
The Sober Diaries
How One Woman Stopped Drinking and Started Living
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Narrated by:
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Karen Cass
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By:
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Clare Pooley
About this listen
Like many women, Clare Pooley found the juggle of a stressful career and family life a struggle, so she left her successful role as a managing partner in one of the world's biggest advertising agencies to look after her family.
She knew the change wouldn't be easy, but she never expected to find herself an overweight, depressed, middle-aged mother of three who was drinking more than a bottle of wine a day and spending her evenings Googling 'am I an alcoholic?'
This book is the bravely honest story of a year in Clare's life. A year that started with her quitting booze and then being given the devastating diagnosis of breast cancer. By the end of the year she is booze-free and cancer-free, no longer has a wine belly and is two stone lighter and with a life that is so much richer, healthier and more rewarding than ever before. She has a happier family and a more positive outlook.
Sober Diaries is an upbeat, funny and positive look at how to live life to the full. Interwoven within Clare's own very personal and brilliantly comic story is research and advice as she discovers the answers to questions like:
- How do I know if I'm drinking too much?
- How will I cope at parties?
- What do I say to friends and family?
- How do I cope with cravings?
- If I stop drinking, will I lose weight?
- What if my partner still drinks?
And many more.
©2017 Clare Pooley (P)2017 Hodder & Stoughton LimitedListeners also enjoyed...
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Story
When Lydia takes a job running the Senior Citizens’ Social Club three afternoons a week, she assumes she’ll be spending her time drinking tea and playing gentle games of cards. The members of the Social Club, however, are not at all what Lydia was expecting. From Art, a failed actor turned kleptomaniac to Daphne, who has been hiding from her dark past for decades to Ruby, a Banksy-style knitter who gets revenge in yarn, these seniors look deceptively benign—but when age makes you invisible, secrets are so much easier to hide.
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Aging imperfections
- By Susan Love on 08-07-24
By: Clare Pooley
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Drinking
- A Love Story
- By: Caroline Knapp
- Narrated by: Gabra Zackman
- Length: 9 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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Fifteen million Americans a year are plagued with alcoholism. Five million of them are women. Many of them, like Caroline Knapp, started in their early teens and began to use alcohol as "liquid armor", a way to protect themselves against the difficult realities of life. In this extraordinarily candid and revealing memoir, Knapp offers important insights not only about alcoholism, but about life itself and how we learn to cope with it.
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The Big Picture of Alcohol Dependence
- By Karen K on 07-26-16
By: Caroline Knapp
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Dry
- A Memoir
- By: Augusten Burroughs
- Narrated by: Augusten Burroughs
- Length: 8 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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At the request (well, it wasn't really a request) of his employers, Augusten lands in rehab, where his dreams of group therapy with Robert Downey Jr. are immediately dashed by grim reality of fluorescent lighting and paper hospital slippers. When Augusten is forced to examine himself, he finds himself in the worst trouble of all. Because when his thirty days are up, he has to return to his same drunken Manhattan life - and live it sober. Dry is the story of love, loss, and Starbucks as a Higher Power
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Sobriety with a sense of style....
- By heidi on 09-28-03
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Quit Like a Woman
- The Radical Choice to Not Drink in a Culture Obsessed with Alcohol
- By: Holly Whitaker
- Narrated by: Holly Whitaker
- Length: 10 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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We live in a world obsessed with drinking. We drink at baby showers and work events, brunch and book club, graduations and funerals. Yet no one ever questions alcohol’s ubiquity—in fact, the only thing ever questioned is why someone doesn’t drink. It is a qualifier for belonging and if you don’t imbibe, you are considered an anomaly. As a society, we are obsessed with health and wellness, yet we uphold alcohol as some kind of magic elixir, though it is anything but.
