Join us on a literary world trip!
Add this book to bookshelf
Grey
Write a new comment Default profile 50px
Grey
Subscribe to read the full book or read the first pages for free!
All characters reduced
If I Die Before I Wake - A Memoir of Drinking and Recovery - cover

If I Die Before I Wake - A Memoir of Drinking and Recovery

Barb Rogers

Publisher: Conari Press

  • 0
  • 0
  • 0

Summary

A woman shares the story of her descent into alcoholism, her journey to getting clean and sober, and life on the other side. 
 
The tragic death of her teenage son, Jon, forces Barb Rogers to delve into the horror that was her life to that point. Due to a home life fraught with substance and emotional abuse, she found herself bottomed out more than once, and homeless along the way. 
 
“When asked in early recovery if I knew any prayers, the one I could think of was the child’s nighttime prayer, “Now I lay me down to sleep.” As I thought of it, I recalled the long nights when I simply wanted to go to sleep and never wake up.” 
 
Barb learned most of her life lessons through pain, tragedy, and addiction. This is not a glamorous story; it is real and raw. It is not about survival of the fittest, but the weak, the hopeless, the helpless, the truly addicted—not only to substances, but to drama, anger, excuses, and justifications. 
 
Barb reflects on how she reached her lowest point, just what it was, and how and why she finally reached out to a 12-step program for help. She shows the reader what it’s really like to survive, to stay clean and sober, and to find a way to the other side. Recovery was one of the most difficult things she ever did but it was “worth every effort I put out.” 
 
Barb Rogers would be the first to tell you she's not special. But her story, told well and with humor, is sure to inspire anyone to put in the work to improve their lives. 
 
Praise for If I Die before I Wake 
 
“Raw, vivid, and brutally heart-wrenching, Barb’s account of her shattered life…will undoubtedly hit home with many.”—Jennifer Storm, author of Blackout Girl and Leave the Light On 
 
“Gripping, tragic, and absolutely impossible to put down.”—Rachael Brownell, author of Mommy Doesn’t Drink Here Anymore 
 
“An inspiring story that reflects the transformative power of Twelve Step recovery. This is a particularly important book for any woman who is struggling with sobriety and feels she will never achieve it.”—Stephanie S. Covington, author of A Woman’s Way Through the Twelve Steps
Available since: 04/01/2010.

Other books that might interest you

  • Family Lexicon - cover

    Family Lexicon

    Natalia Ginzburg, Peg Boyers

    • 0
    • 0
    • 0
    An Italian family, sizable, with its routines and rituals, crazes, pet phrases, and stories, doubtful, comical, indispensable, comes to life in the pages of Natalia Ginzburg's Family Lexicon. Giuseppe Levi, the father, is a scientist, consumed by his work and a mania for hiking—when he isn't provoked into angry remonstration by someone misspeaking or misbehaving or wearing the wrong thing. Giuseppe is Jewish, married to Lidia, a Catholic, though neither is religious; they live in the industrial city of Turin where, as the years pass, their children find ways of their own to medicine, marriage, literature, politics. It is all very ordinary, except that the background to the story is Mussolini's Italy in its steady downward descent to race law and world war. The Levis are, among other things, unshakeable anti-fascists. That will complicate their lives.Family Lexicon is about a family and language—and about storytelling not only as a form of survival but also as an instrument of deception and domination. The book takes the shape of a novel, yet everything is true. "Every time that I have found myself inventing something in accordance with my old habits as a novelist, I have felt impelled at once to destroy [it]," Ginzburg tells us at the start. "The places, events, and people are all real."
    Show book
  • Henrietta Szold - Hadassah and the Zionist Dream - cover

    Henrietta Szold - Hadassah and...

    Francine Klagsbrun

    • 0
    • 0
    • 0
    Award-winning author Francine Klagsbrun reveals the complex life and work of Henrietta Szold, founder of Hadassah and a Zionist trailblazer Henrietta Szold (1860–1945) is renowned as the founder of Hadassah, the Women's Zionist Organization of America, which quickly became one of the most successful of all Zionist groups. In her work with Hadassah, Szold used a combined ethical and pragmatic approach aimed at improving the lives of both Jews and Arabs. She later moved to Mandate Palestine to help shape education, health, and social services there. The pinnacle of her career came in her seventies, when she took on the task of directing the Youth Aliyah program, which rescued thousands of young people from the Nazis and resettled them in Palestine. Using Szold's copious letters, diaries, and essays, along with other archival documents, Francine Klagsbrun traces Szold's life and legacy with an eye to uncovering the person behind the Zionist icon. She reveals Szold as a complex human being who had to cope with controversy and criticism, a workaholic with an outsized sense of duty, and an idealist who fought for her beliefs even as she questioned her own abilities. With deep insight, Klagsbrun introduces listeners to this extraordinary woman, whose impact on women's lives as well as on education and health systems still resonates.
    Show book
  • Where Crocodiles Roam - A Zambezi paddling tale and other wilderness stories - cover

    Where Crocodiles Roam - A...

