Quit Like a Woman: The Radical Choice to Not Drink in a Culture Obsessed with Alcohol PDF AZW3 EPUB MOBI TXT Download

Biographies & Memoirs


NEW YORK TIMESBESTSELLER •“An unflinching examination of how our drinking culture hurts women and a gorgeous memoir of how one woman healed herself.”—Glennon Doyle, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Untamed“You don’t know how much you need this book, or maybe you do. Either way, it will save your life.”—Melissa Hartwig Urban, Whole30 co-founder and CEOThe founder of the first female-focused recovery program offers a groundbreaking look at alcohol and a radical new path to sobriety. We live in a world obsessed with drinking. We drink at baby showers and work events, brunch and book club, graduations and funerals. Yet no one ever questions alcohol’s ubiquity—in fact, the only thing ever questioned is why someone doesn’t drink. It is a qualifier for belonging and if you don’t imbibe, you are considered an anomaly. As a society, we are obsessed with health and wellness, yet we uphold alcohol as some kind of magic elixir, though it is anything but. When Holly Whitaker decided to seek help after one too many benders, she embarked on a journey that led not only to her own sobriety, but revealed the insidious role alcohol plays in our society and in the lives of women in particular. What’s more, she could not ignore the ways that alcohol companies were targeting women, just as the tobacco industry had successfully done generations before. Fueled by her own emerging feminism, she also realized that the predominant systems of recovery are archaic, patriarchal, and ineffective for the unique needs of women and other historically oppressed people—who don’t need to lose their egos and surrender to a male concept of God, as the tenets of Alcoholics Anonymous state, but who need to cultivate a deeper understanding of their own identities and take control of their lives. When Holly found an alternate way out of her own addiction, she felt a calling to create a sober community with resources for anyone questioning their relationship with drinking, so that they might find their way as well. Her resultant feminine-centric recovery program focuses on getting at the root causes that lead people to overindulge and provides the tools necessary to break the cycle of addiction, showing us what is possible when we remove alcohol and destroy our belief system around it. Written in a relatable voice that is honest and witty, Quit Like aWoman is at once a groundbreaking look at drinking culture and a road map to cutting out alcohol in order to live our best lives without the crutch of intoxication. You will never look at drinking the same way again.

Holly Whitaker
January 12, 2021
384 pages
English
978-1984825070

File Size: 56 MB
Available File Formats: PDF AZW3 DOCX EPUB MOBI TXT or Kindle audiobook Audio CD(Several files can be converted to each other)
Language: English, Francais, Italiano, Espanol, Deutsch, chinese

“An unflinching examination of how our drinking culture hurts women and a gorgeous memoir of how one woman healed herself. It will change your relationship with alcohol—and it has the power to change your relationship with your entire life.”—Glennon Doyle, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Untamed   “A funny, fast-paced, and bracingly candid dispatch from the realm of the self-actualized, but Holly Whitaker is no polished model of self-help evangelism, nor is her memoir-manifesto selling a one-size-fits-all solution. Her story is a messy human one and all the more convincing that sobriety is a feminist issue.”—Melissa Febos, author of Whip Smart and Abandon Me   “As a culture, we have a weird and often dysfunctional relationship with alcohol. This thoughtful, moving book will help a lot of people get to a healthier place.”—Johann Hari, author of Chasing the Scream and Lost Connections   “Holly Whitaker is a genius: brilliantly clever, fearless, snort-out-loud funny.”—Catherine Gray, author of The Unexpected Joy of Being Sober   “Brave and revolutionary, Whitaker has written a compulsively readable book about creating a life you don’t want to escape. Funny, insightful, and candid, it is a must-read for anyone embarking on the adventure of abandoning alcohol.”—Ann Dowsett Johnston, author of Drink: The Intimate Relationship Between Women and Alcohol   “A vital, timely, and intriguing analysis of women and alcohol . . . Whitaker cuts to the quick of the issues, skillfully using gripping anecdotes and well-researched insights to educate, liberate, and provide real hope and tangible steps for anyone looking to quit like a woman.”—Annie Grace, author of This Naked Mind: Control Alcohol, Find Freedom, Discover Happiness & Change Your Life   “Raw, vulnerable, and unapologetic. Holly Whitaker brings these ingredients together for a fresh and needed perspective as well as a great read.”