Diary of an Alcoholic Housewife

Diary of an Alcoholic Housewife PDF Author: Brenda Wilhelmson
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1616490004
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 356

Get Book Here

Book Description
A gripping first-hand story of personal triumph and recovery by a wealthy American housewife who appeared to have it all but who was, in reality, losing life's most important moments in an alcohol-induced haze. Brenda Wilhelmson was like a lot of women in her neighborhood. She had a husband and two children. She was educated and made a good living as a writer. She had a vibrant social life with a tight circle of friends. She could party until dawn and take her children to school the next day. From the outside, she appeared to have it all together. But, in truth, alcohol was slowly taking over, turning her world on its side. Waking up to another hangover, growing tired of embarrassing herself in front of friends and family, and feeling important moments slip away, Brenda made the most critical decision of her life: to get sober. She kept a diary of her first year (and beyond) in recovery, chronicling the struggles of finding a meeting she could look forward to, relating to her fellow alcoholics, and finding a sponsor with whom she connected. Along the way, she discovered the challenges and pleasures of living each day without alcohol, navigating a social circle where booze is a centerpiece, and dealing with her alcoholic father's terminal illness and denial. Brenda Wilhelmson's Diary of an Alcoholic Housewife offers insight, wisdom, and relevance for readers in recovery, as well as their loved ones, no matter how long they've been sober.

Diary of an Alcoholic Housewife

Diary of an Alcoholic Housewife PDF Author: Brenda Wilhelmson
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1616490004
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 356

Get Book Here

Book Description
A gripping first-hand story of personal triumph and recovery by a wealthy American housewife who appeared to have it all but who was, in reality, losing life's most important moments in an alcohol-induced haze. Brenda Wilhelmson was like a lot of women in her neighborhood. She had a husband and two children. She was educated and made a good living as a writer. She had a vibrant social life with a tight circle of friends. She could party until dawn and take her children to school the next day. From the outside, she appeared to have it all together. But, in truth, alcohol was slowly taking over, turning her world on its side. Waking up to another hangover, growing tired of embarrassing herself in front of friends and family, and feeling important moments slip away, Brenda made the most critical decision of her life: to get sober. She kept a diary of her first year (and beyond) in recovery, chronicling the struggles of finding a meeting she could look forward to, relating to her fellow alcoholics, and finding a sponsor with whom she connected. Along the way, she discovered the challenges and pleasures of living each day without alcohol, navigating a social circle where booze is a centerpiece, and dealing with her alcoholic father's terminal illness and denial. Brenda Wilhelmson's Diary of an Alcoholic Housewife offers insight, wisdom, and relevance for readers in recovery, as well as their loved ones, no matter how long they've been sober.

Mrs D is Going Without

Mrs D is Going Without PDF Author: Lotta Dann
Publisher: Allen & Unwin
ISBN: 1877505390
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 303

Get Book Here

Book Description
An honest, upfront, engaging account of a suburban housewife's journey from miserable wine-soaked boozer to self-respecting sober lady.

Edith's Diary

Edith's Diary PDF Author: Patricia Highsmith
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly Press
ISBN: 9780871132963
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 324

Get Book Here

Book Description
To escape the terrible realities of an alcoholic son, a departed husband, a bedridden uncle, and a dreary parttime job, Edith records the activities of a happy family in her journal.

At Home in the World

At Home in the World PDF Author: Joyce Maynard
Publisher: Picador
ISBN: 1429977558
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 395

Get Book Here

Book Description
New York Times bestselling author of Labor Day With a New Preface When it was first published in 1998, At Home in the World set off a furor in the literary world and beyond. Joyce Maynard's memoir broke a silence concerning her relationship—at age eighteen—with J.D. Salinger, the famously reclusive author of The Catcher in the Rye, then age fifty-three, who had read a story she wrote for The New York Times in her freshman year of college and sent her a letter that changed her life. Reviewers called her book "shameless" and "powerful" and its author was simultaneously reviled and cheered. With what some have viewed as shocking honesty, Maynard explores her coming of age in an alcoholic family, her mother's dream to mold her into a writer, her self-imposed exile from the world of her peers when she left Yale to live with Salinger, and her struggle to reclaim her sense of self in the crushing aftermath of his dismissal of her not long after her nineteenth birthday. A quarter of a century later—having become a writer, survived the end of her marriage and the deaths of her parents, and with an eighteen-year-old daughter of her own—Maynard pays a visit to the man who broke her heart. The story she tells—of the girl she was and the woman she became—is at once devastating, inspiring, and triumphant.

Mrs D is Going Within

Mrs D is Going Within PDF Author: Lotta Dann
Publisher: Allen & Unwin
ISBN: 1760638056
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 223

Get Book Here

Book Description
Despite outward appearances three years after getting sober Lotta is struggling to deal with life in the raw. It's becoming abundantly clear what people mean when they say putting down the drink is just the beginning. Truth is Lotta's lifelong heavy-drinking habit has left her as a fledgling emotionally. She's slowly accepting that she needs to do some more work on herself. But what? Please don't say it has to involve turning into a hippy. Can't she just comfort herself with another chocolate muffin, distract herself on Instagram, and hope for the best? It would appear not. In Mrs D Is Going Within Lotta outlines the practices she developed and strategies she worked on to start establishing herself as an emotionally robust woman.

She Stays

She Stays PDF Author: Bettye Shelton
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780785277422
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 304

Get Book Here

Book Description
How God Inspired a friendship that saved Bettye and Ricky Van Shelton's marriage.

