"The Good House tells the story of Hildy Good, who lives in a small town on Boston's North Shore. Hildy is a successful real-estate broker, good neighbor, mother, and grandmother. She's also a raging alcoholic. Hildy's family held an intervention for her about a year before this story takes place--"if they invite you over for dinner, and it's not a major holiday," she advises "run for your life"--And now she feels lonely and unjustly persecuted. She...

"For years, Holly Whitaker wore her workaholic-party-girl persona as a badge of honor, while privately feeling increasingly miserable. She believed that if she could just eat cleaner, save more money, and be more perfect, her life would finally snap into place. Yet all of her attempts to fix herself just added up to more chaos and the chaos added up to more pain and so she added more wine. When she finally had enough and started looking around for...

Frankie Elkin is a recovering alcoholic with more regrets than belongings. But she spends her life doing what no one else will--searching out missing people the world has stopped looking for. When the police have given up and the public no longer remembers, Frankie starts looking. A new case brings her to Mattapan, a Boston neighborhood with a rough reputation. She is searching for Angelique Badeau, a Haitian teenager who vanished from her high school....

From earliest experimentation to habitual excess to full-blown abuse, twenty-four-year-old Koren Zailckas leads us through her experience of a terrifying trend among young girls, exploring how binge drinking becomes routine, how it becomes "the usual." With the stylistic freshness of a poet and the dramatic gifts of a novelist, Zailckas describes her first sip at fourteen, alcohol poisoning at sixteen, a blacked-out sexual experience at nineteen,...

"Shuggie Bain is the unforgettable story of young Hugh "Shuggie" Bain, a sweet and lonely boy who spends his 1980s childhood in public housing in Glasgow, Scotland. Thatcher's war on heavy industry has put husbands and sons out of work, and the city's notorious drugs epidemic is waiting in the wings. Shuggie's mother Agnes walks a wayward path: she is Shuggie's guiding light but a burden for his artistic brother and practical sister. She dreams of...

"Drinking is everywhere in our culture-whether it's wine-o-clock or impromptini, alcohol often is a fundamental part of socializing and destressing. And it can seem black or white: you drink or you don't. If you fall into the latter camp, people automatically assume one of a few things: you're pregnant, you're taking antibiotics, or you're in recovery. There's not a lot of grey area. But a lot of women aren't given the tools to really take a step...

A writer whose sister suffered from severe alcoholism investigates the relationship between women and alcohol, offering medical facts to break through the myths.

The author relates her return home to her family's Orkney sheep farm at the age of thirty, after a decade of heavy drinking in London, where she discovered the natural healing she needed to put her on the path to recovery from addiction.

"Jesse O'Hara is profane, introverted, and not frequently sober - and has just lost another job. "A million-dollar brain and a ten-cent personality," her last employer said. With nothing better to do, Jesse reluctantly accepts the gift of a luxury cruise around the Iberian Peninsula. She's not sure she can drink enough to keep her boredom at bay, but that's the least of her problems. From the very first moment of the cruise, it's clear to Jesse that...

"I swim for every chance to get wasted--after every meet, every weekend, every travel trip. This is what I look forward to and what I tell no one: the burn of it down my throat, to my soul curled up in my lungs, the sharpest pain all over it--it seizes and stretches, becoming alive again, and is the only thing that makes sense." At fifteen, Casey Legler is already one of the fastest swimmers in the world. She is also an alcoholic, isolated from her...