—Jud Brewer, MD, PhD, author of The Craving Mind: From Cigarettes to Smartphones to Love—Why We Get Hooked and How We Can Break Bad Habits“Following in the footsteps of titles such as Rachel Hollis’s Girl, Wash Your Face, Whitaker aims her first book at modern, urban women—specifically those who are concerned that they might have a problem with alcohol. Part self-help, part recovery memoir, this personal account provides useful and inspiring techniques for addiction recovery.”—Library Journal“In this blending of memoir and advocacy for an alcohol-free lifestyle, Whitaker . . . offer[s] inspiration to others in need of guidance or permission to find their own paths.”—Booklist About the Author Holly Whitaker is the founder and CEO of Tempest (formerly Hip Sobriety). With years of experience in the fields of healthcare and tech, she created an individualized recovery program in 2014 through a virtual platform that offers education, community, and support services. She lives in Brooklyn with her cat, Mary Katherine. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Introduction   Nearly a decade ago, about a year before I stopped drinking alcohol, a friend of mine showed up at my door. She lived in my neighborhood, the Tendernob of San Francisco, which is another way of saying we lived somewhere between a shithole and a fancy tourist trap. It was early on a Saturday afternoon, and my friend was carrying a Solo cup full of whiskey because some man she’d met on OkCupid had broken her heart. It seemed a reasonable solution to me at the time: to walk around the streets of San Francisco sipping Maker’s Mark to dull the specific pain of being rejected by someone she met on the internets who wasn’t good enough for her in the first place. Only, I would have chosen Jameson.   We called a few friends to come over, and we sat in my little studio apartment smoking pot and drinking even more whiskey and cheap wine from the corner store, when my dear, brokenhearted friend announced to the group that she was pretty sure she was going through an “alcoholic phase.” Alcoholic phase. I looked around the room at the faces of my other friends for a hint of the same reaction I felt, which was relief. I saw not only looks of relief but also ones of deep knowing—we’d all experienced something close enough to that to empathize.   Huh.   When you’re terrified that maybe your drinking has gone off the rails, nothing will rein in that hysterical, ridiculous thought more tightly than a group of successful, intelligent, attractive, “together” women who normalize your affliction with a new term: Alcoholic phase! This scenario is only one of a few hundred examples of why I couldn’t  figure out whether I really had a problem with alcohol, or if maybe I was just going through a little “thing” that would straighten itself out.   Around the time of this particular incident, when I was thirty-three, my drinking was escalating in a way that felt out of control. It was no longer just one or two at home, or a drunk night out with the girls, or hangovers on the weekends, or any of the things I’d done in my twenties that felt moderately in control or normal-ish. I was drinking by myself after going out; I was hungover more days than not; keeping it to a bottle of wine a night felt like a win; five o’clock stopped coming fast enough, and I started to leave work at 4:45, then 4:30, then 4:00 p.m. At some point, it made sense to carry airline shots in my purse— just in case. Sometimes (especially when working on a deadline) I holed up in my apartment for days on end, drinking from morning until I passed out. That kind of thing.   But (and there is always a but when you want to invalidate everything you’ve just said) I didn’t drink every night, and I didn’t drink any more than my friends when we went out. I’d recently made it twelve days without booze, and—perhaps most important to me—I had mastered the art of keeping my shit together when drunk in public. I was never the one being carried home, and I was never the one who got sloppy. I made sure of that.   To my mind, there was enough evidence to prove I was a “normal drinker,” and equally enough evidence to qualify me for the Betty Ford. I went back and forth between knowing I needed major help and thinking if I just did more fucking yoga, I’d be fine.   My passage into sobriety was both slow and fast. Slow, in that it took me seventeen years to realize alcohol had never done me any favors, seventeen years of trying to control it and master it and make it work for me like I imagined it worked for all the other people. Fast, in the sense that once I crossed some invisible line, one I still can’t retrace, I was hurtling so quickly toward total dissolution that I couldn’t pretend to have the strength to stave off what was happening to me. The whole thing was like that Price Is Right game where the little yodeler is climbing the mountain and you never know when he’s going to stop or how far he’s going to make it, but you also know he has the potential to go all the way.   