Writers Caren Osten Gerszberg and Leah Odze Epstein, co-editors of an anthology-in-progress called SPILL, have started a sharp-looking blog as part of this project about women and drinking. The same day Caren and Leah contacted me about it, I’d picked up the first books I have ever bought in the self-help section of a bookstore: Adult Children of Alcoholics and Losing a Parent. Clearly, this is something I wanted to read and write about to come to terms with my own thoughts and feelings about a personal/family situation and loss, and how it continually affects me and the kind of writing I do, but on a larger scale this anthology feels necessary. So many women have been and continually are affected by drinking, whether a partner’s, family member’s, or their own. The secrecy and shame that goes along with it must be broken.

So my post just went up–you can check it out here — I wrote about the psychological baggage that goes along with even light drinking when a parent was a problem-drinker. The basic mental back and forth that, were it dialogue, could possibly read like a Beckett play.