Wife Mother Drunk

Wife Mother Drunk is a rare feat in the now infamous genre of "quit lit" - it eschews much of the usual rhetoric around rock bottoms and happy endings to offer a far more stark and realistic view of addiction and the road to healing. After having her fourth and last baby, Emily Redonodo found herself in rehab with a breast pump and a five-week old at home. On the surface, she looked like every other suburban mom, replete with dance bags and mini van, but inside, she was in a harrowing dance with alcoholism, drinking from morning until night, stealing alcohol from liquor stores, and finding herself arrested for a DUI with a four-year old in the backseat.

Wife Mother Drunk tells the story of Emily's decades-long battle against her disease while also confronting generations of inherited trauma and addiction. As she writes, "I come from pioneers." In this incredible book, Emily investigates those dusty-earth roots to understand how women process trauma, heartbreak, and centuries of putting their children before their own well-being. As Emily untangles the web of female addiciton in her own family line, she uncovers all the ways her life has become the ultimate consequence of others' unhealed trauma.

This is a book like few others on addiction, in that Emily doesn't just wake up sober one day. After twenty institutions, all while being a stay-at-home mom raising her children, Emily walks an awkward yet gentle road towards recovery, even as she is forced to face the consequences of her own trauma, through heart-breaking diagnoses and her long-term neurolofical damage caused by alcohol.

Wife Mother Drunk is a searing, heartbreaking portrait of a woman caught in the grips of addiction but also a mother whose greatest hope is the love for her children.