It might be helpful to mention that during this time I was simply killing it at work. I’d joined a start-up in 2009, and because I was a cutthroat workaholic with a habit of fucking men in charge, in a few short years I landed a director title—something typically reserved for Ivy League MBAs who favored Ann Taylor pinstripes. It was a health care company, and many of my friends were medical doctors, so I dropped in to see one of them about my “thing.” I explained that I might have a teeny-tiny drinking issue and a habit of throwing up most things I ate, and when she had to google how to treat me and suggested Alcoholics Anonymous, I knew I was completely screwed. I bought wine on the way home from that appointment, because I wasn’t an alcoholic and there was no way in hell I was going to AA.   But over the course of the next eighteen months, one by one, I stopped drinking, smoking pot, taking all recreational drugs, and I got over my bulimia. I started meditating and crawled out of the depths of depression, addiction, sickness, and crushing debt. Within twenty months of that afternoon with my friends—drinking room-temperature whiskey and pondering if maybe all of us are sick or none of us are—I also quit my job. I did this because I had finally become someone who (a) wasn’t the kind of woman who reports to someone she’s been sleeping with, and (b) had a pure reason to exist: I knew I was supposed to start a revolution around alcohol, addiction, and recovery.   What I didn’t quite know was exactly how I would do that, or that this revolution would become stronger with the strands of activism and energy woven into other major social forces: fourth-wave and intersectional feminism, the reaction to the Trump election, the legalization of marijuana in several states, the Black Lives Matter movement, the opioid crisis, and the growing and vocalized dissent against a very racist, classist, imperialist—and failed—War on Drugs.   This journey has been an evolving one. At first, it was the story of a dead woman walking, of all the women in this world who try to conform to a life they are told they should want—one that looks good on paper. I drank green juice and I made the right sounds when I fucked men I didn’t really like and I crushed it in the boardroom and traveled to Central America all by myself and my ass was yoga tight. I did all the right things until all the right things became so suffocating I wound up prostrate, drunk, on the floor of my apartment. It then became the journey of a woman waking up to the world and all its possibilities and wonder, her own power and voice and unique identity, the bigness that a life can be when we center it on our true desires, compared to the smallness of the one we accept when we center it on the desires we’re supposed to have.   That personal awakening was followed by the part where I discovered that alcohol was not only something I could not abide, but perhaps something we all shouldn’t, and that was paralleled by the part where I discovered that the systems in place to help me stop drinking the chemical we’ve been trained to tolerate—the chemical that was physically and emotionally and mentally murdering me—were archaic, patriarchal, masculine, and hence ineffective for me as a non-man. I discovered that I not only had to claw my way out of hell and construct my own system for recovery, but that also, perhaps, it was my duty to create something more so the women who come after me, women who are dying in broad daylight while we look the other way, might not have to face the same bullshit I had to endure.We are living at a time in history where more and more women are waking up to their infinite potential and calling out the systems that hold them down and keep them quiet, submissive, sick, second-to, voiceless, and out of power. We have more socioeconomic and political clout than ever before. The movements started by women of color, the LGBTQIA community, and radical feminists have gained considerable momentum, and we’ve reached a tipping point—more of us are aware of the terms of our own oppression and of our complicity in the oppression of others. Words like misogyny, patriarchy, tone-policing, white privilege, and gaslighting have become common lexicon; women, now more than at any other time in history, are conscious of our collective subjugation.   And yet.   