Quitter: A Memoir of Drinking, Relapse, and Recovery

You may know Erica C. Barnett from her dogged local reporting in the Stranger or PubliCola or on her current blog, The C Is for Crank, or her appearances on KUOW, but what you may not have known was that she spent a decade of her reporting career as a blackout drunk, cycling through recovery and relapses and nearly destroying herself in the process before finally finding a sobriety that stuck. What sets Quitter apart as an addiction memoir is that she reports on her own life with the same ruthless attention to detail (and wry humor) she brings to City Hall, and that she declines to fit her story into the usual arc of rock-bottom epiphany. She knows failure is as likely as success, and that there's always a bottom below the one you thought was bedrock, and her skepticism toward solutions makes the ones that ultimately worked for her feel even more precious and hard-earned.