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Why everyone should read this book: Too important to missMarie Dubuque

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Name: Quit Like a Woman: The Radical Choice to Not Drink in a Culture Obsessed with Alcohol - Kindle edition by Whitaker, Holly. Health, Fitness & Dieting Kindle eBooks @ Amazon.com.
Rating: 4.5 (9313 reviews)

Holly Whitaker

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Quit Like a Woman: The Radical Choice to Not Drink in a Culture Obsessed with Alcohol Kindle Edition

by Holly Whitaker (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

4.5 9,313 ratings

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NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “An unflinching examination of how our drinking culture hurts women and a gorgeous memoir of how one woman healed herself.”—Glennon Doyle, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Untamed

“You don’t know how much you need this book, or maybe you do. Either way, it will save your life.”—Melissa Hartwig Urban, Whole30 co-founder and CEO

The founder of the first female-focused recovery program offers a groundbreaking look at alcohol and a radical new path to sobriety.

We live in a world obsessed with drinking. We drink at baby showers and work events, brunch and book club, graduations and funerals. Yet no one ever questions alcohol’s ubiquity—in fact, the only thing ever questioned is why someone doesn’t drink. It is a qualifier for belonging and if you don’t imbibe, you are considered an anomaly. As a society, we are obsessed with health and wellness, yet we uphold alcohol as some kind of magic elixir, though it is anything but.

When Holly Whitaker decided to seek help after one too many benders, she embarked on a journey that led not only to her own sobriety, but revealed the insidious role alcohol plays in our society and in the lives of women in particular. What’s more, she could not ignore the ways that alcohol companies were targeting women, just as the tobacco industry had successfully done generations before. Fueled by her own emerging feminism, she also realized that the predominant systems of recovery are archaic, patriarchal, and ineffective for the unique needs of women and other historically oppressed people—who don’t need to lose their egos and surrender to a male concept of God, as the tenets of Alcoholics Anonymous state, but who need to cultivate a deeper understanding of their own identities and take control of their lives. When Holly found an alternate way out of her own addiction, she felt a calling to create a sober community with resources for anyone questioning their relationship with drinking, so that they might find their way as well. Her resultant feminine-centric recovery program focuses on getting at the root causes that lead people to overindulge and provides the tools necessary to break the cycle of addiction, showing us what is possible when we remove alcohol and destroy our belief system around it.

Written in a relatable voice that is honest and witty, Quit Like a Woman is at once a groundbreaking look at drinking culture and a road map to cutting out alcohol in order to live our best lives without the crutch of intoxication. You will never look at drinking the same way again.

From the Publisher

Glennon Doyle says, “Unflinching … It will change your relationship to alcohol.”;Quit Like a Woman

WARNING: California’s Proposition 65

Editorial Reviews

Review

“An unflinching examination of how our drinking culture hurts women and a gorgeous memoir of how one woman healed herself. It will change your relationship with alcohol—and it has the power to change your relationship with your entire life.”—Glennon Doyle, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Untamed

“A funny, fast-paced, and bracingly candid dispatch from the realm of the self-actualized, but Holly Whitaker is no polished model of self-help evangelism, nor is her memoir-manifesto selling a one-size-fits-all solution. Her story is a messy human one and all the more convincing that sobriety is a feminist issue.”—Melissa Febos, author of Whip Smart and Abandon Me

“As a culture, we have a weird and often dysfunctional relationship with alcohol. This thoughtful, moving book will help a lot of people get to a healthier place.”—Johann Hari, author of Chasing the Scream and Lost Connections

“Holly Whitaker is a genius: brilliantly clever, fearless, snort-out-loud funny.”—Catherine Gray, author of The Unexpected Joy of Being Sober

“Brave and revolutionary, Whitaker has written a compulsively readable book about creating a life you don’t want to escape. Funny, insightful, and candid, it is a must-read for anyone embarking on the adventure of abandoning alcohol.”—Ann Dowsett Johnston, author of Drink: The Intimate Relationship Between Women and Alcohol

“A vital, timely, and intriguing analysis of women and alcohol . . . Whitaker cuts to the quick of the issues, skillfully using gripping anecdotes and well-researched insights to educate, liberate, and provide real hope and tangible steps for anyone looking to quit like a woman.”—Annie Grace, author of This Naked Mind: Control Alcohol, Find Freedom, Discover Happiness & Change Your Life

