Wife Mother Drunk: An Intergenerational Memoir of Loss and Love

Summary

Wife Mother Drunk is an intergenerational memoir recounting the author’s harrowing struggle with alcoholism, tracing it back through her ancestry to the times of the pioneers when the seeds of trauma were first planted, long before they overtook her otherwise loving life.

After having her fourth and last baby, Emily Redondo found herself in rehab with a breast pump and a five-week-old at home. On the surface, she looked like every other suburban mom, replete with dance bags and mini van, but inside, she was in a harrowing dance with alcoholism, drinking from morning until night, stealing alcohol from liquor stores, and finding herself arrested for a DUI with a four-year-old in the backseat.

Wife Mother Drunk tells the story of Emily’s decades-long battle against her disease while also confronting generations of inherited trauma and addiction. In this incredible book, Emily investigates those dusty-earth roots to understand how women process trauma, heartbreak, and centuries of putting their children before their own well-being. As Emily untangles the web of female addiction in her own family line, she uncovers all the ways her life has become the ultimate consequence of others’ unhealed trauma.

This is a book like few others on addiction, in that Emily doesn’t just wake up sober one day. After twenty institutions, Emily walks an awkward yet gentle road towards recovery, even as she is forced to face the consequences of her own trauma, through heartbreaking diagnoses and the long-term neurological damage caused by alcohol.

Wife Mother Drunk is a searing, heartbreaking portrait of a woman caught in the grips of addiction, but also a mother whose greatest hope is the love for her children.