The White Flag AA meeting — "Joelle cuts off his interjection and…"
Joelle cuts off his interjection and says that but that her trouble with it is that ‘But For the Grace of God’ is a subjunctive, a counterfactual, she says, and can make sense only when introducing a conditional clause, like e.g. ‘But For the Grace of God I would have died on Molly Notkin’s bathroom floor,’ so that an indicative transposition like ‘I’m here But For the Grace of God’ is, she says, literally senseless, and regardless of whether she hears it or not it’s meaningless, and that the foamy enthusiasm with which these folks can say what in fact means nothing at all makes her want to put her head in a Radarange at the thought that Substances have brought her to the sort of pass where this is the sort of language she has to have Blind Faith in.
Context
The theme's center of gravity: Joelle, two days out of a defib-paddle O.D., dismantles a recovery slogan on strictly grammatical grounds — subjunctive, counterfactual, conditional clause, indicative transposition, the full prescriptive toolkit — and her horror isn't that the slogan is trite but that it's senseless, and that her life now depends on Blind Faith in senseless language. Grammar as the lexical mind's last fortification against surrender, deployed mid-meeting at the raffle-break. (Note the syntax of the reporting frame itself — "says that but that her trouble" — the narration buckling slightly around her precision; preserved as written.) [sweep — the anchor]