And yet: This is also the time in which women are drinking more than we ever have before. Between 2002 and 2012, the rates of alcohol addiction among women rose by 84 percent—as in, it nearly doubled. One in ten adult American women will die an alcohol-related death, and from 2007 to 2017, alcohol-related deaths among women rose 67 percent, as opposed to 29 percent among men. It is a time of radical progression in almost every area of our collective experience—and a time of unprecedented rates of addiction coupled with an almost gross ambivalence toward our personal and societal relationship with alcohol. Here is the time in history where The Future Is Female, the wine is pink, the yoga classes serve beer, and the death toll rises. Here is the time in history where masses of us women fill the streets to protest against external oppression, then celebrate or cope or come down from it all with a glass of self-administered oppression.   This book is about all these things—about the sickness in our society that drives us toward an unattainable perfection and lives we never bargained for and what we do to manage that impossible situation. It’s about an addictive chemical that we have been fooled into believing is the answer to every problem, a healthful staple of our diet, our key to connection and power. It’s about a system that limits our ability to question whether we should be consuming that addictive chemical and one that, when we do become addicted, forces us into male-centric “recovery” frameworks (i.e., Alcoholics Anonymous) that not only run counter to our emerging feminist and individualist ideals but actively work against them, boarding us through yet another system that requires submission to male authority, self-silencing, further dissolution of self, and pathologized femininity.   In other words, this book is about what makes us sick and keeps us sick. It’s about our power as women—both as individuals and as a collective—and how alcohol can keep us from it. And most important, it is about what is possible when we remove alcohol from our lives and destroy our belief systems around it. This is the truth about alcohol, and the thing about truth is once you know it, you can never un-know it.   You will never look at drinking the same way again. Read more <div id="

  • Quit Like a Woman is part autobiography, part “how to,” & part cultural critique. I’ve been following Holly Whitaker on Instagram for a couple years, and I bought her book in hopes that it would be beneficial not just to me, but also to the women in a treatment court I work with as a public defender. For some participants, this court is transformational, but it has a bit of a “one-size-fits-all” approach to treatment. Like, if AA isn’t working for you, then you must not working the program. Anyway, I hoped Holly’s book could provide an alternate perspective. This book is extremely well-researched. Holly does a great job critiquing our alcohol obsessed society and pointing out how “big alcohol” specifically targets and harms women. She also does a great job explaining how AA was formed (by well-off Christian white dudes) and analyzing how the tenets of AA may not apply (and may even be harmful) to women and people of color. That said, I think this book would better be titled “Quite Like a Well-Off White Woman.” Holly got sober, in part, by putting her Moet budget into Kundalini yoga classes, meditation practice, and therapists who charge hundreds of dollars an hour and don’t even mess around with insurance (apparently that’s a status-y thing to do??). I’m sure those are all quite effective, but: WHO THE HELL HAS ACCESS TO THAT? While Holly is extremely astute at discussing the additional stressors and pressures women face, the book doesn’t give nearly so much attention to the stressors and pressures people of color face that further complicate the process of getting sober. A lot of my clients are indigent single moms with significant trauma histories. While some of Holly’s advice would be helpful to them, much of it seems so far out of reach as to almost be laughable. I am rooting for Holly, who clearly put her heart and soul into this book. But most folks who need help getting sober don’t have access to the tools in Holly’s toolbox.
  • I admit I couldn’t get very far in this book! She starts off with the anti-capitalist, anti-white male political talk … after admitting to sleeping with her male bosses for her career! Also, the lack of nuiance regarding how the alcohol industry is “targeting” women, but ignoring that they targeted men for a very long time before ‘branching out’ doesn’t acknowledge that many alcohol issues are gender neutral. And to claim cigarettes have only been around for 200 years is stupid – maybe her idea of “modern” cigarettes… but people have been drinking and smoking various substances to alter their moods for thousands of years now. Anyway, I’m sure she has some good stuff in the book but I cannot get past the bias and uneducated statements. The book Drink by Ann Dowsett Johnston is a much more professional examination of women and alcohol, and is very well researched.
  • I enjoyed some aspects of this book, such as the Science of alcohol and some practical advice. However, the ultra-feminist, AA, white male bashing, victim stance got a little old. If I had it to do over, I would have saved my money.
