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Susan Juby

The definition of a winner, Susan Juby writes in an appendix to her addiction and recovery memoir, Nice Recovery, is, "People who stay clean and sober or at least try really hard to do so." She means from drug and alcohol abuse via a sobriety that is often achieved with the help of a recovery program: Alcoholics Anonymous, Narcotics Anonymous.

Juby, author of the bestselling Alice MacLeod books for young adults, which were recently made into a TV series - Alice, I Think, Miss Smithers - and other YA novels, knows what she's talking about. She's been drug- and alcohol-free for 20 years, but during her teens she was trouble - "an out-of-control piss-tank."

A fearfully shy girl who was the victim at school of "every little cruelty or betrayal or instance of meanness" and desperate to fit in, she began her drinking career in middle school at the age of 13, when she teamed up with "the wild ones, the baby delinquents."

Drinking transformed her life, she says, and "drowned all the fear and anxiety that ranged constantly in my ears and blurred my vision." No longer would the schoolgirls who "cruised the hallways like bull sharks" terrify her; she had become invincible and unselfconscious, "a card-carrying member of the party nation." Gone was the socially inept, off-putting loner; the frenzied life of the party had arrived. By 16, she was calling herself an alcoholic, and there was both bravado and a desperate awareness of her situation contained in this statement.

Because her drinking life wasn't only obliterating fun at the gravel pit on weekend nights, or showing up at math class high on speed or mushrooms. It included blackouts, DTs, waking up in strange places with guys she didn't know, fist fights, traumas, humiliations, physical injuries, incomplete schooling and an alienated family, all part of the "homely, unvarnished alcoholism with a side order of minor drug addiction" that was her life.

Juby tells her story with such honesty and warmth that it's easy to empathize with both her ascent into alcoholism, for that's what it was for her, and then her spiralling downfall. Her story is also interspersed with the same wonderfully incisive humour that distinguishes her novels, though she is careful to avoid flippancy; her book, after all, was not written for laughs. Though laughs it has. As an inveterate teenage puker, she writes: "If there was one thing the beer commercials taught me, it was that hot girls didn't projectile vomit."

Juby is also careful to honour the AA tenant of anonymity. For this reason there is little mention of her family life in Smithers, B.C., where she grew up; the identity of other alcoholics has been altered. The focus is on herself and the details of her addiction and recovery, though one can imagine the anguish that her parents and siblings experienced. Add into the mix the personality changes that Juby underwent while drinking - she was a nasty and aggressive drunk - and her story becomes, as well, a testament to her persevering family. For whatever their reasons, they didn't out-and-out reject her, which is the fate, tragically, of many of the young alcoholics and addicts now seen on a street near you.

Juby was lucky. Whether it was a combination of the tenuous bond she somehow maintained with her family, her small-town sensibility, her will to self-preservation or her intelligence and humour, she managed to get herself to an AA meeting when she hit bottom at 20, though at the time, she notes, she "looked thirty and felt a hard-up fifty."

Like her alcoholic years, her writing about the years in recovery ring true. Again, Juby's been through it all: the overwhelming fears as she faced her demons, her compulsive behaviours, the personality rebuilding she underwent with the help of sponsors and AA members, and then the miracles that began occurring as a result of her changing life: fulfilling relationships, a less fearful, more balanced self, beginning to write at the age of 27, which was, she says, a chance to rewrite her adolescence, and then marriage.

Ultimately, though, recovery is about reaching out to those new to the program. Written in the spirit of service, something that is central to the Alcoholics Anonymous creed, Juby's story is offered to young people who may be "mired in the seeming hopelessness and helplessness of addiction," and with the hope that they can find the help to profoundly change their lives, as she did. Staying sober over the long haul, she says, is a task that "requires faith, courage and epic quantities of assistance; it is a journey as fascinating as any person can take."

Her "street cred," good humour and folksy writing style will, hopefully, connect with her young audience to good effect, and the insights she provides into the monster that is teenage alcoholism should prove invaluable to parents, educators, and counsellors alike.

Nice Recovery includes a bibliography, a list of resources and the Twelve Steps of AA, as well as Juby's witty glossary of recovery-speak, wherein God, as a form of higher power, is defined as follows: "Quite a multifarious character among recovery types. Characterized by a certain loving quality and propensity to forgive saints and assholes alike."

It is Juby's acceptance and forgiveness of herself that is on display here; her story is, quite simply, an inspiration.

M.A.C. Farrant's latest books are Down the Road to Eternity and The Secret Lives of Litterbugs.

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