That's what Chicago Sun-Times columnist Neil Steinberg has done.

Yet if there are more than five semi-literate people in Chicago who don't know that Steinberg is a "drunkard," it's a surprise.

In 2005, Steinberg's private life became very public when, after a long day of almost continuous drinking, he slapped his wife, Edie, during a quarrel. She called 911 and he was arrested. He was placed on leave from his job and, under court order, entered an alcohol rehab program. The slap and the arrest made headlines in both Chicago newspapers.

Steinberg's new book, "Drunkard: A Hard-Drinking Life," just published by Dutton, begins on the day of the slapping incident with Steinberg ordering a Jack Daniels - no, he doesn't have to order it; Phyllis, the colorful bartender at the Billy Goat Tavern, knows him so well that she brings him the drink as soon as he walks in the door.

"The magically arriving glass is my Pulitzer, my round of applause from the world. Love it," he writes, the first of many encomiums to alcohol in the book.

Then Steinberg takes readers through more drinking; the fight with Edie, his lawyer wife; a night in jail; and everything that happens in the next year: his stint in a rehab program at Highland Park Hospital (he eventually gets kicked out for being "Too Much of a Drunk for Rehab," as one of the book's sections is titled); the AA meetings he reluctantly attends; relapses and returns to sobriety and, eventually, some hard-won wisdom and a very tentative ending, not happy exactly, but somehow hopeful. More normal family moments with the couple's two young sons, Kent and Ross, are chronicled as well.

It's a well-written book, easy to read, fascinating but also infuriating. That Steinberg can be so dense! you think at every third page. You want to scream at him, then hug him, something he probably wouldn't like at all. (There's little about this book that's warm and fuzzy.)

"Drunkard" is also a vivid picture of what it's like to be an alcoholic, to be in love with booze, with drinking, with bars, with the whole scene, to understand that giving up drinking is not even the hardest part - giving up thinking about drinking is.

And it's a horrifying, Edvard Munch kind of picture. Steinberg sees to that. He doesn't indulge in much self pity - in fact he seems to invite readers to dislike him, at least part of the time. One example from many: He drops one of his sons off in the children's section of the Northbrook library, then leaves to buy a pint of bourbon. When he comes back to the library, he can't find his son. (He eventually does; the boy is unharmed.)

There's a societal element to the story, too. "Drinking was not something you thought about, it was something you did, whenever you could," he writes. But then it went beyond that: "I'd be having dinner with Edie, nursing a glass of red wine, excuse myself to go to the bathroom and pause at the bar to down a glass of Jack, just because I was passing by, just to keep the tank topped. Because the opportunity presented itself. It was not a practice I chose to dwell upon."

Eventually, he plucks a bottle of brandy out of the recycling bin in his house and drains the few drops that are left. He drinks from the vanilla extract his wife is using for French toast. He inhales the alcohol vapors from a mini-bottle he finds, forgotten, in a desk drawer. He falls off the wagon innumerable times. He remembers, over and over again, how much he loves drinking. At Yom Kippur services, he even makes note of the prayer renouncing any oaths and vows made in the past year, drawing a tart rebuke from Edie. "'That's not what (the prayers) mean,' she says, unamused.

Yes, there's a subtext of Judaism in the book, not surprising for a guy who often wears his Jewish heart on his sleeve in his columns. Though Steinberg at one point confesses to being an agnostic (and AA's emphasis on a "higher power" puts him off), he also discovers that, on Yom Kippur, "Prayer feels good. Not because G-d suddenly pulls the clouds apart and gives me a big wink. But because the words are right. Pounding on my chest and begging for forgiveness meshes with my mood, and I enunciate the prayers boldly and loudly."

He even silently thanks his rabbi, Rabbi Eitan Weiner-Kaplow of Shir Hadash Reconstructionist Synagogue in Northbrook, for not mentioning alcoholism when he gives a Rosh Hashanah sermon on husbands and wives who are caretakers for their spouses.

That sermon also leads to what Steinberg calls one of his favorite scenes in the book. Weiner-Kaplow asks how many couples "look back to the day when they first stood under the chuppah ... and then look at their lives today, and think: 'We never imagined it would be like this!'"

"Edie and I burst out laughing," Steinberg writes. "No s-t, Rabbi. We never imagined it would be like this. We laugh and don't stop. Not discreet, into-the-fist giggling. But big guffaws that draw curious looks. I don't care. We keep going, the chuckles beginning to ebb, until we glance at each other and erupt again. We never imagined it would be like this." Poignantly, the scene takes place shortly after Steinberg enters rehab, shortly after the night in jail, the arrest, the slap.