  • The author tells us early on she secured her high powered jobs by sleeping with management and had no legitimate reason for working in those capacities. She also has no legitimacy lecturing on this topic – no background in addiction medicine or psychology, and no real standing save her own experience. The author also admits to being a drug user with tendencies towards sex addiction and disordered eating. Her first source is Wikipedia, and other information “sources” equally lack rigor or are not cited. The basic premise for the work seems to be that the she’s angry about subjugating herself to men and at having lived a pretty self absorbed life. This is just not the book for women who are truly struggling with alcohol abuse and in need of solid and actionable guidance for sobriety. On the contrary, it appears to be solely another vehicle through which this author can try her next round of impostorism while trying to normalize or justify her past troubles. I am returning this book after failing to make it through more than a couple of chapters. Badly done and potentially harmful.
  • I’ve been wanting to read a deep dive into the history and science of alcohol and why we are so obsessed with it as a culture. There is a lot of recent research on these topics and this book examines this in depth along with some foundational knowledge on how to quit drinking without white knuckling it and feeling deprived forever.I’ve been reading the authors writing since her first blog many years ago. Back then, it was the first thing that ever made sense to me, and I knew she was on to something then. She was asking questions I couldn’t believe weren’t already being asked and making points that seemed so obvious I couldn’t believe they felt so out of left field.This book is a deep, continuation of the work the author has been working on for many years. It’s well researched, well written and rebellious to deliver such a powerful truth nuke on alcohol. The connection we have to alcohol as a culture is powerful. This book will piss some people off who can’t believe the audacity of someone question alcohol’s role in our lives and challenge us to see it through different lens.If you are a woman who is questioning the role of alcohol in your life, want to explore all the nitty gritty, and think the f word can enhance a story, I can’t recommend this enough. FYI, you don’t have to hit some insane “rock bottom” to question your drinking and want to do something about it.To be clear this book is written to a specific audience, women. Super entitled white guys will likely take issue because something doesn’t focus on them as the baseline for once. Also the tantrums I have seen AA members and supporters throw when anyone mentions there being any other way to address alcohol abuse is just shocking. I mean there can be more than one way to recovery, please chill. Not everything can fit into the AA box, and that in no way undermines the success the program that has helped millions. No one way is some how superior though.
  • I really wanted to like this book, as there is a dearth of good literature about the particular difficulties women face accessing recovery, the reasons why women are traumatised and drink and use in the first place, and the ways in which women are traumatised all over again by recovery. As a long time survivor of AA, and someone who has slogged through more than a decade of trauma recovery, I had high hopes. Alas I found this book deeply annoying, not feminist, and for an author who claims to have stopped trying to please everybody, it tries painfully hard to please everybody.Some accounts of her own life and drinking are well written, as were some parts of her description of trying and leaving AA, and I’m sure many women would identify, but there was just too much wrong (and dangerous) about this book. There’s too much to fit into a short review but my headline complaints are:1. despite nodding to radical feminism, it’s not remotely radical (in the latin sense of ‘root cause’) because Holly doesn’t understand the difference between sex and gender (or she does but she’s trying so hard not to offend men, she won’t say so).Gender isn’t an identity (just like racism isn’t an identity), it’s the means by which women are oppressed, gender is the SYSTEM of patriarchy, the ‘how’ that is used to keep women down as a sex, and women are also inculcated into their own oppression via ‘femininity’ – learning to be submissive, it’s not innate, and it’s not natural, and if you can’t grasp this, then you have no material analysis.This lack of analysis inevitably leads to utterly offensive suggestions such as embracing your ‘feminine energy’ – this is evolutionary psychology straight out of the MRA playbook. It’s also not true. That chapter was so offensive, I threw the book across the room.2. it’s dreadfully woke waffling on about ‘oppressed folks’ and then detailing very expensive trips, drinking excursions to vineyards, baby showers and so on, and then a long list of ‘recovery’ courses, therapy, massage, acupuncture, holistic retreats that were embarrassingly middle class (told without a trace of irony). If you haven’t got ‘thousands of dollars’ like Holly, then whoopsy, sorry oppressed folks.3. She’s still centering men, with all her agender, genderless BS, women are female, men are male, male people oppress female people because of their sex (not their ‘feminine energy’), they use gender to do it, this is feminism 101. Any good discussion of WHY women experience things the way we do was then derailed by trying to PLEASE and shoehorn confused men into it. Feminism – clue is in the name – is for females. It is entirely fine and reasonable that women could expect just one book that actually exclusively focuses on them and their needs, it’s not women’s job to wipe the tears of the whole world.4. For anyone traumatised, diving into anything as dodgy as Kundalini yoga (which can cause a huge decompression, regression, and all kinds of emotional havoc, and that’s before we mention the untrained hippies running those kind of things) is just irresponsible, if you are female, traumatised and in need of help, for God’s sake don’t do that, it’s not safe.5. More laughing when new ager, arch 12 stepper, and age woo practitioner Echart Tolle turned up, give me strength, once again, McMindfulness, spirtual bypassing twaddle.6. A course in miracles, is she taking the p*ss? Again dangerous, stay well clear. Those last two books are handed from member to member in AA, nothing new there, or helpful. This kind of junk, just like Marianne Williamson and Byron Katy’s (evil) ‘The Work’ are all the same kinds of abusive twaddle that no woman in her right mind should touch with a bargepole and yet seem to be very popular in recovery circles. It’s all still a wolf in sheep’s clothing.7. Falling to her knees and asking God to put her into service – is the KEY PLANK of AA, that’s pretty much the entire (nonsense) AA programme in one phrase. There’s nothing wrong with helping others, but hardly a counter AA idea, and nor is the idea of ‘surrender’ – you absolutely do not have to surrender, this is not a war.8. I live in the UK, but the endless references to oppression taking a turn for the worse because Trump won an election rang a bit hollow, given the dearth of political analysis (there’s much abuse and misogyny in liberal, identity obsessed politics, indeed it’s the main focus of the actual proper women’s movement right now) and I’d imagine many women who perhaps voted for Trump have equally complicated and difficult lives and are in need of good advice on quitting drinking. Virtue signalling isn’t political analysis.In short, nice try but no cigar, which is a shame, as it had the potential to be a better book if she wasn’t so afraid of offending anybody (men mostly). In my opinion identity politics has been the ruination of the women’s movement, has turned young women’s brains to mush, and it has absolutely no business being in your recovery. Being female isn’t not an identity, and being female in a patriarchy has serious material consequences.Do yourself a favour, read some actual feminism, if you are into your spiritual stuff, read some of the brilliant female mystics out there.If you like yoga, then go to a nice safe gentle class (yoga for trauma for instance, with a trained, safe, boundaried teacher) and stay away from quackery, or people who claim they can heal you, these people are dangerous.Buy Charlotte Kasl’s Many Roads, One Journey (that’s the book that got me out of AA, written in 1995, unashamedly centred on the needs of women, still a classic and not done justice by Holly at all) or read Gabriel Glaser’s book on women and drinking, and run as fast as you can away from this silly book.Holly, if you ever read this: the master’s tools cannot dismantle the master’s house.
