Gately on Boston AA — "Near the end of his Ennet…"
Near the end of his Ennet residency, at like eight months clean and more or less free of any chemical compulsion, going to the Shattuck every A.M. and working the Steps and getting Active and pounding out meetings like a madman, Don Gately suddenly started to remember things he would just as soon not have. Remembered. Actually remembered’s probably not the best word. It was more like he started to almost reexperience things that he’d barely even been there to experience, in terms of emotionally, in the first place.
Context
The theme's recovery-side thesis: sobriety strips the anesthetic and the past arrives — not recalled but reexperienced, because the boy who lived it was too numbed to be present the first time. The prose audits its own verb in real time ("Remembered. Actually remembered's probably not the best word."), the book stopping to define what kind of memory this is, since the ordinary word won't hold it.