Quitter

Starred review from April 6, 2020
Journalist Barnett debuts with an intense account of her alcoholism, denial, and, ultimately, redemption. With her first taste of alcohol as a 13-year-old in 1991, she discovered a “magic trick that took me outside myself,” one that, after graduating from the University of Texas, turned a shy young woman into a gregarious one. After landing her first reporting job at the Austin Chronicle, Barnett began drinking heavily, suffering blackouts before accepting a job at Seattle Weekly. In Seattle, her problem worsened, with more frequent blackouts and Barnett relying on box wine at her desk at work. Barnett’s snappy prose carries the reader through several rounds of rehab before the final one sticks, pulling no punches as she goes. Barnett doesn’t skimp on her life’s lows (she goes to an interview drunk, and shoplifts wine) of how her ever-worsening problem caused her to lose her health, her job, and many of her friends, and alienate her family. In the end, she begins therapy and reluctantly joins AA, eventually acknowledging, “I feel better if I give some of those things up to whatever’s out there.” Emotionally devastating and self-aware, this cautionary tale about substance abuse is a worthy heir to Cat Marnell’s How to Murder Your Life.

May 15, 2020
A Seattle-based political reporter recounts her tumultuous, nearly deadly dance with the bottle. Writing a recovery memoir seems to be Step 13 for many professional writers of nonfiction who make it out the other side of addiction: Pete Hamill, Leslie Jamison, Mary Karr, David Carr, Caroline Knapp, and Sarah Hepola are just a few of the names that spring to mind. Perhaps because such authors have claimed truth-telling as their life's work, and because addiction involves so many lies, putting an honest version of this story in print is a necessary part of reclaiming their identities as writers. The problem, of course, is that it's usually the same story, which puts a heavy burden on prose style. Barnett rises to the challenge with a witty, self-deprecating, sometimes snide voice. (She describes her boyfriend's friends as "well-adjusted in ways that made me nervous, with carefully curated lives filled with long-haired, gender fluid children, camping trips, and backyard chicken coops.") The author engagingly chronicles her Southern roots and her school years in a Houston suburb, including some heavy teenage drinking, and then moves on to her first jobs, at the Texas Observer and the Austin Chronicle. In Austin, she found that "the grown-up world replicates high school in ways we don't always recognize or acknowledge," and her attempts to fit in with her new peer group led to her first blackout drinking. Barnett's journey involved an almost unbearable number of relapses, and readers may begin to feel the way her family and friends did: out of patience and sympathy. Nonetheless, this is the truth, and she tells it openly. Like many others, she utterly denied that AA was right for her--until it became the only way to save her life. If you're in the mood for a well-written, relatable, rock-bottom recovery memoir, this will hit the spot.

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