In the afterwords of The Authenticity of Project, author Clare Pooley noted that it was her attempt to capture in fiction something she’s done in fact: change her life through honesty. She’d done it by blogging her journey to sobriety, beginning with the embarrassing account of her pouring some wine into a WORLD’S BEST MOM coffee cup just to combat a morning hangover to be there for her kids. The diary takes readers through an entire year of starter sobriety and details the psychological, physical, and social challenges she faced, as well as the changes she observed. Pooley’s journey to sobriety had the additional challenge of a cancer diagnosis several months in. I’ve never read anything like this before and found it fairly absorbing, although after a month or so it appears Pooley had more or less settled in on the right track. The biggest ongoing challenge was the expectation of social drinking, which she negated in part by drinking nonalcoholic ‘drinks’ like Beck’s Blue. There were only a couple of times that she was tempted by her old frenemy wine: one time her husband stumbled in on her contemplating a glass and intervened, another time she pulled her own self back. This is not a journey I’ve been on, personally, so I can’t comment on what her depiction of “Post-Acute Withdrawal Syndrome” is like: this entails mood swings and such as the brain continues to find a new normal after its chronic chemical sedation suddenly ceases. It was the beginning of this book that was most arresting, with Clare finally admitting that her bottle-of-wine a day habit was a problem, and she began dealing with the feelings of shame — both for having a problem and for potentially being a problem for her husband and kids — but forced herself to start moving in the right direction. I imagine whether the issue is sobriety or weight loss, getting started is always the hardest part. This appears to be very popular with readers, at least those who aren’t offended by the fact that Clare is upper middle class and not writing this memoir from a trailer park. On a partially irrelevant side note: I’ve read nearly two Pooley novels now, and was amused to see common elements in this and the novels, from words of wisdom to her frequent Harry Potter and David Attenborough references.

(Yes, this was supposed to be my next read, but I hit a stall during People on Platform 5 and looked at this instead, and then wound up reading it through. Should finish People on Platform 5 sometime today, though.)

Related:
Rachel’s Holiday, Marian Keyes. An unreliable narrator is forced to go to rehab.