“Raw, vulnerable, and unapologetic. Holly Whitaker brings these ingredients together for a fresh and needed perspective as well as a great read.”—Jud Brewer, MD, PhD, author of The Craving Mind: From Cigarettes to Smartphones to Love—Why We Get Hooked and How We Can Break Bad Habits

“Following in the footsteps of titles such as Rachel Hollis’s Girl, Wash Your Face, Whitaker aims her first book at modern, urban women—specifically those who are concerned that they might have a problem with alcohol. Part self-help, part recovery memoir, this personal account provides useful and inspiring techniques for addiction recovery.”—Library Journal

“In this blending of memoir and advocacy for an alcohol-free lifestyle, Whitaker . . . offer[s] inspiration to others in need of guidance or permission to find their own paths.”—Booklist

About the Author

Holly Whitaker is the founder and CEO of Tempest (formerly Hip Sobriety). With years of experience in the fields of healthcare and tech, she created an individualized recovery program in 2014 through a virtual platform that offers education, community, and support services. She lives in Brooklyn with her cat, Mary Katherine.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Introduction

Nearly a decade ago, about a year before I stopped drinking alcohol, a friend of mine showed up at my door. She lived in my neighborhood, the Tendernob of San Francisco, which is another way of saying we lived somewhere between a shithole and a fancy tourist trap. It was early on a Saturday afternoon, and my friend was carrying a Solo cup full of whiskey because some man she’d met on OkCupid had broken her heart. It seemed a reasonable solution to me at the time: to walk around the streets of San Francisco sipping Maker’s Mark to dull the specific pain of being rejected by someone she met on the internets who wasn’t good enough for her in the first place. Only, I would have chosen Jameson.

We called a few friends to come over, and we sat in my little studio apartment smoking pot and drinking even more whiskey and cheap wine from the corner store, when my dear, brokenhearted friend announced to the group that she was pretty sure she was going through an “alcoholic phase.” Alcoholic phase. I looked around the room at the faces of my other friends for a hint of the same reaction I felt, which was relief. I saw not only looks of relief but also ones of deep knowing—we’d all experienced something close enough to that to empathize.

Huh.

When you’re terrified that maybe your drinking has gone off the rails, nothing will rein in that hysterical, ridiculous thought more tightly than a group of successful, intelligent, attractive, “together” women who normalize your affliction with a new term: Alcoholic phase! This scenario is only one of a few hundred examples of why I couldn’t figure out whether I really had a problem with alcohol, or if maybe I was just going through a little “thing” that would straighten itself out.

Around the time of this particular incident, when I was thirty-three, my drinking was escalating in a way that felt out of control. It was no longer just one or two at home, or a drunk night out with the girls, or hangovers on the weekends, or any of the things I’d done in my twenties that felt moderately in control or normal-ish. I was drinking by myself after going out; I was hungover more days than not; keeping it to a bottle of wine a night felt like a win; five o’clock stopped coming fast enough, and I started to leave work at 4:45, then 4:30, then 4:00 p.m. At some point, it made sense to carry airline shots in my purse— just in case. Sometimes (especially when working on a deadline) I holed up in my apartment for days on end, drinking from morning until I passed out. That kind of thing.

But (and there is always a but when you want to invalidate everything you’ve just said) I didn’t drink every night, and I didn’t drink any more than my friends when we went out. I’d recently made it twelve days without booze, and—perhaps most important to me—I had mastered the art of keeping my shit together when drunk in public. I was never the one being carried home, and I was never the one who got sloppy. I made sure of that.

To my mind, there was enough evidence to prove I was a “normal drinker,” and equally enough evidence to qualify me for the Betty Ford. I went back and forth between knowing I needed major help and thinking if I just did more fucking yoga, I’d be fine.

My passage into sobriety was both slow and fast. Slow, in that it took me seventeen years to realize alcohol had never done me any favors, seventeen years of trying to control it and master it and make it work for me like I imagined it worked for all the other people. Fast, in the sense that once I crossed some invisible line, one I still can’t retrace, I was hurtling so quickly toward total dissolution that I couldn’t pretend to have the strength to stave off what was happening to me. The whole thing was like that Price Is Right game where the little yodeler is climbing the mountain and you never know when he’s going to stop or how far he’s going to make it, but you also know he has the potential to go all the way.