    Hollie and Jamie Manuel

    • 0
    • 0
    • 0
    My goodness! How are you boys still alive? 
    Because survival is by co-ordination, good luck, respect and karma and ‘sometimes luck is with you, and sometimes not, but the important thing is to take the dare.’ David Brower 
    Where Kingsley Holgate explores Africa beneath an outrageous beard with a keg of rum by his side – 40 years his junior I decided to explore my Africa with naiveté, invincibility and the testosterone fueled charisma of boyhood. 
    Unprepared, untested, unperturbed – who said that an explorer needs to be tried and tested? 
    Taking six months from our boyhood lives to find adventure? That’s easy. Undertaking a Zambezi source-to-sea paddling expedition with no previous kayaking experience? That’s harder. And stupid. 
    Staying alive amongst crocodiles and hippos, rapids and whirlpools, sunstroke and dysentery – now that’s almost impossible ... or commendable if you can live through to the end of your own story. 
    Now throw in two marauding rhino and appendicitis and see if you would still predict survival and start packing for your own adventure. Did I worry that each day may be my last? Of course I did but in the end ‘the principal difference between an adventurer and a suicide is that the adventurer leaves himself a margin of escape (the narrower the margin the greater the adventure), a margin whose width and length may be determined by unknown factors but whose successful navigation is determined by the measure of the adventurers nerve and wits. It is always exhilarating to live by one’s nerves and toward the summit of one’s wits.’ Tom Robbins. Another Roadside Attraction
    Show book
  • A Rare Recording of Ayn Rand - cover

    A Rare Recording of Ayn Rand

    Ayn Rand

    • 0
    • 0
    • 0
    Ayn Rand (1905 - 1982) was a Russian-American novelist, philosopher, and screenwriter. She is best-known for her two influential novels, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, and for developing a philosophical system she called Objectivism. Rand's first major success as a writer came with The Fountainhead in 1943, a romantic and philosophical novel that eventually became a worldwide success. It was eventually also made into a movie. Atlas Shrugged, published in 1957, was considered Rand's best work. It is a novel of the morality of rational self-interest. In this public lecture, she criticizes altruism and mysticism as incompatible with business.
    Show book
  • Dialysis: a Memoir - Second Edition - cover

    Dialysis: a Memoir - Second Edition

    Lisa Frieden

    • 0
    • 0
    • 0
    “A compelling story about coping with a serious illness, offering lessons in the value of slowing down and appreciating life in the moment." -- Kirkus Reviews 
    Dialysis: a Memoir portrays how a young woman’s life is changed forever when her kidneys fail. From hospitalization through hemodialysis and peritoneal dialysis and finally to transplant, the memoir explores how her experience of illness is at odds with the world around her: the buoyant and youthful atmosphere of the San Francisco Bay Area during the dotcom bubble of the 1990's. The memoir describes how she learns to make sense of what happened and how she ultimately overcomes the physical and emotional challenges of kidney failure to thrive in her new life. Dialysis, Second Edition, includes a new Introduction and an updated Afterword, twenty years later.
    Show book
  • Happy Chaos - From Punky to Parenting and My Perfectly Imperfect Adventures In Between - cover

    Happy Chaos - From Punky to...

    Soleil Moon Frye

    • 0
    • 0
    • 0
    Enthusiastic, spunky, and positive, Punky Brewster was the quintessential eighties kid. Nearly thirty years later, Soleil Moon Frye-the adorable girl who played her on TV-is all grown up. Now she's a married mom of two, an entrepreneur who parlayed her successful kids' clothing line into a partnership with Target, and a social media whiz with millions of followers. Many of the same girls who watched Soleil on television are now grown up with children of their own, too, and they look to her as a go-to source for realistic, in-the-trenches parenting advice, inspiration, and fun. Happy Chaos invites those women into Soleil's world, and makes them revel in the chaos of their own lives, too.Soleil believes that "happy chaos" is the sign of a family operating at its best-when parents accept that they'll make mistakes, that there will be messes, tears and skinned knees. She learned to love a jumbled life during her own childhood, when her own mom created an atmosphere that was thoroughly unconventional. Their house in Los Angeles was a haven for many young stars of Soleil's generation, often far from home and looking for a safe place to hang out. In this book, she shows how her happy but chaotic childhood informed her parenting: Each chapter begins with a telling reminiscence before moving into insightful advice and fun stories about life with her husband and two adorable daughters.
    Show book