Lush: A Memoir

(Paperback)

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In this fiercely honest memoir, Kerry Cohen explores the nature of addiction and recovery through her own midlife love affair with wine.

When Kerry Cohen reached her early forties, she woke up one day and realized she had a drinking problem. Yes, she could get up on time, take her kids to school, make dinner, and chat with friends, but through it all, Kerry was waiting for her five o'clock glass of wine. Maybe two glasses. Maybe a bottle. Just enough to blur the edges of her monotonous life. In this gripping memoir, Kerry examines her struggle with alcohol, a struggle that many middle-aged women are facing today as alcohol dependency among females drastically increases. Beautifully poignant and infinitely relatable, Lush follows Kerry as she attempts to rediscover the awe in her life and learns to leave her regretsand the bottlebehind.

Reviews

"Raw, intimate and brave, Lush tears apart the usual advice about drinking and addiction (guess what, AA isn't the only answer), and chronicles Cohen's journey toward a healing that at first she can only image. Gorgeously written and audaciously intelligent, here is a controversial and compelling look at finding your own way back." - Caroline Leavitt, New York Times bestselling author of Is This Tomorrow and Pictures of You
"Kerry Cohen applies her legendary wit and sagacity to women's often subtly destructive dance with alcohol. With great vulnerability and dynamic prose, Cohen examines her own descent into the bottle, its ruinous consequences, and her courageous fight to find her footing in her real life again. This is a story you won't soon forget." - Jillian Lauren, New York Times bestselling memoirist of Some Girls: My Life in a Harem and Everything You Ever Wanted
"Holy mother of wine--finally a woman wrestles the story of what it is really like to be a woman away from what we've been told we are supposed to be. Kerry Cohen's Lush will light you up, crack you up, make you bawl, and most of all, allow you to breathe again. I'm beyond thrilled to read a book where a woman tells the truth without falling into the sap-hole of the sin-and-redemption narrative. There is no sin and redemption. There's just our lives, and as Cohen reminds us one truth bomb at a time, they are messily gorgeous. Move over Mary Karr." - Lidia Yuknavitch, bestselling author of The Book of Joan and The Misfit's Manifesto
"I love this book. I am this book. Kerry Cohen has written a memoir that wrestles with the subtleties, the ambiguities, the sheer alluring horrifying real-life mess of mid-life alcohol addiction. For those of us wrestling with demons--and who isn't--Lush is a solace as powerful as red wine." - Claire Dederer, bestselling author of Poser: My Life in Twenty-Three Yoga Poses
"Kerry Cohen has hit on something important that's rarely discussed -- how the everyday disappointment of middle-age can lead to abuses one never imagined as a teenager. Her voice bristles with both vulnerability and sass; her observations and analyses are razor-sharp. This is about drinking, but also about the simple anguish of being human. I guzzled Lush in one long gulp." - Karen Karbo, author of The Gospel According to Coco Chanel and How Georgia Became O'Keeffe
"Unapologetic in that it offers no trite "darkness to light" narrative about alcoholism, Cohen's book instead offers a sharp-eyed look at what it means to be a midlife female unable to cope with either personal demons or the heavy external social pressures placed on women. An intimate and unsparing book of self-reflection. " - Kirkus Reviews
"An unflinching narrative of one woman's journey to the bottom of her wine glass, over and over and over. " - The Oregonian

Author Bio

KERRY COHEN received an MA in creative writing from the University of Oregon and an MA in counseling psychology from Pacific University. She is the author of the memoir Loose Girl and three young adult novels. She lives with her husband and two sons in Portland, Oregon.