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you had me until the last chapter
- By Katie on 01-15-20
By: Holly Whitaker
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A Happier Hour
- By: Rebecca Weller
- Narrated by: Rebecca Weller
- Length: 4 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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When Rebecca Weller’s pounding, dehydrated head woke her at 3:00 am, yet again, she stared at the ceiling, wondering why the hell she kept doing this to herself. At 39 years of age - and a health coach, no less - she knew better than to down several bottles of wine per week. Her increasingly dysfunctional relationship with alcohol had to stop, but after decades of social drinking, she was terrified of what that might mean. How could she live a joyful existence, without alcohol? How would she relax, socialize, or celebrate - without wine?
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Inspirational
- By DVH on 03-19-21
By: Rebecca Weller
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Blackout
- Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget
- By: Sarah Hepola
- Narrated by: Sarah Hepola
- Length: 7 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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A memoir of unblinking honesty and poignant, laugh-out-loud humor, Blackout is the story of a woman stumbling into a new kind of adventure - the sober life she never wanted. For Sarah Hepola, alcohol was "the gasoline of all adventure". She spent her evenings at cocktail parties and dark bars where she proudly stayed till last call. But there was a price. Publicly, she covered her shame with self-deprecating jokes, and her career flourished, but as the blackouts accumulated, she could no longer avoid a sinking truth.
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Blackout: A Knockout
- By W Perry Hall on 07-17-15
By: Sarah Hepola
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Drinking Games
- A Memoir
- By: Sarah Levy
- Narrated by: Sarah Levy
- Length: 6 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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On paper, Sarah Levy’s life was on track. She was 28, living in New York City, working a great job, and socializing every weekend. But Sarah had a secret: her relationship with alcohol was becoming toxic. And only she could save herself. Drinking Games explores the role alcohol has in our formative years, and what it means to opt out of a culture completely enmeshed in drinking. It’s an examination of what our short-term choices about alcohol do to our long-term selves and how they challenge our ability to be vulnerable enough to discover what we really want in life.
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Surface Level, Young Adult Essays
- By dr8901 on 03-29-23
By: Sarah Levy
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Glorious Rock Bottom
- By: Bryony Gordon
- Narrated by: Bryony Gordon
- Length: 5 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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Bryony Gordon is a respected journalist, a number one best-selling author and an award-winning mental health campaigner. She is also an alcoholic. In Glorious Rock Bottom Bryony opens up about a toxic 20-year relationship with alcohol and drugs and explains exactly why hitting rock bottom - for her, a traumatic event and the abrupt realisation that she was putting herself in danger, time and again - saved her life.
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absolutely fabulous ⭐
- By pixie on 03-05-23
By: Bryony Gordon
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Between Breaths
- A Memoir of Panic and Addiction
- By: Elizabeth Vargas
- Narrated by: Elizabeth Vargas
- Length: 5 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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Beloved former ABC 20/20 anchor Elizabeth Vargas reveals her alcohol addiction and anxiety disorder in a shockingly honest and emotional memoir. From the moment she uttered the brave and honest words, "I am an alcoholic," to interviewer George Stephanopoulos, Elizabeth Vargas began writing her story, as her experiences were still raw. Now, in Between Breaths, Vargas discusses her accounts of growing up with anxiety—which began suddenly at the age of six when her father served in Vietnam.
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Brave and Beautiful
- By LAFalls on 09-14-16
By: Elizabeth Vargas
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Mrs D Is Going Without
- A Memoir
- By: Lotta Dann
- Narrated by: Cat Gould
- Length: 6 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
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This is an honest, upfront, relatable account of one suburban housewife's journey from miserable wine-soaked boozer to self-respecting sober lady. This audiobook is an inspirational tale of self-transformation, addiction, and domesticity.
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Very Enjoyable
- By Chris Kelter on 07-22-20
By: Lotta Dann
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Alcohol Lied to Me - New Edition
- The Intelligent Escape from Alcohol Addiction
- By: Craig Beck
- Narrated by: Craig Beck
- Length: 4 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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Craig Beck is a well-regarded family man with two children, a nice home, and a successful media career; a director of several companies and at one time the trustee of a large children’s charity. Outwardly, Craig was a highly successful and functioning professional man in spite of a ‘two-bottles-of-wine-a-night" drinking habit. For 20 years he struggled to control his drinking, all the time refusing to label himself an alcoholic because he didn't believe he met the stereotypical image that the word portrayed.