It might be helpful to mention that during this time I was simply killing it at work. I’d joined a start-up in 2009, and because I was a cutthroat workaholic with a habit of fucking men in charge, in a few short years I landed a director title—something typically reserved for Ivy League MBAs who favored Ann Taylor pinstripes. It was a health care company, and many of my friends were medical doctors, so I dropped in to see one of them about my “thing.” I explained that I might have a teeny-tiny drinking issue and a habit of throwing up most things I ate, and when she had to google how to treat me and suggested Alcoholics Anonymous, I knew I was completely screwed. I bought wine on the way home from that appointment, because I wasn’t an alcoholic and there was no way in hell I was going to AA.

But over the course of the next eighteen months, one by one, I stopped drinking, smoking pot, taking all recreational drugs, and I got over my bulimia. I started meditating and crawled out of the depths of depression, addiction, sickness, and crushing debt. Within twenty months of that afternoon with my friends—drinking room-temperature whiskey and pondering if maybe all of us are sick or none of us are—I also quit my job. I did this because I had finally become someone who (a) wasn’t the kind of woman who reports to someone she’s been sleeping with, and (b) had a pure reason to exist: I knew I was supposed to start a revolution around alcohol, addiction, and recovery.

What I didn’t quite know was exactly how I would do that, or that this revolution would become stronger with the strands of activism and energy woven into other major social forces: fourth-wave and intersectional feminism, the reaction to the Trump election, the legalization of marijuana in several states, the Black Lives Matter movement, the opioid crisis, and the growing and vocalized dissent against a very racist, classist, imperialist—and failed—War on Drugs.

This journey has been an evolving one. At first, it was the story of a dead woman walking, of all the women in this world who try to conform to a life they are told they should want—one that looks good on paper. I drank green juice and I made the right sounds when I fucked men I didn’t really like and I crushed it in the boardroom and traveled to Central America all by myself and my ass was yoga tight. I did all the right things until all the right things became so suffocating I wound up prostrate, drunk, on the floor of my apartment. It then became the journey of a woman waking up to the world and all its possibilities and wonder, her own power and voice and unique identity, the bigness that a life can be when we center it on our true desires, compared to the smallness of the one we accept when we center it on the desires we’re supposed to have.

That personal awakening was followed by the part where I discovered that alcohol was not only something I could not abide, but perhaps something we all shouldn’t, and that was paralleled by the part where I discovered that the systems in place to help me stop drinking the chemical we’ve been trained to tolerate—the chemical that was physically and emotionally and mentally murdering me—were archaic, patriarchal, masculine, and hence ineffective for me as a non-man. I discovered that I not only had to claw my way out of hell and construct my own system for recovery, but that also, perhaps, it was my duty to create something more so the women who come after me, women who are dying in broad daylight while we look the other way, might not have to face the same bullshit I had to endure.

We are living at a time in history where more and more women are waking up to their infinite potential and calling out the systems that hold them down and keep them quiet, submissive, sick, second-to, voiceless, and out of power. We have more socioeconomic and political clout than ever before. The movements started by women of color, the LGBTQIA community, and radical feminists have gained considerable momentum, and we’ve reached a tipping point—more of us are aware of the terms of our own oppression and of our complicity in the oppression of others. Words like misogyny, patriarchy, tone-policing, white privilege, and gaslighting have become common lexicon; women, now more than at any other time in history, are conscious of our collective subjugation.

And yet.

And yet: This is also the time in which women are drinking more than we ever have before. Between 2002 and 2012, the rates of alcohol addiction among women rose by 84 percent—as in, it nearly doubled. One in ten adult American women will die an alcohol-related death, and from 2007 to 2017, alcohol-related deaths among women rose 67 percent, as opposed to 29 percent among men. It is a time of radical progression in almost every area of our collective experience—and a time of unprecedented rates of addiction coupled with an almost gross ambivalence toward our personal and societal relationship with alcohol. Here is the time in history where The Future Is Female, the wine is pink, the yoga classes serve beer, and the death toll rises. Here is the time in history where masses of us women fill the streets to protest against external oppression, then celebrate or cope or come down from it all with a glass of self-administered oppression.

