Chase describes an attempt to get sober at a rehab facility in this debut remembrance.

In 2007, the author was living in Ottawa with a boyfriend, three teenage daughters, four cats, and a drinking problem: “I’m a 49-year-year-old pileup heading for 50,” she writes of the time. “A head-on collision with myself on a hooch-slicked highway….A short-circuiting fembot, wires and plugs springing out of a spastic frame, walking in circles, one robot foot nailed to the floor.” With no other options, she decided to check herself into a rehabilitation center in Ottawa.Paterson Place cost 12,000 Canadian dollars; for that price, Chase was hoping for some comfort as she weathered the unpleasantness of detox, including healthy meals, a private bedroom, and patience and compassion from the staff. Instead, she says, she encountered a pair of counselors whom she characterizes as “a two-for-one dubiously-credentialed Saviour deal” and who were seemingly bent on transforming her world into a different sort of hell. Would their tough love prove just the thing she needed to kick her habit, or would the pressurized conditions stand in the way of recovery? Chase’s strong authorial voice is the book’s most notable feature; she recounts her story with gleeful snark, her prose performative and conversational at the same time: “The drama at Paterson Place, so brilliantly played out day in and day out by a colorful cast of residential characters, continued to keep me unhealthily diverted from much more crucial concerns, ones I didn’t want to think about at all, no sirree bob.” The style may be an acquired taste for some readers, but it’s a welcome deviation from the tone of many other memoirs, and it feels authentic as she discusses the roots and deleterious effects of her alcoholism. The work also effectively interrogates the programs and strategies people use to get sober. By turns funny, frustrating, and tragic, this book ably gets at the intractability of addiction and the myriad ways that a recovery can fail to succeed.

A brash and sometimes-brilliant recovery memoir.