Big Book Comes Alive

An AA friendship that started 30 years ago led to a clear, concise interpretation of the Big Book. So who were the men behind the movement?

When sober people talk about the program, the two most common names you’ll hear tossed around are, of course, Bill and Bob. But there’s another duo that are spoken about with nearly equal reverence: Joe McQuany and Charlie Parmley, a team of two men (who died in 2007 and 2011, respectively) known as Joe and Charlie who met in 1973 and spent the next three decades spreading their interpretation of the Big Book.
These two Southern gentlemen are credited with making the program literature accessible to many who might have otherwise found the language archaic, obtuse or just downright confusing. As Larry Gaines, the CEO of the Kelly Foundation—an organization dedicated to recovery from addiction that Joe McQuany launched in 1978—“People often say that it took Bill and Bob to write the Big Book but it took Joe and Charlie to explain it.”