Sometimes we approach this podcast with a plan. Tamar makes it. I take the train off the tracks.
This week it came off in the very best way, so we dropped straight in.
A.J. Daulerio runs The Small Bow, the recovery publication I found this past summer and was deeply embarrassed not to have known about. I call myself the Kevin Bacon of recovery. We both come from magazines. I should have known. I fell on my sword, soberly and fast, and gave it the flowers it was due.
A.J., on mic: “It was a lot of flowers.”
He Interviews Himself in the Car
A.J. opened by admitting that when he listens to podcasts on the school run, he turns the volume down seven minutes in and pretends he’s the guest. His go-to was Marc Maron until WTF ended. Now it’s Anna Sale.
He’s been talking to himself since he was five. “I didn’t have an imaginary friend. I just had voices in my head.”
Me: “That explains a lot.”
He’s ten years sober as of July, and the traits he thought sobriety would fix turned out to be the ones that were there before the drinking. Therapy’s answer: “Well, they won’t. You just have to manage them differently now.” He had a 25-minute share to give that night and no canned pitch, so he workshopped it on us.
Literary Meat vs. Sober BuzzFeed
The Small Bow started with a grant. When the money ran out, A.J. couldn’t pay other writers, so it became a newsletter and, reluctantly, more about him. Half his readers are in recovery. The rest, in his words, “are just like lonely and looking for something to figure themselves out.” A big Al-Anon crowd. He likes that, and he protects it.
Then he said the line I’ve been repeating all week. He pitched the compilation to the people who sell it in bookstores as “chicken soup for the dark night of the soul.”
That’s The Small Bow. Here’s us: I told him The Sober Curator is sober BuzzFeed. Listicles, culture, rainbows and butterflies, with the occasional meatier piece when a contributor throws down. The Small Bow is literary meat. When I found it, it spoke to the part of my heart that wants more than the stories in the back of the book.
He asked if I’d ever turned a story down. Reader stories, no. Sponsored stories, constantly. Treatment centers, hard no, and it turns out we made the same rule for the same reason.
Sound Baths and Trust Falls
A.J. asked whether I consider us wellness.
No. Tamar says there’s no other category for us. A.J. doesn’t want health and wellness either. I said sound baths and trust falls, I’m not interested. A.J. said he’d take sound bath if they broke it out as its own category. “I wanna be sound bath.”
Here’s the hole I saw back in 2016 and still see. Sober Instagram, sober TikTok, sober Pinterest, everybody has a book, everybody has a podcast. Cool. All of it is about rock bottom and early recovery. Would’ve used it in 2006.
Twenty years in, I still have a lot of shitty problems and I make a lot of shitty mistakes.
They’re classier. They’re better problems.
I don’t need an article on how to navigate a date sober. I’ve done it badly 800 times. (A.J. did the math.) I think we’re building a category that doesn’t exist yet, for people ten or more years in. A.J.’s version is cleaner: there’s abstinence, there’s sobriety, and there’s recovery. Twelve-step is “one part of, like, nine different things that I have to do to recover, to not be an asshole anymore.” To stay married. To go to Little League games. The other eight are what he wants to read and write about, and so do I.
His oxygen mask right now, by the way, is Starburst. Red and pink. “You unwrap them and close your eyes, they’re all the same. That’s how they get you.”
The Harper’s Story That Started Everything
The origin of The Small Bow is a magazine article. Early sobriety, not yet committed to 12-step, a friend handed him Clancy Martin’s “The Drunk’s Club” from Harper’s, subtitled “A.A., the cult that cures.” He assumed it was a takedown. It wasn’t. It was a writer in the rooms, bearing things A.J. had never seen anyone articulate, and he gasped his way through it.
“I will pay Harper’s $100 a year because they had this story exist at the time when I really needed it.”
So he built a place for a bunch of those stories, for “anyone like me in that moment, not really in crisis, but a little adrift.” The first writer he hired was Clancy Martin, who turned in 6,000 terrifying words about relapse. A.J. doesn’t call it service. “It’s fucking fun for me.”
The meetings came during the pandemic. Not 12-step, but they ripped off most of the format. Now there are seven a week and A.J.mostly stays out of it. He’s not trying to build a community. He’s trying to build the publication he wanted to read at 50 days. He told us what Google gave him instead. I’ll leave that in the episode. It’s the reason the site exists.
Fourth Step Dinner Theater
A.J. doesn’t tell the Hulk Hogan story at meetings anymore. He used to lean on it hard, because he didn’t think he had a good enough rock bottom to be respected in the rooms, so he’d default to his first three months, when the most public thing in his life was a trial.
“It was like fourth step dinner theater.”
Every defect of character tossed to a jury. The late Hulk Hogan’s lawyers made him look, in his words, “like a complete psycho.” Three weeks sequestered, on the cover of the Post and the Times.
He did every single thing a sponsor tells you not to do in year one: moved, changed jobs, new relationship, documentary crew, Esquire feature, kept talking. Attention was its own drug. A producer who’d bought a screenplay about his life told him they wanted to “humanize” the story.