  • Well, the first 20% of this book is excellent. But Ms Whitaker isn’t a health professional with qualifications and experience in addiction support work (I was for a long time.) Nor is she an anthropologist, sociologist or any other kind of academic versed in Human Behaviour. This book is pretty good but apart from some stuff she’s Googled, mostly anecdotal. So, I did hit a screech point when she started demolishing AA. But then again, I’m in the UK, maybe AA is a little different here. She’s a bit naive. The thing about AA is that it’s voluntary, prescriptive, and individuals involved aren’t supposed to set up power trips etc. I personally don’t like the God based model, and we know some of the 12 Steps are outdated. But what needs to be understood is that AA, all the ‘A’s in fact, are a fantastic support space for people struggling to give up drinking. Ms Whitaker does not appear to have struggled with this like some of my clients. We don’t support ‘alcohol counselling’, ‘Controlled Drinking’, or fancy expensive ‘programmes’ sold by dubious ‘consultants’ to rich people who think they are too special for Meetings. The point of AA is that Alcohol DOES make you temporarily change your strategies. As a result, ALL drinkers feel compelled to prolong their substance abuse, and come up with excuses to do so. In thirty years of being around all kinds of addiction through my work – and been one or two journeys myself, I have learned that the only people who are going to spot your BS and call you out are other addicted people. She is 100% correct about the Drinks Industry of course. Before I was a therapist, I was a journalist, working for a while on a journal which actually covered the tobacco industry. People have no idea how evil they are, and yes, the drinks industry is. As a Second Wave Feminist, I’m unsure that linking womens’ drinking to the Patriarchy is really that relevant. I am a lot older than Ms Whitaker but I never felt I was ‘bad’ or ‘wrong’ just because I’m a woman, and I’ve had three successful careers where gender ‘ableism’ did not hold me back, but, to be fair, that’s just me. Maybe the USA is, again, backsliding from the mid 20th century revolution, more than the UK is. She’s correct about the insidious notion that Mothering requires large helpings of self medicating wine, we mustn’t ‘normalise’ this, that’s really serious. But please leave AA alone. It’s very imperfect, but it’s What Works. One of my teachers, when I did my addiction training, told me that the first time he showed up at a Meeting, in London, he was terrified. In the dark, outside, he bumped into a man in an old raincoat, the weather was terrible, he couldn’t really see his face. The man asked if he was going in, my teacher said he asked whether he really was the same as the dreadful down and outs he was about to meet inside, after all, he was an educated man with a great job. ‘Nobody is above AA,’ replied the man. When they got inside he turned and saw man was famous actor Anthony Hopkins. For me, not being ‘suitable’ for AA is still a gigantic excuse.
  • I love this book! A fantastic read for women who want better for themselves and to quit but want to do it their own way. This wonderful woman saved my life and the community she is building is incredible. She gave me hope when I had none.
  • Oh my goodness, this book, this book, this BOOK. I was first introduced to Holly Whitaker’s work through a blog on Soberistas. And she had me at NQTD. At Grape Flavoured Gasoline. At using yoga, and meditation, and breath work, and nutrition, and activism and so many other things as part of my recovery. Having read all her blogs on Hip Sobriety and listened to every episode of HOME, a lot of the information in QLAW wasn’t new to me. But there was something incredibly special about seeing it all written down in one place, blended with Holly’s own story. Which is so like mine, so like so many of ours. And I’m always amazed and so grateful when I remember that all the inspiration, avenues of support and places of connection I used to get sober didn’t always exist. People had to INVENT them, and because of that, people like me and hundreds of thousands of others, who were so trapped within addiction but who didn’t find their own truth within the philosophy of 12 step recovery, had and will have somewhere to go. Because a new paradigm has been created. Where it is possible to choose sobriety because you are learning to love yourself too much to do anything else. To choose a path of recovery where you don’t have to identify in any way that makes your soul hurt a bit. Where you don’t have to burn your ego to the ground and take every ounce of blame and responsibility for every shitty thing that has ever happened to you on to your already aching and overloaded shoulders. Read this book if you’re sober. Read it if you’re not. Because it is a call to action which is sorely needed in our disconnected and hurting world. A road map for anyone looking to treat themselves with a bit more care. And, quite simply, a bloody good read. Thank you Holly for creating such a huge part of the path to recovery which I followed. I will always be grateful. Julia Carson, author of Sober Positive
  • I’m only a third of the way through, and finding it to be so well written and easy to understand. It’s brilliant. Full of insights. I am finding I resonate so deeply with her experience on multiple levels. She’s talking about alcohol for the most part, but you can switch out issues with alcohol with any issue you feel you’re struggling with or addicted to. I’d highly recommend, definitely worth a read if you feel drawn to the topic or are having issues you want to get a handle on. It’s written conversationally, but with some confrontational language. Buy it. Read it. The world needs more of this conversation happening. Thank you Holly Whitaker for writing this timely and thought provoking book!

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