Funny Recovery

This is the age of addiction, a condition so epidemic, so all encompassing and ubiquitous, that unless you are fortunate enough to be an extreme case, you probably don't know that you have it. What unhealthy habits and attachments are holding your life together? Are you unconsciously dependent on food? Bad relationships? A job that doesn't fulfill you? Numb, constant perusal of your phone, looking for what? My qualification for writing this book is not that I am better than you, it's that I am worse.

When it comes to illness, sometimes the end is just the beginning. Recovery and convalescence are words that exist at the periphery of our lives - until we are forced to contend with what they really mean. Here, GP and writer Gavin Francis explores how - and why - we get better, revealing the many shapes recovery takes, its shifting history and the frequent failure of our modern lives to make adequate space for it.

Sister Bea was born in Ireland and came to Southern California in 1964 This talk is very lighthearted and funny, but there is a very powerful message at the heart of the retrospective humor. She discovered Margaritas when a marvelous host prepared them for her and the sisters at an outing. Right from the start, she did not drink like other people, especially the other sisters. How her alcoholism progressed, and then how she found AA.

My entire world has been rocked with a loss, and I need to escape. With nothing left to lose, I leave behind the place I grew up and the memories haunting me there. I trust no one. Then I meet him. And he won’t stay out of my way.

"Barnett's prose style is brassy and cleareyed, with echoes of Anne Lamott." --Beth Macy, The New York Times Book Review "Emotionally devastating and self-aware, this cautionary tale about substance abuse is a worthy heir to Cat Marnell's How to Murder Your Life." --Publishers Weekly (starred...