No Lost Causes Club: An Honest Guide to Recovery, and How to Find Your Way Through It

Opera singer McQuistin debuts with a perceptive and self-aware guide to recovering from alcoholism. The daughter of tenant farmers, McQuistin grew up in a depressed area of Scotland and began drinking at age 13 to escape childhood trauma and persistent self-loathing. Following a suicide attempt at age 19, an abusive relationship, and visits to the psychiatric ward, she was warned by a doctor that if she kept drinking she risked dying in her 20s (“I thought sobriety was for people who needed to get their life back on track, and I’d never actually been on it,” she remembers thinking). With those experiences as a springboard, she leads readers through the recovery process, from hitting rock bottom—which can be triggered by disaster or a more mundane moment “that finally gets your attention” but should be acted upon quickly—to grappling in early sobriety with the emotions that drinking had anesthetized and creating daily routines to build stability. McQuistin’s guidance is light on specifics and most useful in viscerally rendering the internal experience of addiction recovery (“Sometimes you can feel like there’s a stranger in you body, and it’s you. You maybe once believed you processed your trauma by obliterating it with alcohol... but that just leaves it frozen in time”). The author’s appealingly diaristic tone and nonjudgmental advice will help those hoping to break their addictions feel seen. (July)