelle, in White Flag." This is the theme's substitute-father pole in its AA form: not the intact authority a father is supposed to be but a broken authority, men who "used to be somebody else," whose power over the newly-sober is precisely that they've been ruined and rebuilt. For a room full of people whose actual fathers were absent or abusive, the found father can only be a broken one — authority you'll accept exactly because it wears its damage openly.