This book is about all these things—about the sickness in our society that drives us toward an unattainable perfection and lives we never bargained for and what we do to manage that impossible situation. It’s about an addictive chemical that we have been fooled into believing is the answer to every problem, a healthful staple of our diet, our key to connection and power. It’s about a system that limits our ability to question whether we should be consuming that addictive chemical and one that, when we do become addicted, forces us into male-centric “recovery” frameworks (i.e., Alcoholics Anonymous) that not only run counter to our emerging feminist and individualist ideals but actively work against them, boarding us through yet another system that requires submission to male authority, self-silencing, further dissolution of self, and pathologized femininity.

In other words, this book is about what makes us sick and keeps us sick. It’s about our power as women—both as individuals and as a collective—and how alcohol can keep us from it. And most important, it is about what is possible when we remove alcohol from our lives and destroy our belief systems around it. This is the truth about alcohol, and the thing about truth is once you know it, you can never un-know it.

You will never look at drinking the same way again.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B07QWH6MKZ
Publisher ‏ : ‎ The Dial Press (December 31, 2019)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ December 31, 2019
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 3.9 MB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Print length ‏ : ‎ 385 pages

Best Sellers Rank: #72,619 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #23 in Alcoholism (Kindle Store)
- #200 in Motivational Self-Help (Kindle Store)
- #379 in Women's Studies (Books)

Customer Reviews:
4.5 9,313 ratings

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Customers find the book well-researched and insightful. They find the humor humorous and witty. The narrative style is described as raw, personal, and eye-opening. Readers describe the author as brave and fierce.

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304 customers mention "Readability"227 positive77 negative

Customers find the book well-researched and groundbreaking. They say the author does a good job of presenting some pretty huge shifts. The book is described as a breath of fresh air that puts words to thoughts and feelings they've held for a long time.

"...Holly, for putting our collective story into such powerful, undeniable language, backed up with science and underlined with your incredibly..." Read more

"...with alcohol was unhealthy, but Holly really lays it out in a very thorough manner to show how pervasive our obsession with alcohol is and how sick..." Read more

"...Good work, Holly, I thoroughly enjoyed your book, even though you hesitate to tell the story about how alcoholism affects everyone and can drive..." Read more

"...With friends like this...... She is unlikable (SO unlikable), misinformed, and lacking in applicable experience..." Read more

242 customers mention "Insight"238 positive4 negative

Customers appreciate the book's insights and clear path to victory. They find it persuasive and well-researched, with a thoughtful approach to sobriety. The message and suggestions provide hope, power, and self-forgiveness. The book provides great points that have helped them. Overall, customers say the book is a wealth of information and capable of fostering needed change.

"...Thank you, Holly, for putting our collective story into such powerful, undeniable language, backed up with science and underlined with your..." Read more

"...This made stopping alcohol easy for me. I was a more casual alcohol user, but I still found this book very helpful. Highly recommended!" Read more

"...Holly your book has opened my eyes to a whole new view on alcohol and I have been sober for 15 months since leaving AA and I contribute it all to..." Read more

"...Holly gives us great insight, and a clear path to victory, and for me, it may give me the language I need to help those I love, who have lost their..." Read more

48 customers mention "Humor"42 positive6 negative

Customers enjoy the humor in the book. They find it witty, honest, and funny. The author integrates humor, sarcasm, and wit to portray a very real picture. Readers describe the book as honest, laugh-out-loud funny, intelligent, and important.

"...Not only is the tone of the book and the way the author writes hilarious and incredibly engaging, the way that she pulls apart, looks at, and..." Read more

"...QLAW is a provocative and incredibly well researched book that expands on the early ideas of HS...." Read more

"...It’s witty, and the writer is entertaining while presenting serious life and death subject matter." Read more

"...Finally, the book is funny, relatable, and pretty enjoyable to read. I certainly saw myself in some of her writing...." Read more

47 customers mention "Narrative style"47 positive0 negative

Customers find the narrative style engaging. They appreciate the historical context and personal narrative, which helps them understand their own relationship with alcohol. The book blends history, memoir, and how-to advice in an entertaining way, providing a candid look at why we drink and how we got to where we are today.