Tyrant Memory

Tyrant Memory PDF Author: Horacio Castellanos Moya
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
ISBN: 0811219178
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 281

Get Book Here

Book Description
With pitch-perfect, pitch-black humor, this saga refracts through one family's struggles a whole country's nightmare. The tyrant of the book is the actual pro-Nazi mystic Maximiliano Hernández Martínez, known as the Warlock, who came to power in El Salvador in 1932. An attempted coup in April of 1944 failed, but a general strike in May finally forced him out of office. The book takes place during that tumultuous month between the coup and the strike. With her husband a political prisoner and her son fleeing for his life, wealthy Haydée Aragon takes matters into her own hands. Events ricochet from one near-disaster to the next.--Publisher's description.

At Home on the Range

At Home on the Range PDF Author: Margaret Yardley Potter
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1408832291
Category : Cooking
Languages : en
Pages : 257

Get Book Here

Book Description
_______________ 'Ideal for those who like their recipes to come with a back story ... The book is tremendously funny, and her cooking was way ahead of her time' - Sally Hughes, BBC Good Food Magazine 'Hilarious' - English Home _______________ Recently, Elizabeth Gilbert unpacked some boxes of family books that had been sitting in her mother's attic for decades. Among the old, dusty hardbacks was a book called At Home on the Range, written by her great-grandmother, Margaret Yardley Potter. As Gilbert writes in her Foreword: 'I jumped up and dashed through the house to find my husband, so I could read parts of it to him: Listen to this! The humor! The insight! The sophistication! Then I followed him around the kitchen while he was making our dinner (lamb shanks), and I continued reading aloud as we ate... By the end of the night there were three of us sitting at that table. Gima had come to join us, and she was wonderful, and I was in love.' The cookbook was far ahead of its time. In it, Potter espouses the importance of farmer's markets and ethnic food (Italian, Jewish and German), derides preservatives and culinary shortcuts and generally celebrates a devotion to epicurean adventures. Potter takes car trips out to Pennsylvania Dutch country to eat pickled pork products, and to the eastern shore of Maryland, where she learns to catch and prepare eels so delicious, she says, they must be 'devoured in a silence almost devout'. Part scholar and part crusader for a more open food conversation than currently existed, it's not hard to see where Elizabeth Gilbert inherited both her love of food and her warm, infectious prose. At Home on the Range is a fascinating, humorous and useful cookbook from the past that is essential for the present day.

Lying

Lying PDF Author: Lauren Slater
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 0307830160
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 210

Get Book Here

Book Description
"The beauty of Lauren Slater's prose is shocking," said Newsday about Welcome to My Country, and now, in this powerful and provocative new book, Slater brilliantly explores a mind, a body, and a life under siege. Diag-nosed as a child with a strange illness, brought up in a family given to fantasy and ambition, Lauren Slater developed seizures, auras, neurological disturbances--and an ability to lie. In Lying: A Metaphorical Memoir, Slater blends a coming-of-age story with an electrifying exploration of the nature of truth, and of whether it is ever possible to tell--or to know--the facts about a self, a human being, a life. Lying chronicles the doctors, the tests, the seizures, the family embarrassments, even as it explores a sensitive child's illness as both metaphor and a means of attention-getting--a human being's susceptibility to malady, and to storytelling as an act of healing and as part of the quest for love. This mesmerizing memoir openly questions the reliability of memoir itself, the trickiness of the mind in perceiving reality, the slippery nature of illness and diagnosis--the shifting perceptions and images of who we are and what, for God's sake, is the matter with us. In Lying, Lauren Slater forces us to redraw the boundary between what we know as fact and what we believe we create as fiction. Here a young woman discovers not only what plagues her but also what heals her--the birth of sensuality, her creativity as an artist--in a book that reaffirms how a fine writer can reveal what is common to us all in the course of telling her own unique story. About Welcome to My Country, the San Francisco Chronicle said, "Every page brims with beautifully rendered images of thoughts, feelings, emotional states." The same can be said about Lying: A Metaphorical Memoir.

Drinking

Drinking PDF Author: Caroline Knapp
Publisher: Dial Press
ISBN: 044033408X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 305

Get Book Here

Book Description
Fifteen million Americans a year are plagued with alcoholism. Five million of them are women. Many of them, like Caroline Knapp, started in their early teens and began to use alcohol as "liquid armor," a way to protect themselves against the difficult realities of life. In this extraordinarily candid and revealing memoir, Knapp offers important insights not only about alcoholism, but about life itself and how we learn to cope with it. It was love at first sight. The beads of moisture on a chilled bottle. The way the glasses clinked and the conversation flowed. Then it became obsession. The way she hid her bottles behind her lover's refrigerator. The way she slipped from the dinner table to the bathroom, from work to the bar. And then, like so many love stories, it fell apart. Drinking is Caroline Kapp's harrowing chronicle of her twenty-year love affair with alcohol. Caroline had her first drink at fourteen. She drank through her yeras at an Ivy League college, and through an award-winning career as an editor and columnist. Publicly she was a dutiful daughter, a sophisticated professional. Privately she was drinking herself into oblivion. This startlingly honest memoir lays bare the secrecy, family myths, and destructive relationships that go hand in hand with drinking. And it is, above all, a love story for our times—full of passion and heartbreak, betrayal and desire—a triumph over the pain and deception that mark an alcoholic life. Praise for Drinking “Quietly moving . . . Caroline Knapp dazzles us with her heady description of alcohol's allure and its devastating hold.”—Los Angeles Times Book Review “Filled with hard-won wisdom . . . [a] perceptive and revealing book.”—San Francisco Chronicle “Eloquent . . . a remarkable exercise in self-discovery.”—The New York Times “Drinking not only describes triumph; it is one.”—Newsweek