A New Byliner Original by Paul Carr
SAN FRANCISCO, March 12,
2012 -- Paul Carr's new Byliner Original, published today,
is Sober Is My New Drunk, a wonderfully bracing (but
zero-proof) tale of recovery. In it, Carr—the bestselling humor writer and
notorious tech blogger—explains why he avoided Alcoholics Anonymous and instead
found salvation through social media, including using Twitter, Facebook,
YouTube, and the Internet to get (and stay) clean and sober.
Paul Carr gave up booze with the same verve and
originality that he brought to his life as a drunk.
For one thing, he didn't go to Alcoholics Anonymous, an organization that, he
writes, "breeds an 'it's not my fault' mentality that refuses to accept that
anyone can ever truly be cured of the 'disease' of alcoholism."
Instead, Carr quit in the most non-anonymous way imaginable: He posted an
open letter on his popular website and took to Twitter and Facebook, inviting
others to police his progress.
As Carr writes, "Fortunately, we live in a time when it's easier than ever to share our
secrets with friends and strangers alike. Thanks to Facebook and Twitter and
blogging and video sharing and all that good stuff, a decision to give up
drinking can easily be publicized for all to see. Which is precisely what I
did."
The letter was both a confession and an invitation for public scrutiny. "No
matter where I was," he recalls, "there was always a chance that someone had
read my post and was waiting to catch me with a drink in my hand." To help keep
himself on the straight and narrow, Carr still has a counter at the top of his
site, ticking off the number of days he's gone without a drink.
In this no-holds-barred essay, Carr delivers his own twelve steps to building
a life without booze. His hard-earned advice, punctuated with anecdotes that are
both cautionary and comic (a bender once took him to Iceland, where he drunkenly believed he'd get better
Wi-Fi), is given with humility and goodwill. Along the way, Carr celebrates the
simple yet overlooked pleasures of sobriety—weight loss, a renewed love life,
the ability to buy a phone or laptop without promptly losing it in a bar. As he
slowly discovers, a sober life actually can be fun. What's more, he'll
remember it.
Paul Carr is the author of the memoirs
Bringing Nothing to the Party and The Upgrade. Sober Is My New
Drunk is his first book since quitting alcohol. A former columnist for
TechCrunch and The Guardian, he makes his home in a series of
hotels in Las Vegas, Nevada.
Byliner publishes
compelling works of original fiction and nonfiction written to be read in a
single sitting. Among its bestselling titles are Amy
Tan's Rules for Virgins, Jon
Krakauer's Three Cups of Deceit, Ann
Patchett's The Getaway Car, William T.
Vollmann's Into the Forbidden Zone, Taylor
Branch's The Cartel, Margaret
Atwood's I'm Starved for You, and Mark
Bittman's Cooking Solves Everything. The companion website, Byliner.com, features curated
archives of the best fiction and nonfiction writing and allows readers to easily
find, share, and buy new and classic stories by their favorite authors.
Sober Is My New Drunk is available for $1.99 as a Kindle Single at Amazon, a Quick Read at
Apple's iBookstore, a Nook Snap at BarnesAndNoble.com, and at Kobo.
SOURCE Byliner
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