"...language, backed up with science and underlined with your incredibly relatable personal story. -..." Read more

"...The author's personal stories are so powerful and real- it is hard to not relate to her...." Read more

"Quit Like a Woman is part autobiography, part "how to," & part cultural critique...." Read more

"...I can feel my perspective on alcohol shifting as I further metabolize and sit with this book...." Read more

19 customers mention "Eye opening"19 positive0 negative

Customers find the book insightful and engaging. They appreciate the storytelling style before more technical details, finding it vivid and revelatory. The author uses humor, wit, and sarcasm to portray a realistic picture of alcohol's history in the US. Overall, readers describe the book as a powerful memoir and self-help guide that can help improve one's mental health and self-image.

"I could not put this book down. Holly is an absolutely beautiful, soulful, deeply articulate writer...." Read more

"...⁣⁣⁣ ⁣⁣⁣ QLAW is brave & beautiful & humane - it is compassionate & empathetic & revolutionary. I LOVED." Read more

"...The result is a book that is sometimes vivid and revelatory but can also be maddeningly glib, prone to overstatement and hasty generalization based..." Read more

"...the author brilliantly integrates humor, sarcasm, and wit to portray a very real picture of this highly advertised, and strongly stigmatized pandemic." Read more

13 customers mention "Strength"13 positive0 negative

Customers find the book brave, fierce, and honest. They describe it as compassionate, vulnerable, and earth-shattering.

"...You will find an a compassionate and fierce ally in the author...." Read more

"...⁣⁣⁣ ⁣⁣⁣ QLAW is brave & beautiful & humane - it is compassionate & empathetic & revolutionary. I LOVED." Read more

"I wish I could give this book 10 stars — for its intelligence, courage, vulnerability and truth...." Read more

"...Fierce, smart, kind, messy, and personal, you can hear her voice on every page. I highlighted half the book. Highly recommended." Read more

19 customers mention "Author tone"0 positive19 negative

Customers dislike the author's tone. They find her angry and unjust in her assessment of AA. The author has a dislike for men in general, and they describe her as narcissistic with hateful rhetoric. The book is described as a long, unpleasant, useless rant that piggybacks on other authors. Readers are unsure of the author's motives and find it repetitively talking negatively about white men and Trump.

"...But the thing I just can't get past is her repeatedly talking negatively about white men and her obvious Trump obsession/ hatred...." Read more

"This book has extremely tiny font. The author goes into many personal details that do not interest to me...." Read more

"...The author comes off very brash, judgmental, and egotistical...." Read more

"I wanted to like this book. I had an open mind. But the author was so unfair in her assessment of AA , there’s no point even having an exchange of..." Read more

18 customers mention "Feminist viewpoint"0 positive18 negative

Customers dislike the feminist viewpoint in the book. They find it distracting, unconvincing, and not relatable to their experiences. Many feel it's too liberal and egotistical, belittling those struggling with alcohol abuse.

"...and of course sprinkled in with liberal agenda...." Read more

"...This is just not the book for women who are truly struggling with alcohol abuse and in need of solid and actionable guidance for sobriety...." Read more

"...The author comes off very brash, judgmental, and egotistical...." Read more

"...Author gets political, contradicts herself several times, idk, this read just rubbed me the wrong way. I’m sadly disappointed." Read more

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Lo R
A personal journey of recovery offered, and explained.
Reviewed in the United States on January 2, 2020
Verified Purchase

My first book finished in 2020.

I preordered this in August or September and then forgot about it. In the meantime I had stopped drinking. This showed up on my doorstep yesterday, the last day of the (my drunkest) decade.

My story closely parallels the authors (especially through high school and college) except for the fact that I actually used to work in the alcoholic beverage industry for several years, I even went back to school for it. I lived and breathed and ate and slept alcohol for years. One day over a month ago I took a sip of (not good) wine and a thought popped into my head, “why am I doing this?” I poured it out. Read a book instead. Went to the gym the next morning. Enjoyed my kale stir-fry. All the things we do to keep ourselves healthy...

