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Quit Like a Woman: The Radical Choice to Not Drink in a Culture Obsessed with Alcohol Paperback – January 12, 2021
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“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.
- Print length384 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- Publication dateJanuary 12, 2021
- Dimensions5.1 x 0.85 x 7.95 inches
- ISBN-101984825070
- ISBN-13978-1984825070
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- Is alcohol getting in the way of my happiness, my life, my self-esteem? Is it getting in the way of my dreams, or maybe just not working for me? Does it cost more than it gives, does it shrink more than it expands, does it cut pieces out of me I can’t reclaim? Does it make me hate myself, even just a little bit?Highlighted by 3,621 Kindle readers
- What I am saying is, alcohol is addictive to everyone. Yet we’ve created a separate disease called alcoholism and forced it upon the minority of the population who are willing to admit they can’t control their drinking, and because of that, we’ve focused on what’s wrong with those few humans rather than on what’s wrong with our alcohol-centric culture or the substance itself.Highlighted by 3,596 Kindle readers
- The goal here is to create a situation you no longer have to escape, or a life you don’t have to numb. The achievement of sobriety is not the point; it’s a by-product of the work. The work is the point. Addiction is the hook that gets you in the door, and quitting is the catalyst to heal deeper wounds.Highlighted by 3,525 Kindle readers
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Editorial Reviews
Review
“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
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
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
- Publisher : Dial Press Trade Paperback (January 12, 2021)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 384 pages
- ISBN-10 : 1984825070
- ISBN-13 : 978-1984825070
- Item Weight : 9.6 ounces
- Dimensions : 5.1 x 0.85 x 7.95 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #2,285 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #9 in Alcoholism Recovery
- #96 in Motivational Self-Help (Books)
- #126 in Memoirs (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
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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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Reviewed in Mexico on July 30, 2023
Tenho Kindle e tive dúvida se valia mais comprar o físico ou o e-book. Optei pelo físico e foi a melhor escolha q poderia ter feito pq sei que vou ler este livro mais vezes. Ele é recheado com reflexões relevantes demais pra serem lidas uma vez só...
This book focusses on the way we are marketed to, and how it's easy to leave behind the best hints that matter in order to fit into some construct. It cuts through a lot of bullshit and addresses programs like AA which clearly don't work for everyone because they simply cannot identify with it.
It's funny that booze is the only substance where not having it means you have some kind of problem. I have never seen the logic in that. How can you have a disease where the symptoms of that disease are being unable to resist the urge to drink if the cure to the disease is actually the opposite of the disease,
It's like saying the cure for cancer is to purposefully stop having cancer ...
Anyway not to rant, I found this book honest because I'm not an alcoholic, I don't identify with that term, but I don't like drinking and I'm curious about why it's such a problem to everyone else if you just "don't want a drink"
This book addresses a lot of that. Ill definitely e reading more books ok the subject, whilst enjoying a cup of tea, problematically