#112 – Episode 112 – The Sober Lush

VeronicaValli

Jardine Libaire and Amanda Eyre Ward join Veronica to discuss their book, The Sober Lush. When they got sober, they discovered that everything about sobriety was the opposite of what they believed. It was fun, expansive, and exciting. So they wrote a book to tell the world about what they had discovered.

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If you’ve been around here for any amount of time you’ve heard me talk about the horribly misleading way our culture presents alcohol to us.

We hear over and over that alcohol is the best way to have fun, excitement, belonging and connection. It’s not just advertising. It’s so pervasive that we raise our kids with the assumption that they will drink once they are adults and it’s almost unthinkable that there would be a different path.

That message is so ingrained that we’re forced to assume automatically, that sobriety must be boring, lonely, and grey.

The Sober Lush is the book we’ve been waiting for. – Veronica Valli

I’ve been fighting this battle for 20 years, waiting for this book, for someone to come along and say, actually, sobriety is expansive, awesome, wild and fun.

That’s The Sober Lush in a nutshell.

We’re lucky to be in a place right now where there’s a growing library of sobriety-focused books of so many different styles.

  • Feeling like you’re the only person going through it? Sober memoirs are great for that sort of identification
  • Ready to get sober but not sure where to start? How-to books have got you covered
  • Afraid that choosing sobriety means resigning yourself to a dim, bleak, world of dullness? *crickets*

That’s the gap that Jardine Libraire and Amanda Eyre Ward saw in the quit lit world. They saw that nobody had written the book they wanted to read, that talked about the really mischievous and beautiful life that you can live sober. And by doing that, it becomes so much more than an abstract promise that sobriety is worth it. It actually makes it more achievable.

What to me was harder than getting sober, was creating a sober life and a sober identity. – Jardine Libaire

The Sober Lush is a whimsical, wonderful, intentional chaos of ideas that shares Jardine and Amanda’s experiences with the expansiveness and beautiful joyousness of sobriety through storytelling and creative and poetic material.

What Jardine and Amanda want you to know is, The Sober Lush wasn’t written to tell you the way to get sober – there’s a wide spectrum of experiences of how to get sober. They want The Sober Lush to be a letter to the person contemplating sobriety and to keep them company as they create a sober life and sober identity.

Wherever you are in your sobriety journey, I really encourage you to check out The Sober Lush. It’s whimsical, it’s fun, it’s beautiful. It’s the book to give to your friend who’s doing the dance with sobriety. This is the book for them.

 

About Jardine Libaire & Amanda Eyre Ward

Jardine Libaire is a novelist (novels include Here Kitty Kitty, and White Fur) and screenwriter (just released a film she co-wrote called Endings, Beginnings with director Drake Doremus starring Shailene Woodley, whose character has just given up alcohol). She is from New York, spent a blissful decade in Austin, and lives in LA now. She’s been sober since January 8, 2013.

Amanda Eyre Ward is the author of eight novels, including the New York Times Bestseller, The Jetsetters, which was also Reese Witherspoon’s Book Club Pick in March (and features a character trying to stay sober on a cruise ship!). Amanda’s work has been optioned for film and television and published in fifteen countries.

Connect with Jardine Libaire & Amanda Eyre Ward

 

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