In a phone conversation (where Steinberg sheds his acerbic self, seems eager to please) he says, surprisingly, that "what helped me get through this was studying Talmud."

Talmud? That wasn't in the book ...

"Talmudic thinking," he amplifies. "Thinking your way out. If you can't drink your way out, you think your way out. The route most people take, putting your faith in Jesus, wasn't really an option for me. I had to think it through really on my own. Being Jewish teaches you to think - the same way when you're six years old you stand up in a room full of gentiles and hold up a menorah and tell them you're Jewish."

Something similar to this is in the book, with Steinberg delivering his "chemical history" - addiction history - at rehab. He begins with his upbringing in a Cleveland suburb, on the other side of town from the rest of the Jewish community: "I was the only Jew in elementary school. Every Hanukkah I'd give the little dog-and-pony show - 'This is a dreidel, this is a menorah.' I hated that."

This will be familiar territory to readers of at least one of Steinberg's other books, "Don't Give Up the Ship: Finding My Father While Lost at Sea," published in 2002. In it, he chronicles a month and a half spent with his remote, often argumentative father recreating a sea voyage the older man had taken years earlier. The idea was for Steinberg to reconnect with his dad, who had been distant and work-obsessed in his childhood, create some new, warm memories. It mostly doesn't turn out that way, and father and son are hardly closer by the end of the voyage.

"Drunkard" is Steinberg's sixth book. The others include a history of collegiate pranks, of failed schemes and ideas, of the decline of the men's hat industry thanks largely to the example of "Hatless Jack," the book's title, referring to President John F. Kennedy. None has been a best-seller, although most received good if scattered reviews. (Steinberg told a Chicago magazine reporter that the earlier books "sank like stones.") He hopes that will not be the case with "Drunkard," which has not yet been reviewed widely since it came out in June.

But he didn't write the book to make money or to have it become a best-seller. "I wrote it because I thought the experience was interesting," he says. "People read books about a mountaineer on the edge. You read the book about a guy falling down the trail. It's something interesting, and interesting things don't come by all that much.

"I wasn't going to let the opportunity pass. I'm an opportunistic writer. My father wanted to go on a ship" and Steinberg ended up writing a book about it.

Besides, "it gave me something to do," he says. "I didn't have a job (he had been placed on leave from the Sun-Times), I couldn't go to work, I had to spend days in this dreary way. It was to sort of ground myself, a way to help justify the disaster. It gave it sort of a silver lining. I'm a big fan of Dante, and he said, if you find yourself in hell, take notes. It gave the illusion of work to me." But the book isn't just about Steinberg; Edie and the boys float through its pages, and a reader wonders sometimes what they're thinking, what their version of events would be like - and, of course, how they, and especially Edie, feel about having such personal aspects of their lives revealed, unpeeled.

"I've been writing about Edie for 25 years" in the column, Steinberg says. "It's not a big deal for her to be in print. She never gave me any trouble about it. She understood what I was doing and I think she approved."

Edie Steinberg, nee Goldberg, Skokie native, confirms this in an upbeat phone conversation. "I think it's a magnificent book," she says. "It can really help people understand the nature and obsession of addiction, which I think is great."

She says she read it as her husband was writing it and is satisfied with the way she is portrayed. "It's all based on Neil's memory of what happened at the time. It's more about him going through rehab than it is about me," she says.

Now, things are better. "That was one of our hardest years, for better or for worse," she says. "But all marriages are always a process of working out your problems."

Having her family's life on display has not been excessively hard for her. "I think most people understand that as you go through life, people have all sorts of difficulties and problems. When you reach a certain level of maturity, you realize that that single problem doesn't define that person. If (people) can't do that, they're not much use to me," she says.

She calls the book "a fast, fascinating read. Almost everyone can enjoy it. It really can help people understand addiction. So many people know someone who is addicted to something or other - alcohol, illegal or legal drugs. It can really help people."

Helping people might not have been the first thought on his mind when the news of Steinberg's fractured life became public, although he never tried to hide what happened, even giving a quote to the Sun-Times reporter who was writing a story about it. Then came the reactions from devotees and detractors.

"When the news came out, I heard everything from shock to sympathy to glee," he says. "It was validation for people who disagreed with something I said, and especially over (former Tribune columnist) Bob Greene. I took a great deal of pleasure in his fall and some people thought I was kicking him when he was down, so they felt entitled to kick me when I'm down."