Like the author I also tried twelve-step programs and every form of self-help possible. The only thing that really, truly stuck was asking “why am I doing this?” Why am I doing ALL THE THINGS for my health but I’m still pouring poison into my body? Is this habit helping me reach my best life? Do I really care about the social capital of being “good at wine” so much that I am willing to sabotage my health for it?

Finally the answer is no, I’m not. Holly Whitaker will explain further.

If you have ever even had an inkling or question around your “relationship” with alcohol, you must read this book. It is certainly geared towards Gen Y, millennial and Gen X career-aged women (ages 18-45), but this is the “truth to power” book we need as a culture. Yes, alcohol is having a tobacco moment. And it’s long overdue.

Thank you, Holly, for putting our collective story into such powerful, undeniable language, backed up with science and underlined with your incredibly relatable personal story.

-

For those confused about the “political” frame up for this book in the first few chapters, and thus compelled to rate the book a low rating based purely on a differing understanding from the author’s of current events, please read Howard Zinn’s “People’s History of the United States,” or watch John Oliver explain the opioid crisis and the Sackler family on the HBO show Last Week Tonight.

“Politics,” or rather the historical domination of everything by, power seeking/protecting and privilege of WASP men is a salient underlying factor for many (bad) American habits related to capitalism - smoking, drinking, overweight, pain killers the list goes on - to the detriment of the poor, minorities, women and children.

Anyone see the pics of Jeff Bezos hulking around St. Bart’s over the holidays? Asking for a friend.

I do believe a more thorough exploration of the issue of exploitation of the poor, the working class, women and minorities (men are including in most of the above groups) for the gross profit of a few men at the top the substance industries would have benefitted this book, but really it’s a separate book (Holly, would you?).

Readers, if you are curious to come at this very large, complex (though not really complex) issue from another angle you can try Marion Nestle’s “Food Politics,” or Joseph Stieglitz’s “Globalization and its Discontents.”

Or watch Mad Men. Or a Weinstein Brothers or Woody Allen movie... whatever.
I mean, I don’t know what you’re into.

The more things change the more they stay the same. If you’re pointing at “politics” you’re not really trying.

Holly is simply asking everyone to reframe why we all starting getting schlitzed in the first place (or really, why we do any bad/addictive habit - like compulsively check social media) - and her research and experience points to the exploitative capitalism that has historically been the exclusive domain of WASP men.

That’s just her, but it’s also a good place to start.

-

For those of you confused about Holly’s rejection and criticism of 12 Step Programs (of which I share), I point you to page 249-250:

Holly has just publicly outed her recovery on her blog (that is, used her real name). “After reading those essays, a friend of mine—a daughter of a man who’d recovered through AA—wrote me a note. It said in effect: /You seem to be in pain, your family seems to be in pain, maybe you should work the Twelve Steps, my father did that, it helped my family./ At this point, I’d been working on myself and towards sobriety for 16 months, and it was going, by all accounts, pretty well. Further, in this recovery, this woman hasn’t once asked me how it was going, what was happening in my world, how I was saving my life, or how she could help. She was a spectator; one who read a few blogposts, interpreted them through her lens...and decided she understood the missing course of action in my f*cked-up life, which led to her unsolicited advice about my recovery.”

This is evangelicalism by another name. Have you heard about the 12 Steps (Jesus Christ)? Yep. Doesn’t work for me. Didn’t work for Holly. Doesn’t work for a lot of people. AND THAT’S FINE. Everything Holly posits in this book as a recovery tool DID work for me and it DID work for Holly and countless other women, minorities, or other groups of people (the majority of people in the US) who are not of an white male evangelical bent. You need to do what most makes sense for you, people. Bruce Lee and Kung Fu your life - keep what works, toss what doesn’t. It is criticism but only insomuch as that is her (and many other people’s) reality. It’s a needed criticism so that others like me can realize we have different options, and that may help many people reach a place of recovery FASTER.

—

As Holly says, there should be a fourth (or fifth, or sixth) position of recovery and that is: “I am human, and being human is a messy affair with lots of twists, turns, and in-betweens.”

Exactly.

Good luck to everyone wherever they are at using whatever method works for them.

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Kayla K
Great Read, changes your perspective
Reviewed in the United States on February 26, 2025
Verified Purchase
This book is life changing. I would recommend to any woman, even those not trying to quit alcohol.