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This method worked for me
- By Kindle Customer on 07-07-17
By: Craig Beck
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Unwasted
- My Lush Sobriety
- By: Sacha Z. Scoblic
- Narrated by: Julie McKay
- Length: 6 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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The single glass of wine with dinner... the cold beer on a hot day... the champagne flute raised in a toast... what I'd drink if Hunter S. Thompson wanted to get wasted with me... these are my fantasies lately. Too bad I've gone sober. When Sacha Z. Scoblic was drinking, she was a rock star; the days were rough and the nights filled with laughter and blackouts. Then she gave it up. She had to. Here are her adventures in an utterly and maddeningly sober world... and how she discovered that nothing is as odd and fantastic as life without a drink in hand.
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Not good for audio
- By Cheri on 01-29-20
By: Sacha Z. Scoblic
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Drunk Mom
- A Memoir
- By: Jowita Bydlowska
- Narrated by: Meredith Mitchell
- Length: 8 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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A best seller in its native Canada, Drunk Mom is a gripping, brutally honest memoir of motherhood in the shadow of alcoholism. Three years after giving up drinking, Jowita Bydlowska found herself throwing back a glass of champagne like it was ginger ale. It was a special occasion: a party celebrating the birth of her first child. It also marked Bydlowska's immediate, full-blown return to crippling alcoholism.
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A not very lovely story that I love anyway.
- By Alixandra Hice on 01-12-15
By: Jowita Bydlowska
What listeners say about The Sober Diaries
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- D. Lobo
- 05-02-19
An amazing book
Get this in audio book, not only you will hear her lovely Slightly posh London accent but every kind of accent she perfectly impersonates but also how funny and witty she sounds. A great book for someone contemplating sobriety, trying to cut back or dealing with cancer who wants to see everything in a more humorous way. I couldn’t read “the naked mind “ because it was so preachy and judgmental, but this was the opposite. Claire is brilliant!
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- Pauline
- 06-10-19
Must read!
Must read for ANYONE who drinks alcohol! Especially women! It is an honest account of the authors journey, very moving and I can see myself in her journey
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- Asia Darakjian
- 03-21-20
inspiring.
Clare set out to make a difference and she has, to me. thank you for this book.
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- Elizabeth
- 07-20-19
This book is life-changing.
If you are struggling at all with the amount of wine you drink. This is your book. I have never written a review, but this book has been life-changing for me. Clare Pooley is simply the best. (Thank you, Clare!)
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- KatieJoandHerBooks
- 01-13-20
I am her!
This was eye opening, hilarious, inspirational and the final kick in the bum I needed. I related to most issues she had 100% and I see things differently now. I’m 2 weeks sober!
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- Dog Wrangler
- 06-09-21
The Sober Diaries is a terrific read! Cheers Clare!
Thank you for writing this book. So insightful and even more, incredibly helpful in normalizing my feelings about addiction and drinking. Your heartfelt story was inspiring and great fun to read.
Thank you again.
Warm regards,
Amanda
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- Regi
- 02-05-21
Perfect Book
I absolutely loved this book. I very much relate to Clare and appreciate her honesty and humor. Her story needed to be told. Moms like me need for her story to be told.
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- Anonymous User
- 04-26-20
Amazing book!
Absolutely love Clare's way of telling her story, she is witty, smart, loving and super fun to listen to! She has given me many insights about drinking, and I'm truly grateful to her för sharing her story with us all. Read it! ❤
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- T. Grove
- 06-17-22
Oh boy! This really hits home.
I loved the British humor! I’m not a mum so I generally get bored with mum stories, but I didn’t, I laughed, listened and stayed present all the way to the end, in fact I couldn’t turn it off. Im done, no more wine oh clock for me! Thank you Clare Pooley for exposing yourself…you’ve helped another soul wake up to their life. I highly recommend this book.
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- Allison Barry
- 11-03-18
Really great audiobook
I almost never give five stars to a book or take the time to write a review but I wanted to say how much I enjoyed this book. It was entertaining, moving, funny and just very well written and read.
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