In the mid-'90s, writing under the name Ed Gold, Steinberg wrote the BobWatch column in the Chicago Reader, skewering Greene primarily for what he considered the vapidity of his columns. In a 2007 interview, Steinberg told a writer for the Web site Chicagoist that "what I hated (about Greene) was, ... that he would write a hundred columns about Baby Richard.

"And so whatever I'm trying to do, is I just try to be different. I want to be different. And ideally not that much of the news, and I try to do different stuff, because that to me is the role of a columnist, is that when everyone is yelling 'Iraq Iraq Iraq' you can do something else. That's why I have Dante in the column. And people adore that," he went on to tell the Chicagoist interviewer.

Yet Steinberg has also made enemies with his column, which he has been writing since 1996. (He joined the Sun-Times in 1987 as a reporter and also wrote obituaries.) When Cook County Board President John Stroger suffered a stroke, he made light of the diagnosis, questioning whether Stroger was sick at all. The column angered many.

Now, he says, "if I write something criticizing the Bush administration, I'll get a lot of 'Were you drunk when you wrote that?' or "Go home and slap your wife.' You never quite get used to it, but after the first 100 times ....

" Yet many other people, he says, "were very sympathetic. I didn't invent this problem, and a lot of people related to it one way or another. It's an uncomfortable area for a lot of people."

He didn't find that to be case in the Jewish community, despite the common perception - misperception, most would say - that there is little alcoholism among Jews. (Although studies in the last few years have shown that Jews have a relatively high incidence of a rare genetic variation that has a protective effect against alcohol dependence, validating the perception in a minor way.)

Gene variation or no, Steinberg dismisses the question. "Are Jews immune from becoming alcoholics? We're not," he says. "It's self-flattery more than anything else. There are lots of Jews in the (rehab) program. I didn't do a survey, I don't know what the statistics are, but even if there are fewer Jews, they are still there. It's not that relevant. I could have been the only Jew there, and among my concerns, letting down the tribe was not really up there."

He tells the story of "somebody who wanted me to talk to a Jewish group, and I had talked to this group before, and she said she wanted me to come back for another round. Then she wrote me apologizing for using the phrase 'another round.' I didn't really notice it."

The point of the story was how uncomfortable some people are around an addict.

"I've lost friends over this, they're too uncomfortable with it," Steinberg says. "It's all they think about, some people. I have had people come to my house and I offer them a beer and they freak out. It's not for me, it's for them! I've had those beers in there since Chanukah. They're not familiar, they don't understand. It's sort of annoying. If you were diabetic and offered me a slice of chocolate cake, I wouldn't get all bent out of shape. I'm sure blind people still have walls in their house."

Yet he also admits that "it's not like I have this big social milieu anymore. I go to the Goat and no one's there. There's no social milieu to worry about."

Clearly, that also means that Steinberg must lose, or has already lost, part of his self-image: the hard-drinking reporter, the alcoholic writer. Drink, that's what writers do, isn't it? In the book we learn (who didn't know it already?) that legendary columnist Mike Royko was also a drunk. Yes, and he died far too young. A Booklist review suggests that Steinberg "wants a sophisticated life where he can drink, hoping liquor will turn his nebbish-like persona into Mike Royko."

Meanwhile the book is out - 100 pages shorter and not quite so "excruciating" as it might have been had Steinberg not had a good editor, he says. He hopes reading it will help people who might be in a similar situation. What he would say to them if he could is "if you suspect you have a problem, you probably do. You're in denial about it. It's very hard to imagine how you can live without (drinking). You actually can, but it takes some doing. It isn't easy."

As for himself, he says that "ideally this stuff all sort of recedes and is kept in a corner. It waxes and wanes. Sometimes it sits in the front of your mind and burns, and sometimes it smolders in a corner. I keep waiting for it to go away but is hasn't."

And: "Alcoholism is an obsession. I've got that I cannot drink, not for years. The tough part is not to think about it."

At the book's ending, he tells readers that he has been sober "a year and counting." In a phone conversation, he relates that he kept it up for a year and a half, then had relapses, he doesn't say how many.

So now will he remain sober for the rest of his life?

"People ask me that, but I never think that," he says. "I sort of focus on today. I've got today locked down and I'm very confident about tomorrow. (I tell people) I never made Edie any promises so I'm not going to promise you. I'm trying. It's a tough thing. If I had to pick something to say I'd say I feel good about how things have gone in the past three years.

"But I'm not searching for some sort of perfection. Am I ever going to drink again for the rest of my life? Yes, absolutely. Am I ever going to go back to how I was in the book? I hope not. Anyone who says (they're not ever going to drink again) is deluding themselves. And the point is not to delude yourself.