Beloved books for the new teetotaler
These are my personal favorites, the ones I always recommend and why.
At the ripe old age of 21, I read my first book on alcoholism. I knew then that alcohol was not going to do me any favors. I grew up with several people in my life who had problems with drinking. Not because anyone actually explained it to me but I knew what it felt like when it was around me. The main person was a boyfriend of my mother’s. My mom rarely drank, but I was acutely aware of what dating a man who was addicted to alcohol did to my mom. Even at the age of eight, I knew what an alcoholic was. I was also familiar with what al-anon was and how people who drank made their loved ones feel. I can still feel the tension that was around me when her boyfriend was in our home. My mom was always anxious or worried, and I can recall her breaking point when she finally left him. And although he was out of our lives physically, his presence remained forever. It was one of those defining relationships in a woman’s life, and my mother was never the same.
Another came into my life when I was a teenager; she was the mother of one of my friends. I remember my friend’s mom and dad breaking up and the pain my friend went through. I also remember seeing books around their house, such as The Language of Letting Go by Melody Beattie. One night during one of the parties my friend would host while her parents were away, I locked myself in the upstairs bathroom, grabbed the copy of Melody’s book that was displayed in a bookholder hanging from the wall, and started reading while sitting in an empty bathtub. I was completely fascinated by it. I am positive I was also drinking a beer at the time.
And then, somehow, at the age of 21 (1997), I found myself with the newly released book Drinking: A Love Story by Caroline Knapp. To this day, I have no idea how I found that book. But I devoured it cover to cover.
And this is where I started using books…..
This is not the be-all-end-all list of quit-lit books. You can find my ULTIMATE QUIT-LIT list here. The books listed below are the books that have moved me the most, and I share the reasons behind my love for them.
Drinking: A Love Story by Caroline Knapp.
I reread this book again in 2016 when I was a little over a year AF. The intensity of the story was what moved me and made me so acutely aware of what kind of direction my drinking could have easily taken me. There is this term known as the early exit in the non-drinking community, and it refers to when one stops drinking before the drinking stops them, basically. This is not Caroline’s story. Alcoholism is a self-diagnosis. And as much as Caroline Knapp fought this, she comes to terms with it in this book, and she takes us on that long ride. This book is the OG of quit lit. And yet, I don’t think it gets as much love as some others do. Probably because it’s older. It was written in 1997, twenty-five years ago.
“In some ways I felt that way about drinking from the very start: conscious and needful and aware. It always seemed pointless to me to pour a drink and not finish it, or to hold back if someone offered me another one, and although I couldn’t articulate it, I remember being vaguely aware that I drank differently from the way other people did. I can’t remember ever turning down a drink, not even once; it would have been like a puppy turning down a proffered treat. Why not? Sure, I’ll have another. Drinking is fun. It feels good.”
“Drinking was the best way I knew, the fastest and simplest, to let my feelings out and to connect, just sit there and connect, with another human being. The comfort was enormous: I was an easier, stronger version of myself, as though I’d been coated from the inside out with a warm liquid armor.”
“I was a white wine junkie. Toward the end I’d slug down just about anything but if I had my choice, I’d drink a crisp, cold, dry white, a French Sauvignon Blanc or a Chardonnay from the valleys of northern California. The look of a bottle of white wine in a refrigerator always reassured me somehow, the way it stood there on the shelf, beads of moisture forming on the exterior, the labels forming sharp rectangles of color against the pale golden liquid. These days, I can go to a restaurant and watch people sipping dark bottles of cold beer or short, squat glasses of vodka or gin, and it really doesn’t affect me much. But even now, when a waitress walks by with a tall glass of white wine, six or eight ounces of liquid relief, my pulse still quickness and I find myself watching it wistfully, the way you might look at a photograph of someone you loved deeply and painfully and then lost.”
The Sober Lush by Amanda Eyre Ward and Jardine Libaire.
