Lush: A Memoir - Softcover

"Raw, intimate and brave, Lush tears apart the usual advice about drinking and addiction (guess what, AA isn't the only answer), and chronicles Cohen's journey toward a healing that at first she can only image. Gorgeously written and audaciously intelligent, here is a controversial and compelling look at finding your own way back." - Caroline Leavitt, New York Times bestselling author of Is This Tomorrow and Pictures of You

"Kerry Cohen applies her legendary wit and sagacity to women's often subtly destructive dance with alcohol. With great vulnerability and dynamic prose, Cohen examines her own descent into the bottle, its ruinous consequences, and her courageous fight to find her footing in her real life again. This is a story you won't soon forget." - Jillian Lauren, New York Times bestselling memoirist of Some Girls: My Life in a Harem and Everything You Ever Wanted

"Kerry Cohen has hit on something important that's rarely discussed -- how the everyday disappointment of middle-age can lead to abuses one never imagined as a teenager. Her voice bristles with both vulnerability and sass; her observations and analyses are razor-sharp. This is about drinking, but also about the simple anguish of being human. I guzzled Lush in one long gulp." - Karen Karbo, author of The Gospel According to Coco Chanel and How Georgia Became O'Keeffe

"Unapologetic in that it offers no trite "darkness to light" narrative about alcoholism, Cohen's book instead offers a sharp-eyed look at what it means to be a midlife female unable to cope with either personal demons or the heavy external social pressures placed on women. An intimate and unsparing book of self-reflection. " - Kirkus

"Holy mother of wine--finally a woman wrestles the story of what it is really like to be a woman away from what we've been told we are supposed to be. Kerry Cohen's Lush will light you up, crack you up, make you bawl, and most of all, allow you to breathe again. I'm beyond thrilled to read a book where a woman tells the truth without falling into the sap-hole of the sin-and-redemption narrative. There is no sin and redemption. There's just our lives, and as Cohen reminds us one truth bomb at a time, they are messily gorgeous. Move over Mary Karr." - Lidia Yuknavitch, bestselling author of The Book of Joan and The Misfit's Manifesto

"An unflinching narrative of one woman's journey to the bottom of her wine glass, over and over and over. " - The Oregonian

"I love this book. I am this book. Kerry Cohen has written a memoir that wrestles with the subtleties, the ambiguities, the sheer alluring horrifying real-life mess of mid-life alcohol addiction. For those of us wrestling with demons--and who isn't?--Lush is a solace as powerful as red wine." - Claire Dederer, bestselling author of Poser: My Life in Twenty-Three Yoga Poses