Falling Apart and Other Gifts from the Universe

Fiction by Catherine Ryan Hyde

https://www.amazon.com

Addie is sixty-something year old working a night shift security guard job and attending five AA meetings a week. But even though she’s eight years sober, she’s really never dealt with what was underneath her addiction. 

Her new sponsor assigns her to redo her moral inventory, and she starts to really uncover some things. But then she kind of falls apart. Fortunately, although she is a chronic loner, Addie has a couple of good friends to help her through.

This was a really good character story. 

I also read recently by this author: Michael Without Apology

Drunk Mom

 Nonfiction by Jowita Bydlowska.

https://www.audible.com

This story is, exactly as the title suggests, about a new mother struggling with alcoholism. Jowita (pronounced yo-VEE-tuh) had been sober for years when she unexpectedly fell pregnant in her mid-thirties and fell off the wagon. She managed to (mostly) not drink while she was pregnant, white-knuckling her way through because she was too proud to go back to AA and admit a relapse, but once her son Frankie was born she really went off the deep end.

The story follows the usual structure of an addiction memoir: the person is okay at first, and then not okay, and then REALLY not okay, until they finally relent and go to rehab. You don't read an addiction story for the plot twists. (Although there is some surprise in the shock value of how VERY not okay things can get.) What makes this type of memoir readable or not is the individual voice of the teller, which is an unquantifiable and ambiguous thing.

I really liked Jowita, even though she was very selfish and deceitful, and really she kind of was a terrible person. I can't explain why I still wanted to hear her story. Not everyone agrees with me; opinions are sharply divided. Sample reviews on audible.com are titled: "Terrible," "Just can't get through it," "Riveting," and "Awe-Inspiring."

Her descriptions are VERY detailed, and sometimes almost poetic. If I were a person with an alcohol problem, I might feel triggered by passages that seem like they should be called "A Love Song To Booze." So I'm pretty sure this book is not for everyone. Still, I really liked it.

A Piece of Cake

 Nonfiction by Cupcake Brown. 

https://www.barnesandnoble.com

This was also an interesting memoir of the Harrowing Childhood variety, but it's not the same as The Pale Faced Lie.

An eleven-year-old girl, called Cupcake by her mother and LaVette by her father, wakes up one day to find her mother dead and her life completely upended. She goes through many terrible things as a foster child, a runaway, a gangbanger, and a "trash-can" junkie, before finally finding herself and God's purpose for her life.

This is not a Christian story; for one thing, there are way too many cuss-words for that! Still, it is a story about the living God and His mysterious ways in one woman's life.