Stefanie Wilder-Taylor is a humorist, TV personality, and a podcaster who also writes laugh-out-loud memoirs that offer a playful, absurdist take on life and its many challenges. In five previous books, including Sippy Cups Are Not for Chardonnay and Naptime Is the New Happy Hour, her offbeat commentaries riff on being a daughter, a wife, and a parent. Her love of and dependence on alcohol have infused the many eccentric stories of her life. Her sixth book, Drunk-ish: A Memoir of Loving and Leaving Alcohol, reveals even more depth to Wilder-Taylor's self-deprecating humor and her ability to find the funny in every situation, while also facing up to her own glaring weaknesses and faults.
Through 21 immensely entertaining chapters, Wilder-Taylor explores the role over-indulgence has played, for better or worse, in her life, and how she eventually confronted and overcame addictions. "Sugar was my very first full-on addiction," she says, sharing side-splitting stories about how candy and sweet obsessions ruled her childhood. Once, when hired as a babysitter, she became known as a "lying sugar thief," when she ate all of her charges' Easter candy and then tried to pin the rap on the kids. "I was never hired back."
Such behavior later morphed into a cycle of bulimia. As a 14-year-old ninth-grader, Wilder-Taylor sipped her first drink, a beer, in the backseat of a VW Rabbit, cringing while making out with a boy for the first time: "I could have been twelve beers in and I still would've felt stupid and inexperienced." The feelings evoked by this incident become a watershed in defining the future role alcohol would play in her life, when she grapples with her parents' divorce; dates under the influence; struggles to find her place in the world; marries; and becomes a day-drinking mother of three. Along the way, she wanders a maze of inebriations, interventions, and self-deceptive rationalizations. At the age of 42, when she drinks and drives with her children in the car, she becomes "stunned by [her] own arrogance," and the tide is finally forced to turn.
Wilder-Taylor's inimitable ability to latch onto humor even in the darkest of times is most refreshing. A perfect balance of bold honesty and riotous wit takes the edge off her culpability as she faces startling truths enroute to accepting the empowerment of sobriety. --Kathleen Gerard, blogger at Reading Between the Lines
Shelf Talker: A brave comic writer offers a fresh, fun, self-deprecating take on the role alcohol has played in her life and the path that led her to sobriety.