Sarah takes us by the hand through her personal journey with blackouts, dating, relationships, wellness culture, startups, social media, friendship, and self-discovery. It’s an examination of what our short-term choices about alcohol do to our long-term selves and how they challenge our ability to be vulnerable enough to discover what we really want in life.Ĭandid and dynamic, this book speaks to the all-consuming cycle of working hard, playing harder, and trying to look perfect while you’re at it. And only she could save herself.ĭrinking Games explores the role alcohol has in our formative years, and what it means to opt out of a culture completely enmeshed in drinking. But Sarah had a secret: her relationship with alcohol was becoming toxic.

She was 28, living in New York City, working a great job, and socializing every weekend. On paper, Sarah Levy’s life was on track. Part memoir and part social critique, Drinking Games is about how one woman drank and lived- and how, for her, the last drink was just the beginning. (Jan.Named Most Anticipated by: Good Morning America ・ New York Post ・Pure Wow ・BuzzFeed ・ Los Angeles Times ・ Book Riot ・ Apple Books

The author’s insightful account of her path to sobriety takes in the full sweep of her experience, from discovering in recovery meetings a sense of community that wasn’t contingent on her job title, to concluding that there’s no one-size-fits-all approach to dealing with addiction: “Twelve-step programs are not the only way to get sober.” Though the narrative can be repetitive, it nevertheless offers equal measures of introspection and hope: “Every day I wake up is an opportunity to start again.” This emotional excavation will inspire anyone navigating addiction. A 16-year-old Levy experienced her first blackout at a house party in suburban New Jersey, which she recalls as “shameful” but also “a bit thrilling.” After a newly single Levy moved to New York City at 22, alcohol was a fixture in her life (“I came to view vodka as an extension of my new personality”), and though the frequency of Levy’s blackouts increased, she didn’t think she had a “real” problem until the nearly 30-year-old author woke up in bed next to her boss’s best friend with no memory of how she’d gotten there. “At twenty-eight, I looked like I had it all together,” Levy writes about her destructive relationship with alcohol in her bracing debut.

Sarah levy memoir