Hands down my favorite quit-lit book. This book just feeeeeeeeeeels good. Short stories about the lushness of life. The lushness of the choice to live alcohol-free. The lushness that is all around us. Even though I have always had a positive aspect around this lifestyle choice, I also have a deep respect for any person who has or may be struggling with quitting drinking. I know way too many people (many good friends) who have struggled with alcohol, some who continue to do so, and sadly, several who have passed. So for me, to have anything less than the utmost respect and sensitivity would be unheard of. Thankfully there are many (most) quit-lit books that focus on the struggles that led up to quitting with superior guidance for getting help. The Sober Lush tells tales around quitting from a different perspective. It looks at what happens after the big quit and how beautiful it can be and is. It takes deep dives into the quiet beauty. The un-struggle. The pleasure of it all. It’s like being wrapped up in a big old warm blanket. And that’s exactly how I read it. I would take it off my shelf every morning and read just one chapter at a time. I would just let it soak in and marinate, and it always made me feel so good. It also helped reinspire me when I was burnt out from talking about alcohol. This is the book I always, always recommend to anyone who is open to learning more about this alcohol-free lifestyle. And even while writing this, I am thinking about where it is on my bookshelf so I can go grab it and start rereading it again.
“Sober lushness is not a moral code, and not a closed club. It’s a loose set of ideas and experiences that anyone is welcome to use, and we’re all free to come and go as we please. we don’t believe in sides; we don’t see it as sober people versus drinkers. we don’t imagine someone as in or out.”
“Caroline Knapp’s Drinking, A Love Story, Sarah Hepola’s Blackout; and Mary Karr’s Lit. We devoured the stories of artists who’d almost boozed themselves to death but then decided, instead, to live. These incredible books were the entry point into imagining something else, and their accounts of lost weekends, black-out days, and broken families helped us know it was time to stop. But we also wondered, is this the end, or can it be a beginning?”
“We got sober to feel deeply, to take risks. We didn’t get sober to live forever but rather to feel alive.”
“It’s extravagant to pack food you wouldn’t normally serve outside, like grilled shrimp (cooked the night before and served cold, with yogurt dip, sliced pork tenderloin, or pineapple spears. Smoked oysters in a tin can are skewered with a toothpick, and you feel like Ernest Hemingway. We like to bring ingredients to make sandwiches at the beach, bags of chips we ate when we were little, hot sauce pickles. A portable backgammon board, a few magazines”
Girl Walks Out of a Bar by Lisa Smith.
Lisa’s story is based in New York, and being that I lived in New York from the age of 21 to 41, I was privy to a lot of the things and places she mentions in the book. Lisa was also the first author who I could immediately envision sitting and drinking tea with. She immediately felt like a friend. I would go on to start a book club the second year of quitting, and I reached out to Lisa to join us while we read her book. Lisa, being the amazingly open woman that she is, not only joined for the author interview, but she joined the book club and offered her home as a place to hold the meet-ups going forward. Even after I moved to Los Angeles, she continued hosting the book club. Yes, cool and kind are definitely words I would use to describe Lisa Smith. She is a survivor of her addictions and a warrior in her recovery. Her story is riveting and important for all women but those especially who may have high-functioning corporate careers and may be thinking they are “just fine” because their lives on paper look damn sweet.
“I learned to master the art of keeping things separate. There was my real life with all its alcohol-soaked secrets and there was the role I portrayed in the stage play of my life. In the play, the protagonist was healthy, strong, and the successful envy of ambitious career women around the world. But every day at 5:30 p.m., she took her bow and the curtain closed. Then the actress sat in front of the vanity mirror framed in bright round bulbs and slowly wiped off her stage makeup with cotton balls…while knocking back highball glasses of Grey Goose.”
