Mary Ann Crenshaw

A personal account of addiction and rehabilitation. Mary Ann Crenshaw, a young woman raised and educated in Alabama, arrives in New York City and becomes a successful career woman, working at Orbach's, a fashionable department store of the time. She finds a caring personal physician, and a diet doctor to help her maintain a fashionable weight. She embarks on what I think was known in the 60s as the Drinking Man's Diet - no carbs, lots of meat and unlimited liquor, preferably straight liquor (fewer calories than beer or wine). Gradually, she succumbs to alcoholism, although neither she, her friends, or her doctor recognize it at the time. As the author herself says, "We were just having a high old time." Her drinking is exacerbated when she takes a high-stress job at the New York Times in the fashion department and embarks on a 10-year-long affair with a married man, identified only as "Alan" in the book. She starts to experience severe symptoms of physical illness: migraine headaches, anxiety and terrible pain from pancreatitis (often caused by excessive drinking). She starts to depend more and more on prescription medications for all her ailments, and although she gives up drinking in 1972, she says "it never occurred to me to give up pills". She eventually contemplates suicide and when she hits bottom, checks herself into a New York hospital and eventually a rehab centre.

Very honest and compelling personal memoir. Although the prescription drugs of today are somewhat different, the reasons for taking them and the effects of them on people's lives are not changed in over 30 years since the book was written. Very vivid account of life & times in the 1960s and 1970s also.… (meer)

I read this book when I was about 13, when it arrived as a selection in my parent's Book of the Month Club. I recall it being a great help to me at that young age. Though the book is about pill addiction specifically, I began realizing that one of my parents was an alcoholic and both my parents were in denial over it. It was a first step in what became a very long and bumpy personal road to recovery for co-dependency and my own tendency to self-medicate. A very informative and honest account of struggling and overcoming addiction.… (meer)