Most married couples will tell you it takes a lot of work to keep their relationship afloat, if not always running smoothly.
But most spouses won’t go into all the details about what happens behind closed doors when things get rough and the lines of communication become frayed or even severed entirely.
Sean McCann and Andrea Aragon are not most married couples.
For the past seven years, since he played his final show with Newfoundland’s popular folk band Great Big Sea, McCann’s been a solo performer with five albums to his credit and a new career as a public speaker and advocate for sobriety, recovery and mental health care with the motto, “Help Your Self”.
A 2019 appointee to the Order of Canada, McCann cites 35 years of alcoholism — and nearly nine years since he took his last drink — and details the effects of that journey in his new memoir co-written with his wife, One Good Reason, from Halifax’s Nimbus Publishing.
Subtitled “A memoir of addiction and recovery, music and love” the book covers a lot of ground over its 224 pages, from a childhood touched by trauma and a turbulent relationship with the Catholic Church in St. John’s through the heyday of Great Big Sea, and his marriage and family life with Aragon and their two sons.
A battle worth fighting
Through it all, the common thread is McCann’s increasing reliance on alcohol to function, and how it nearly tore his family apart, told in both his own and Aragon’s voices, giving both sides to a story that continues today in Manotick, Ont., their home for the past five years just outside of Ottawa.
“This book was a battle, but it was a battle worth fighting. It was an uphill struggle, it was hard work, but we’re really proud of it,” says McCann, sharing a video chat screen with Aragon.
“I think like anything, if something is very difficult, there’s usually a large reward for your efforts. At least I still believe that. I think this book will pay off in droves, and by that I mean it’ll probably have a positive impact on many lives.”
Aragon is equally forthcoming about her own past, growing up in Utah as the daughter of a Vietnam vet coping with PTSD and substance abuse issues, coping with an eating disorder and going through her first failed marriage before meeting McCann during one of Great Big Sea’s U.S. tours.
She describes One Good Reason as a visit to some dark places, for both of them, but ultimately calls it a book about finding “the light at the end of the tunnel.”
“There is light in the darkness; we just wanted it to be a hopeful book for people who struggle with any number of issues,” she says.
“As you see in the book, we both have quite a few issues.”
McCann counters with one of his patented grins and proclaims, “Oh no, not me, I’m issue-free! I’m A-OK! We can move on now.”
Big moments
One Good Reason charts a series of difficult, but crucial turning points for the couple. These include the day on Nov. 9, 2011 when McCann decided he was never going to have another drink, and the tweet almost exactly two years later that declared he was on his last tour with Great Big Sea as the trio was celebrating its 20th anniversary of bringing its East Coast kitchen party bravado to arenas across Canada and stages around the world.
And then there was the Sept. 26, 2014 London Recovery Breakfast in Ontario where he not only discussed his personal struggle with alcoholism but also publically revealed that he had been sexually abused by a priest — described in the book as a close family friend — when he was a teenager.
Throughout the book, you understand how difficult this story has been to tell, one he resisted putting on paper at first because he considered himself a songwriter who took those personal vignettes and “reduced them to 14-line sonnets with singable choruses” and wasn’t sure about switching gears to working in prose after 35 years of crafting tunes.
“It was like the opposite muscles, and the unraveling of that, and it also meant spending a lot more time on the details. And that was painful,” he recalls.
“But as a writer, I think it really helped me. It took a long time.”
When he shared his first solo draft with his wife, she showed him her journal that she’d been keeping as the life events he’d been chronicling had taken place, and he realized that his book would be incomplete without her side of the conversation.
“Ultimately this story wasn’t about the band, or what happened to me (as a teen), but about our marriage and our relationship, and how those other things had impacted our life together, and how we survived it.”
Connecting with others
Aragon says most of the impetus for the book came as a result of the speaking engagements McCann was undertaking, sharing his story of recovery and commitment, where hearing the question “When are you going to write a book?” from the people he spoke with became a regular occurrence.
“He knew there was a need for people to read what he had written, to see that kind of bravery and vulnerability, so maybe they, in turn, could face their own issues and their own demons,” she says.
“To be able to put that into something that they can carry with them, and have that vulnerability on their person so they can feel a little bit stronger, I think that was a need that he and I both saw.”
If the couple had one watchword heading into the project, it was honesty. Whether it was about their own weaknesses and frustrations, the seismic shift in their social life brought on by McCann’s sobriety, or their fractious relationship with his other family, Great Big Sea.
There’s no sense that the prose is pulling its punches, especially when Aragon recalls the nights her husband didn’t come home, or how the effort to save their family cost them their friends. And having the freedom now to keep things out in the open has made a vast difference in strengthening their relationship.
“When you embrace recovery, honesty really matters,” says McCann. “I think that’s the essential difference between my life now and my life before. With booze and drugs ... you let a lot of stuff slide, and the truth doesn’t matter as much.
“Honesty is a very subjective thing, but nothing else works in recovery. You can’t be in denial in recovery, you can’t be OK with just certain things. You have to stick to it and not give up. It doesn’t allow for the same amount of bullshit (as before), to be honest.”
By releasing One Good Reason in the middle of a pandemic, with an e-book edition also available for download, McCann and Aragon hope their story can help those who are stuck in isolation with their own demons, looking for something that will let them know they’re not alone.
It's going to be all right
As a working musician, McCann is no different from his peers nationwide, eagerly awaiting the day when it’s deemed safe to be back on the road performing for fans wherever they can gather.
“I do want to go back to the West Coast, I do want to go back to Newfoundland and Halifax and all the Maritimes, so now I want to go buy a van, just like back in 1993, so I can drive all over the place,” says McCann enthusiastically, while his wife laughs with a facial expression that clearly says, “Yeah, like that’s going to happen.”
“Why don’t you write some songs first, and then we can look into that,” she gently suggests.
“I’m not worried about the songs, I need a van,” continues McCann. “My friend Jeremy Fisher, he rode a bicycle across the country with a guitar strapped to his back.
“I’m a little too old for that ... but I want to be ahead of the curve. No one wants to fly or stay in hotels, we’ll all be living in campers and concerts are going to be in backyards or on beaches, which is not going to suck. It’s going to be all right!”
