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Lisa Smith was a bright, young lawyer at a prestigious firm in NYC in the early nineties when alcoholism started to take over her life. What was once a way of escaping her insecurity and negativity became a means of coping with the anxiety and stress of an impossible workload. Girl Walks Out of a Bar is Smith's darkly comic and wrenchingly honest story of her formative years, the decade of alcohol and drug abuse, divorce, and her road to recovery. Smith describes how her spiraling circumstances conspired with her predisposition to depression and self-medication, nurturing an environment ripe for addiction to flourish.
This memoir, I believe, will resonate with several of us who have walked through the doors of FAVOR. Many of us were, and still are, professionals who thought we had mastered the art of being a “High-Functioning Alcoholic/Addict.” For some of us, it was with a sense of pride that we could juggle it all, while for others it was fear and trepidation coupled with necessity that allowed us to do our jobs and continue using our drug of choice. Either way, we teetered on a tight-rope until we just couldn’t any longer.
Lisa shares about individual breaking points. Rock bottom isn't a universal experience, but a personal threshold where the pain of continuing outweighs the fear of change. For Lisa, this moment came on a seemingly ordinary Monday morning, without any dramatic incident triggering it. She also talks about how denial and self-deception fuel the cycle of addiction. There are several points mentioned that are staples in the FAVOR rooms of recovery. As she discusses her recovery, I didn’t necessarily read anything earth-shatteringly new, nor did I have an ‘aha’ moment. I did, however, appreciate her honesty and very raw depiction of her addiction. I saw a lot of myself in her, both in quite negative ways, but also some redeeming ones. There is some humor and l found myself nodding and grimacing as I read but enjoyed her story very much.
No matter where you are on your journey in recovery, and regardless of your drug of choice, this book is a reminder that while we are all unique, many of our stories are not. This book also supports the fact that we are not alone in recovery. Recovery is made better, maybe not easier, but better if we allow others to walk with us and lean on each other.
Beth Holladay-Edwards
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