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LittleRedReading
A necessary and important book blowing up the discussion around alcohol, addiction, and recovery
Reviewed in the United States on January 6, 2020
Verified Purchase
I anticipated this book coming out for quite some time (I've been following the author through her blog for the past few years) and I have to admit that it surpassed my expectations. Not only is the tone of the book and the way the author writes hilarious and incredibly engaging, the way that she pulls apart, looks at, and fleshes out this incredibly complex and emotionally fraught topic has left me with so much to consider and contemplate on my end.

Not only is this a very thorough and in-depth look at a very big topic - addiction - that overlaps with so many other areas in life (neurobiology, psychology, sociology, family systems, history, and more), it is also the story of a woman who woke up in the depths of absolute hell and found a way to claw herself out of it. It's a triumphant, inspiring, and empowering story.

I can feel my perspective on alcohol shifting as I further metabolize and sit with this book. The author offers such a new, refreshing, and interesting perspective on the topic of alcohol, especially as it relates to us as women in this culture. You know how at a certain point you feel like you've read enough and thought enough about a certain topic (and for a lot of us, this can definitely happen when we are reflecting on and ruminating about our relationship with alcohol...). But even though I've followed the author over the years, she has offered up a wealth of new information and perspectives in this book. Like I said, it has surpassed my expectations on that level.

As can be anticipated, this book is not going to make a lot of people happy. It's going to infuriate some. For as many times as the author states (in the book, on her blog, social media, and elsewhere) that her work is not an attack on AA, it's an attempt to expand the conversation on alcohol and addiction, people are still going to see it that way. Which is very interesting. My perspective on 12-Step Recovery has always been fairly neutral. But with the vehemency of the attacks from the 12-Step community that the author has received in the course of presenting her work over the years, it's hard not to see the overlap between 12-Step Recovery and cult-like thinking. The more the 12-Step community attacks the author's work, the more my respect grows for how much courage it must have taken to put it out into the world.

So get the book. You will not be disappointment. You will find an a compassionate and fierce ally in the author. The work will not only expand your thinking around the reality of alcohol for women, it's also a really great and engaging read. Highly, highly recommend.

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Juliana Andrade
amazing from beginning to end
Reviewed in Brazil on August 24, 2024
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Every woman should read it!
Make us think about every aspect of drinking- individual, community, global. You’ll never look at booze the same way.

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Northerner
Excellent. Good read.
Reviewed in Canada on September 14, 2023
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This book explains addiction in a way which is easily understood. A must read for any woman or man that wants to better understand addition. The author has done her research and also speaks of her battle with addition. An easy read.

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ana cecilia
Excelente libro
Reviewed in Mexico on July 30, 2023
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Muy buen libro!

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ana cecilia

Excelente libro

Reviewed in Mexico on July 30, 2023
Muy buen libro!

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Aaziza Elkhati
Excellent
Reviewed in France on March 14, 2024
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Exellent

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Natalia
A must read! - Lectura obligatoria!
Reviewed in Spain on January 30, 2021
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If you are in some way rethinking you relationship with alcohol, this is a must read.
Wonderfully written, it will open up your mind and allow you to see what alcohol really is doing to us as individuals and as a society.

Si te estás planteando de algún modo tu relaciycon el alcohol, tienes que leerte este libro. Está escrito maravillosamente, te abrirá la mente y te permitirá entender qué es el alcohol realmente y lo que está provocando tanto de forma individual como a nivel social.
Muy recomendable.

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Quit Like a Woman: The Radical Choice to Not Drink in a Culture Obsessed with Alcohol Kindle Edition

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5.0 out of 5 stars A personal journey of recovery offered, and explained.

5.0 out of 5 stars Great Read, changes your perspective

5.0 out of 5 stars A necessary and important book blowing up the discussion around alcohol, addiction, and recovery

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5.0 out of 5 stars amazing from beginning to end

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5.0 out of 5 stars A must read! - Lectura obligatoria!

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A personal journey of recovery offered, and explained.

Great Read, changes your perspective

A necessary and important book blowing up the discussion around alcohol, addiction, and recovery

amazing from beginning to end

Excellent. Good read.

Excelente libro

Excellent

A must read! - Lectura obligatoria!