Stefanie Wilder-Taylor (Naptime Is the New Happy Hour) 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. 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. As a 14-year-old ninth-grader, Wilder-Taylor sipped her first drink, a beer, in the backseat of a VW Rabbit. 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