The Sober Curious Year

About this book

<b>The sober curious year, how to stay sober at parties and weddings, sober curious for the gray area drinker, and a field guide to quitting drinking situation by situation — from a recovery coach sober since 2009.</b> <p>You can sit through three sober Christmases and then crack at a Tuesday afternoon barbecue you did not even want to attend. You can quit drinking for nine months on willpower alone and then book a flight to Rome and forget every reason. Ines Marlowe has been there: twenty-five years of drinking that ended in a Portland kitchen with her hand on a wine bottle she had already opened twice that week. This is not a memoir of decline and redemption and it is not a workbook with fillable boxes. It is a field guide to the next eleven months of your life, organized by the small specific situations that actually make drinking hard to quit.</p> <p>Most quit-lit assumes you are a single kind of person at a single point in the arc. You are not. So this sober curious guide is built around sixty real situations — the bar birthday, the wedding toast, the friend's cookout, the Sunday at four, the wine aisle after a hard day, the hotel room alone, the late-night internet, the slip and the climb back. For each one, Marlowe gives you the worked example a recovery coach would give a client across the table: here is what the situation does to a brain trying to quit, here is what I would actually do, and here is what I would do if I broke the first part of the plan. No rock-bottom theory. No California sober hand-waving. Just workarounds that hold.</p> <h4>Inside this sober curious field guide:</h4> <ul> <li><b>A three-part plan for every drinking event</b> — The entrance plan, the glass plan, and the exit plan, plus the one fallback that beats willpower: you drove yourself, and the car is your escape pod</li> <li><b>The bartender deal and the club-soda-with-three-limes trick</b> — How to stay sober at weddings and bars without the half-sip-and-pretend strategy that teaches your body the rules bend</li> <li><b>The Sunday at four, solved</b> — The rebuttal that works on solo drinking is not a fear sentence or a rule sentence; it is a sentence about the project, plus a toolkit for the empty hours the head will try to refill</li> <li><b>The wine aisle route</b> — Why the supermarket is more dangerous than the wedding for the long-term sober person, and the freezer rule: do not buy wine, not for guests, not for cooking, not ever</li> <li><b>The late-night internet</b> — Why an algorithm that remembers what you used to drink is a relapse environment no older recovery book warns you about, and the mechanical fix that ends it</li> <li><b>The slip and the climb back</b> — A five-part climb back (call your person the same day, no large declarations, examine the data, give the body ten days, keep your date) that is neither punitive nor permissive</li> <li><b>Sixty situations in all</b> — From your own birthday and the funeral to the Tuesday with nothing in it, the five-year mark, and the day that has nothing wrong with it, each written with the names and the weather and the smell of the room intact</li> </ul> <p>This is a book for the gray area drinker who quit quietly, without a coin and without an audience, and wants to stay quit anyway. The triumph it delivers is not having a great time at the party. It is the walk to the car, the clean unsaturated memory, the Sunday morning with the whole day still in front of you, and a project that, by bedtime, is one day longer than it was the night before. That is the entire engine.</p> <p><b>For readers of <b>Brene Brown</b>'s The Gifts of Imperfection and <b>Pema Chodron</b>'s When Things Fall Apart.</b></p>