Drunk Mom
A Memoir
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Drunk Mom
Narrated by:
Meredith Mitchell
Buy Now for £10.83
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Narrated by:
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Meredith Mitchell
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By:
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Jowita Bydlowska
Three years after giving up drinking, Jowita Bydlowska found herself throwing back a glass of champagne like it was ginger ale. “It's a special occasion,” she said to her boyfriend. And indeed it was. It was a party to celebrate the birth of their first child. It also marked Jowita's immediate return to full-blown alcoholism.
Her trips to liquor stores are in-and-out missions. Perhaps she’s being paranoid, but she thinks people tend to notice the stroller. Walking home, she stays behind buildings, in alleyways, taking discreet sips from a bottle she’s stored in the diaper bag. She knows she’s become a villain: a mother who drinks; a mother who endangers her baby. She drinks to forget this. And then the trouble really starts.
With brutal honesty, Jowita Bydlowska takes us through the binges and blackouts; the humiliations and extraordinary risk-taking; the self-deception and less successful attempts to deceive others. She shines a light on the endless hunger of wanting just one more drink, and one more again, while dealing with motherhood, anxiety, depression—and rehab.
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Critic reviews
“It’s really very intense, a very brave, very complicated story. It’s a difficult book, and I found my jaw on the floor, which doesn’t happen that often to me. I love the way that she approaches prose—I think it’s really beautiful.” —Lena Dunham
“While the title suggests a simple autobiographical autopsy of motherhood marred by alcoholism, Bydlowska’s memoir delivers far more—a human portrait of the disease . . . the author and her addiction [speak] to each other in a tragic duet.” —The New York Times Book Review
“It is a memoir that pushes at boundaries—what is private, what should perhaps be kept private, what we need to know, what we don’t, what is insightful or just exhibitionism. One of the most talked about books of the season.” —The Globe and Mail.
“Maternal tippling is a trendy topic on ‘mom’ blogs . . . But these chirpy, jokey accounts don’t touch the dark spiral of addiction Toronto writer Jowita Bydlowska relives in this riveting account . . . Bydlowska is an evocative, talented and gutsy writer who appears willing to confess all . . . Bydlowska writes of watching other upscale stroller-pushing moms and wondering: do they hide mickeys in their diaper bags too? With this bracing book, others will now be asking that question as well.” —Maclean’s
“[A] gifted writer, and a courageous one . . . Without glibness, without self-pity, knowing that she risks being judged, Bydlowska tells her story . . . Luckily for those reading her story, she possesses a wickedly dark sense of humour.” —The Montreal Gazette
“To understand this story in the guise of an addiction memoir is to misunderstand its worth. . . . Instead, this book is fresh within the context of a parenting memoir, one of a particular kind: A counterculture parenting memoir. [It] stands as an uncommonly perceptive chronicle of what it means to be an intelligent, urban parent trying to hold on to the rest of her life. As a writer she’s got some chops.” —National Post
“I am adhered to the misery memoir and can say that Bydlowska did it perfectly. She floated over her personal landscape like a drone and then dropped ordnance on herself. As for the why, she wrote one shattering page towards the end about human pain, hers. She’s a Canadian writer headed for even more greatness.” —Heather Mallick, Toronto Star
“Drunk Mom is a stunning, harrowing read. Why harrowing? Not just because of the dramatic story, of a new mother at the edge of her tether. And not only because of Jowita Bydlowska’s skill as a writer, and the crisp, original way she tells it. What’s most harrowing about Drunk Mom is that you can’t stop reading it—this, the dark, now-told tale that lurks in the shadow of every seemingly normal family.” —Ian Brown, author of The Boy in the Moon and Sixty
“While the title suggests a simple autobiographical autopsy of motherhood marred by alcoholism, Bydlowska’s memoir delivers far more—a human portrait of the disease . . . the author and her addiction [speak] to each other in a tragic duet.” —The New York Times Book Review
“It is a memoir that pushes at boundaries—what is private, what should perhaps be kept private, what we need to know, what we don’t, what is insightful or just exhibitionism. One of the most talked about books of the season.” —The Globe and Mail.
“Maternal tippling is a trendy topic on ‘mom’ blogs . . . But these chirpy, jokey accounts don’t touch the dark spiral of addiction Toronto writer Jowita Bydlowska relives in this riveting account . . . Bydlowska is an evocative, talented and gutsy writer who appears willing to confess all . . . Bydlowska writes of watching other upscale stroller-pushing moms and wondering: do they hide mickeys in their diaper bags too? With this bracing book, others will now be asking that question as well.” —Maclean’s
“[A] gifted writer, and a courageous one . . . Without glibness, without self-pity, knowing that she risks being judged, Bydlowska tells her story . . . Luckily for those reading her story, she possesses a wickedly dark sense of humour.” —The Montreal Gazette
“To understand this story in the guise of an addiction memoir is to misunderstand its worth. . . . Instead, this book is fresh within the context of a parenting memoir, one of a particular kind: A counterculture parenting memoir. [It] stands as an uncommonly perceptive chronicle of what it means to be an intelligent, urban parent trying to hold on to the rest of her life. As a writer she’s got some chops.” —National Post
“I am adhered to the misery memoir and can say that Bydlowska did it perfectly. She floated over her personal landscape like a drone and then dropped ordnance on herself. As for the why, she wrote one shattering page towards the end about human pain, hers. She’s a Canadian writer headed for even more greatness.” —Heather Mallick, Toronto Star
“Drunk Mom is a stunning, harrowing read. Why harrowing? Not just because of the dramatic story, of a new mother at the edge of her tether. And not only because of Jowita Bydlowska’s skill as a writer, and the crisp, original way she tells it. What’s most harrowing about Drunk Mom is that you can’t stop reading it—this, the dark, now-told tale that lurks in the shadow of every seemingly normal family.” —Ian Brown, author of The Boy in the Moon and Sixty
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