“I’m the writer. I’m the human.”
What he figured out, eventually: “All the things that I thought were being taken away from me were also the things I needed to let go of the most.” He had a person who loved him, a baby on the way, a roof. He was doing early recovery badly because he was doing it on a stage.
The humility lesson came from an Uber driver in Florida. A.J. would stretch out in the back seat and say he used to be a writer, then mention the trial, then the $100 million. “No, I did not hear about that.” Then the one follow-up question anyone ever asked.
“So you met Hulk Hogan?”
Nobody gives a shit. He says it’s the thing he’s still learning at ten years: “I don’t have to be that interesting.”
The Part I’ll Keep Here
A.J. named something I’ve only ever said in person: I built this site, and The Sober Curator Podcast, and BACKSTAGE, partly because I made the internet into a magical place where the things that happen in church basements couldn’t happen. They do. During the Clubhouse years we had a weekly gathering, and a moderator in Las Vegas went quiet one October. We lost him. We never went back on Clubhouse.
It’s part of our community. I’m never going to like it and I’m never going to get used to it.
I’ll leave that there.
What He’d Tell Year One
We let A.J. interview himself, since he’s so good at it. The question he wanted: what would you tell people in their first year dealing with outside issues, a lawsuit, a public reckoning, a bad headline?
He spent his first year in LA punishing himself. No Christmas, no beach, no good life until he’d earned it back. He lost a year to that, and then a couple more tying his happiness to a verdict, a job, and a book deal he couldn’t control.
“You just don’t wait for that life that’s after this big thing. You can still go to the beach.”
I told him about outpatient homework in my first year: watch My Name Is Bill W., the James Woods one. My son, who’d been to meetings with me with headphones on, wanted to go do something. “Mom, can you just fast-forward to the part they get sober?”
If only. There’s still no button. A.J. says the self-destruct one is always blinking, so he keeps adding things that stop him from pushing it. That’s the nine.
Where to Find AJ
Read and support The Small Bow. The newsletter is free on Tuesdays and Fridays, the meetings are free every day of the week (the Tuesday one is big; I’ve been, once, and A.J. would like it noted that I haven’t been back). The Small Book: On Addiction, Shame, Grief, Sex, Love, and the Strange Art of Living With Yourself, by A.J. and The Small Bow Family Orchestra, is out Dec. 29, and we’re reading it in BACKSTAGE in January.
And if this conversation hit you in that “okay, but what does my actual routine look like” place, that’s exactly what BACKSTAGE is. Not another accountability app. A room full of people doing the unglamorous daily maintenance work right alongside you. If you’d rather hang out with AJ, go. I have a membership. The tide rises all the sober boats.
You’re allowed to build your whole life around a routine nobody will ever write a headline about.
So tell me: 12-step, or whatever your version is, is one of your nine. What are the other eight?
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Who is A.J. Daulerio?
A.J. Daulerio is a writer and editor, formerly of Deadspin and Gawker, and the founder of The Small Bow, a recovery publication launched in 2017. He got sober in 2016, during the Hulk Hogan v. Gawker trial. He lives in Los Angeles and was a guest on Season 2, Episode 19 of The Sober Curator Podcast.
What is The Small Bow?
The Small Bow is a recovery publication founded by A.J. Daulerio with the tagline “expanding the definition of recovery.” It publishes literary first-person essays and reported pieces, sends a free newsletter on Tuesdays and Fridays with a paid Sunday edition, runs free Zoom meetings seven days a week, and produces a podcast. Its readership is roughly half people in recovery and half people who, in Daulerio’s words, are “lonely and looking for something to figure themselves out,” including a large Al-Anon audience.
What is The Small Book?
The Small Book: On Addiction, Shame, Grief, Sex, Love, and the Strange Art of Living With Yourself is a compilation of writing from The Small Bow, credited to A.J. Daulerio and The Small Bow Family Orchestra. It is scheduled for release on Dec. 29, 2026, through Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Bookshop. Daulerio describes it as “chicken soup for the dark night of the soul.”
What does “fourth step dinner theater” mean?
It’s A.J. Daulerio’s phrase for being sued by Hulk Hogan three months into sobriety. The fourth step in 12-step programs is a written moral inventory of your own defects of character; Daulerio’s were read aloud to a jury during a three-week trial in 2016, covered on the front pages of the New York Post and New York Times.
Are The Small Bow meetings 12-step meetings?
No. Daulerio says on the podcast that The Small Bow meetings “rip off most of their format” but are not 12-step meetings. They started during the pandemic, are free, run on Zoom seven days a week, and are hosted by volunteers rather than by Daulerio. The schedule is at thesmallbow.com/meetings.
What’s the difference between abstinence, sobriety, and recovery?
On the episode, A.J. Daulerio describes them as three stages of his own path: abstinence is not using, sobriety is the spiritual work (12-step, for him), and recovery is everything required to live well, which he says is roughly nine things of which 12-step is one. The Sober Curator’s position is that readers choose their own labels; the site serves people who identify as sober, alcohol-free, zero-proof, or in long-term recovery.
