Lisa Smith was a bright young lawyer at a prestigious law firm in New York City when alcoholism and drug addiction took over her life. What was once a way she escaped her insecurity and negativity as a teenager became a means of coping with the anxiety and stress of an impossible workload.Girl Walks Out of a Bar explores Smith’s formative years, her decade of alcohol and drug abuse, divorce, and her road to recovery. In this darkly comic and wrenchingly honest story, Smith describes how her circumstances conspired with her predisposition to depression and self-medication in an environment ripe for addiction to flourish. When her close-knit group of high-achieving friends celebrate the end of their grueling workdays with alcohol-fueled nights at the city’s clubs and summer weekends partying at the beach, the feel-good times can spiral wildly out of control.Girl Walks Out of a Bar is a candid portrait of alcoholism through the lens of gritty New York realism. Beneath the facade of success lies the reality of addiction.
Fascinating Look into Alcohol’s Claiming More & More of a Young Woman’s Life, Well Written! Lisa Smith has a thoroughly entertaining way of writing about a very serious subject. Being ten years sober, she could see the humorous side of her addictions (alcohol & cocaine). This book was difficult to put down.Â
A punchline for a title, and the rest of the book delivers! WOW. I don’t usually write reviews, but felt compelled to for this book. This story is so honest, so real, so funny, and so heart wrenching that it demands a thank you. It’s a hard book to read at some points, and a hard book to put down at all times. The writing is quick paced, vivid, and witty, sort of a “girlfriend’s guide to addiction”, a page turner that has you wondering whether you want to know what happens next at some points, as you root for the heroine.Â
From hopeless to healthy, this is what it takes… For a female attorney who drank and used as copiously as Lisa Smith did, I’m surprised most anyone who had any contact with her in her firm wasn’t well aware that she had an addiction problem. I practiced law for many years as an active alcoholic, basically of the binge drinking variety. So even though I only drank on weekends for the most part, I learned you get pegged pretty quickly. There’s just too many ways for people to tell and for the firm’s lawyers to figure it out, no matter how good…