Catherine Gray - The Unexpected Joy of Being Sober: Discovering a happy, healthy, wealthy alcohol-free life

Hard to put down! This book combines a riveting, raw yet humorous memoir with actionable and well researched advice for anyone looking for the joy of a sober lifestyle. Catherine Gray combines storytelling and science, creating a throughly readable and unexpectedly educational read. Her contribution to this genre is truly unique. Not only entertaining; it holds a universe of hope for the reader. I highly recommend this wonderful book.

Annie Grace, author of This Naked Mind: Control Alcohol.
Find Freedom, Discover Happiness & Change Your Life

Like listening to your best friend teach you to be sober. Light-hearted but serious, its packed with ideas, tools, tips and, most importantly, reasons for living a sober life. This book is excellent.

Eric Zimmer, host of podcast The One You Feed

Catherines writing style and voice captivate me. She has a way of translating her story into an experience I dont want to end. I want to drink every drop she produces.

Holly Whitaker, founder of Hip Sobriety School and co-presenter of Home podcast

This book is great. A balanced, informative and entertaining mlange of memoir, sociology and psychology. I identified very strongly with huge sections of it.

Jon Stewart, guitarist of Sleeper and Leaving AA, Staying Sober blogger

Sober is too often equated with sombre in our culture. Grays book turns that idea on its head. Her experience of sobriety is joyful and life-affirming. A must-read for anyone who has a nagging suspicion that alcohol may be taking away more than its giving.

Hilda Burke, psychotherapist and couples counsellor

Catherine Gray really captures the FUN we can have in sobriety. This book challenges the status quo; sobriety sounds as liberating as taking a trip to the jungle. Fun and inspirational.

What an important book for our time! A joy to read.

Samantha Moyo, founder of Morning Gloryville

This book is a gamechanger. Everyone deserves to have Catherine hold their hand as they navigate the new world of not drinking whether exploring alcohol-free periods or going for full on sobriety and this book enables just that. Wise, funny and so relatable, The Unexpected Joy of Being Sober adds colour to the dull presumption that often comes with not drinking. A book for the times as sobriety continues to be the wellness trend to watch. Keep it in your bag as you navigate the world of not drinking, and let Catherine lead the way for you as she re-defines sobriety in the 21st century.

Laurie, Girl & Tonic blogger

Brave, witty and brilliantly written. Itll make you look at life through sharper eyes. What a revelation.

Tracy Ramsden, features editor, Marie Claire

Grays fizzy writing succeeds in making this potentially boring-as-hell subject both engaging and highly seductive

The Bookseller

Joan Didion, the super-cool American essayist, said, I dont know what I think until I write it down. And thats how I was. I didnt know what I thought about drinking and sobriety, until I started writing about it.

I didnt intend to write a book. At all. If I time travelled right now back to 2013 and said, youre going to write a book about this one day to the Drinking Me who was desperately trying to hide her empty bottles, shaking hands and shattered soul, she would have been horrified. She would have howled with shame.

The me of 2013 wanted to shrink into the wallpaper like a nifty chameleon, not step out and hang a sign around her neck saying sober! Its absolutely the pinnacle of irony that I have fulfilled the lifelong dream of publishing a book, by revealing the very secret I spent years trying to conceal. But, I like irony.

I started out by writing long posts and comments on secret sober groups on Facebook. I noticed how that straightened out my conflicted desires (Drink! Dont drink. Drink! Dont drink). After writing I felt a lot less like drinking. Writing felt like tipping the jumbled contents of my head onto a table and slotting them neatly together, like a jigsaw puzzle. Pictures formed. So, I started writing privately too. I remember sitting down at two weeks sober and finding that 3,000 words flowed out of me like water from a finally-turned-on hosepipe. Phew. I felt unburdened. So, I did it again, and again, and again, until I had 200,000 words oftotal nonsense. Which I then began to slowly shape into a book.

This book took three years of a-bit-here, a-bit-there, to write. For the first two years of that, I absolutely intended to don the cloak of a pseudonym. I said to people, I cant talk about the shakes, about morning drinking, about promiscuity, about the wind-chime tinkle of tiny bottles in my bag, under my real name. HELL NO.

But then I slowly realized that the people I admired the most in the sober-sphere are those who have chosen to step away from the shadows. Those who are fully out. I was inspired by the I am not anonymous movement*, a series of beautiful portraits of sober people. I realized that if I hid behind a fake name, I would effectively be saying that growing addicted to booze, or getting sober, are things to be ashamed of. Which theyre really not. I am no longer remotely ashamed. Unveiling some of these personal details puts me well out of my comfort zone, its true. But nothing truly great ever happens in your comfort zone.

*Check out www.iamnotanonymous.org. Its ace.

Stigmas grow in the shadowlands. So, lets floodlight the sober movement. Alcohol is an addictive drug. Theres no shame in not being able to use it moderately. You are not unusual if you cant stop at one or two. Youre not broken. Or weak. Youre actually the norm. Two-thirds of Brits are drinking more than they intend to.

We should be able to drop I dont drink or Im teetotal or Im taking a break from drinking into conversation just as smoothly as we say I dont eat meat or Im a non-smoker or Im taking a break from dairy. There shouldnt be any cringe around choosing to do something positive for your body and well-being.

Our thinking about drinking, as a society, is wonky. Drinking is not inevitable. Or compulsory. We dont need to have a doctors note to excuse us from swan-diving into wine. We dont have to be driving to say no ta. And its not just recovering alcoholics, like me, who can choose not to drink.

We have a collective shame around feeling like were failing at alcohol. Weve been conditioned into that hangdog shame. Weve been taught to hide away our struggles with alcohol. Its high time that changed. Its a moonshot goal, but Im hoping this book will help re-brand and re-align how people see sobriety. I hope this will start the Im-drinking-too-much-and-I-dont-know-how-to-stop conversation. Instead of sobriety being something a clutch of failed drinkers have to do, its something we all get to do. If we choose it.

I could say that I wrote this book purely for Britains boozehounds, as a selfless exercise. I could say I martyred myself and bared my questionable past, to show other people how rad sobriety is. But, I did it as much for myself, as I did for you. Writing this helped me immeasurably. So, thank you for having me. For buying these pages that got me, and keep me, joyfully sober.