“Coke and alcohol got along beautifully! if I’d drunk so much that I was getting slurry and slushy, coke snapped me up crisp and straight. if too much coke had me wound up and tow tapping, booze would mellow me back down. Each drug helped me hide the other. they were like two illicit lovers who together could fulfill all my needs, and neither one minded sharing me. I knew then how viciously addictive cocaine is, but I didn’t care.
“By eighteen, I was a straight-A student, editor of the high school yearbook, and accepted early to Northwestern University. I was also a blackout drunk.”
Yes, you read that right. Atomic Habits is one of the best quit-lit books out there….even if it has nothing to do with actually quitting alcohol. But let me be clear, this book has everything to do with quitting alcohol because it’s about breaking habits and learning habits. I have so much to say about this book, it’s hard to choose. As I am writing this and looking over my old notes, I have come across a large outline I did on this book. I won’t share it all here, but I may come up with a way we can all go over it together. An Atomic Habits/Quit Drinking workshop of sorts.
Here I will share a few notes on chapter 9:
Atomic Habits Ch 9 The Role of Family and Friends:
I found this chapter to be by far the best explanation as to why we continue to drink when we know internally deep down that it is not for us - Mia.
Belonging and the desire to fit in:
“Often, you follow habits of your culture without thinking, without questioning, and sometimes without remembering” -James Clear
“The customs and practices of life in society sweep us along” -French philosopher Michel de Montaigne.
JC Quotes:
“Behaviors are attractive when they help us fit in”
“New habits seem achievable when you see others doing them every day”
“Nothing sustains motivation better than belonging to the tribe”
“Surround yourself with people who have the habits you want to have yourself”
JC states we imitate three main groups:
The close. The many. The powerful.
“The normal behavior of the tribe often overpowers the desired behavior of the individual. For example, one study found that when a chimpanzee learns an effective way to crack nuts open as a member of one group and then switches to a new group that uses a less effective strategy, it will avoid using the superior nut cracking method just to blend in with the rest of the chimps.”
Think about this! Even though we KNOW IN OUR BONES that alcohol is not for us, we probably kept doing it because everyone else was doing it. Whether to go along with the crowd, to fit in, or to feel part of something. Even when we know, know, know better!
Blackout: Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget by Sarah Hepola.
I think for many of us who have read this book, our eyes were opened to our past drinking moments. I had never really thought about the times when I blacked out here and there. I really just thought it was part of the whole bit that comes along with drinking. But this book stopped me in my tracks and brought on a level of anxiety and equal gratitude that I survived myself. I think most of the people I was drinking with over the years were blacking out as well. So many conversations were had around this happening, but none of those conversations were showing signs of being overly concerned. It was what it was, and that was that.
Until this book.
Until I, for one, realized how fucking relieved I was to no longer be a drinker.
Reading Sarah’s book was such a gut punch of all the memories I had around near misses and all the thanking of God that I called in because I made it home alive and in one piece. I think of all the stupid ass shit I did and the scary situations I was in without knowing I was in at the time. Makes my stomach churn. And again, so fucking relieved I survived myself.
“And people in a blackout can be surprisingly functional. This is a point worth underscoring, since the most common misperception about blacking out is confusing it with passing out, losing consciousness after too much booze. But in a blackout, a person is anything but silent and immobile. You can talk and laugh and charm people at the bar with funny stories of your past. You can sing the shit out of “Little Red Corvette” on a karaoke stage. You can run your greedy hands over the man whose name you never asked. The next day, your brain will have no imprint of these activities, almost as if they didn’t happen. Once memories are lost in a blackout, they can’t be coaxed back. Simple logic: Information that wasn’t stored cannot be retrieved.”
“Sobriety wasn’t supposed to be like this. I thought when I finally quit drinking for good, the universe would open its treasure chest for me. That only seemed fair, right? I would sacrifice the greatest, most important relationship of my existence - here I am, universe, sinking a knife into my true love’s chest for you - and I would be rewarded with mountains of shimmering clinking gold to grab by the fistful. I would be kicking down doors again. In badass superhero mode. Instead, I woke up at 5 am each day, chest hammering with anxiety, and crawled into the closet for a few hours to shut out unpleasant voices.”
Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself by Dr. Joe Dispenza.
Yes, another non-quit-lit, quit-lit book. This is one of the best books about habits, why we are the way we are, how we can change and how we can continue to grow. There is so much to learn in books like this and Atomic Habits. So much we can take and easily just apply to how we used alcohol (or anything, shopping, internet, sex, people pleasing, etc.) and if we are still drinking or using and learn how to move away from these habits and form new neuropathways that have nothing to do with the false rewards of these addictive dopamine hits.
OK, this is a longer excerpt from the book, but it was this part in the book that pulled me in and I became a true believer. Why? Because I have participated in this exact example one million times over. If you haven’t, please raise your hand and tell me all your secrets. Because this behavior is human AF, I don’t know anyone who has not been in this situation. To overcome this is mastery work.
“Warning: when feelings become the means of thinking, or if we cannot think greater than how we feel, we can never change. To change is to think greater than how we feel. To change is to act greater than the familiar feelings of the memorized self. It is to be greater than the body. As a practical example, let’s say you’re driving to work this morning and you begin to think about the heated encounter you had a few days ago with a co-worker. As you think the thoughts associated with that person and that particular experience, your brain starts releasing chemicals that circulate through your body. Very quickly, you begin to feel exactly the way you were thinking. You probably become angry. Your body sends a message back to your brain, saying, Yup, I’m feeling really ticked off. Of course, your brain, which constantly communicates with the body and monitors its internal chemical order, is influenced by the sudden change in the way you’re feeling. As a result, you being to think differently. (The moment you begin to feel the way you think, you begin to think the way you feel.) You unconsciously reinforce the same feeling by continuing to think angry and frustrated thoughts, which then make you feel more angry and frustrated. In effect, your feelings are now controlling your thinking. Your body is now driving your mind. As the cycle goes on, your angry thoughts produce more chemical signals to your body, which activate the adrenal chemicals associated with your angry feelings. Now you become enraged and aggressive. You feel flushed, your stomach is twisted into a knot, your head pounds, and your muscles start to clench. As all those heightened feelings flood the body and change its physiology, this chemical cocktail fires up a set of circuits in the brain, causing you to think equal to those emotions. Now you’re telling your associate off ten different ways in the privacy of your own mind. You indignantly conjure up a litany of past events that validate your present upset, brainstorming through a letter recounting all those complaints you’ve always wanted to lodge. In your mind, you’ve already forwarded it to your boss before you even arrive at work. You exit the car dazed and crazed and a breath away from homicidal. Hello, walking, talking, model of an angry person….and all of this started with a single thought. In this moment, it seems impossible to think greater than you feel - and that’s why it’s so hard to change.”
I hope that you have time to pick up one of these books and/or revisit them. I keep saying that connection starts when we can see ourselves in another person’s story. And books are one of the best vehicles for this connection.
Thank you for connecting with me here.
Much love,
XX M
So i texted my sister this evening saying “for the first time I am having a hard time not drinking”. I am 24 days sober. She wrote back “do something to take your mind off of it. Something you wouldn’t normally do.”
So i cooked😆 bc i do NOT cook.
Then after that i was like well now what?! Still feeling anxious so I picked up my phone to find this email! I sat, read through it and remembered all the reasons NOT to drink today! Thank you for this Mia🙏🏼 I am going to make it to day 25.
thank you so much for this list. When I decided to really face my drinking problem in 2020 I started devouring quit lit books. One of the first books I read was Carolyn Knapps. I had read this book years prior before I ever considered giving up alcohol. Have you read her close friend’s book “Let’s Take the Long Way Home?” by Gail Caldwell. It’s such a touching story of their close friendship. You’re the second person who has recently recommended Atomic Habits so it’s next on my list. Thanks again for sharing your list.