Living a sober life with Laura McKowen

Q&A on finding sobriety and helping others get free

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Love Story

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Laura McKowen is the bestselling author of We Are The Luckiest: The Surprising Magic of a Sober Life and Push Off From Here: 9 Essential Truths to Get You Through Sobriety (and Everything Else), which was released earlier this year. Laura is the Founder of The Luckiest Club, an international sobriety support community, and has been published in The New York Times, and her work has been featured in The Atlantic, The Wall Street Journal, the TODAY show, and more. She lives outside Boston with her daughter.

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In both your books and your weekly newsletter,

Love Story

, you talk about addictions, sobriety, and more. What motivated you to share your experiences, and how has it changed you?

When I hit the wall with drinking in 2013, I was so desperate in every way. I was newly separated from my husband, my daughter was three years old, I had a high-stress job in advertising, and I needed a way to process what was happening. I’d always longed to write publicly and had dreamt of being an author in a far-off fantasy way.

I’ve heard the musician Jason Isbell say sobriety gave him a story to tell, and the same was true for me. The experience of addiction and the struggle to get sober gave me something to write about, and it was more of a compulsion than a desire at that time. Writing was one of the only things I wanted more than I wanted to drink, and doing it helped me pull apart what was going on and sort through all my thoughts and feelings.

People often comment that sharing my experience was so brave, but I don’t see it that way. It was self-preservation. I was doing it for me first. I’m so glad it’s helped other people, but that’s not why I shared.

How has it changed me? I mean, how has it not? I was carrying around so many secrets; there were like thirty different versions of me in the world. That kind of incongruence will make you really sick. The process of writing straightened out my narrative and allowed me to see myself not as a terrible, depraved person but as someone who was in a lot of pain and was doing what she needed to do to survive. It gave me a more benevolent, whole view of myself and others, which is life-changing in every way. It connected me to other people who’d been down the same road; it gave me community; it alchemized my pain into something meaningful.

What are the most common misconceptions on getting sober and being in recovery from addiction?

The biggest misconception is that addiction is somehow unique. It’s not. Addiction is part of the human condition, period. We’re all addicted to something–often many things. Most people see addiction as something that happens to “other people” and that it’s about a lack of willpower or due to some moral failing, but the reality is addictions are just a natural impulse to cope with life, to connect, to soothe, gone awry. Gabor Mate said, “The question is not why the addiction, but why the pain,” and that’s a perfect way to describe what people don’t understand. Nobody chooses to get addicted; nobody would. We do what we need to do to survive our environments, which is actually very intelligent, and somewhere along the line, the cure becomes the problem. And when you talk about alcohol, there are like ten more layers of cognitive dissonance involved. As a culture, we glorify alcohol. We've been bombarded with messages that it’s benign, even good for us, for at least thirty years (which were paid for by Big Alcohol, by the way). Meanwhile, it’s the most harmful drug there is–it causes more deaths per year than all other drugs combined, including illegal drugs. So the message is: drink, a lot! But when someone gets addicted, we’re like: What’s wrong with you?

In the darkest parts of your struggle, how did you keep moving forward?

It’s not an overstatement that writing saved me. This was partially because it helped me understand what was going on and connected me to others, like I said, but also because I was finally using my potential. A quote that’s meant a lot to me throughout this is from the Gospel of St. Thomas, “If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.” Drinking was destroying me, but that unused potential was a spiritual death.

I also learned to start asking for help, which I hated, but other women in sobriety kept me going when I didn’t see a way through and didn’t have any hope.

Tell us more about The Luckiest Club, your online sobriety support community. How is it changing lives?

TLC was an accident, really. When the world shut down in March 2020, I got an email from my local AA chapter saying they had been closing meetings for a while, and I couldn’t believe it. I’d never seen that happen. I figured I knew how to host a meeting and by then I had a pretty big email list and social media following, so I started hosting meetings twice a day. They weren’t AA meetings, I came up with my own format, invited people I knew in the recovery community to speak, and hundreds of people showed up. I kept that going for about six weeks and then, when it became clear that lockdowns weren’t temporary, I told everyone I would have to stop (I had a job and a sixth grader at home!). But folks begged me to keep going. So I brought together a team of folks to lead meetings, came up with The Luckiest Club, and we hosted our first official meeting on May 4, 2020. At the time, we had about ten meetings per week, and now we’re up to over sixty, with special meetings for the Queer community, BIPOC folks, Men’s meetings, Women’s meetings, and over fifty subgroups based on geography or interest. It’s been an incredible experience to see this thing evolve.

One reason it works is that it’s almost entirely virtual (the subgroups sometimes host IRL meetings), which eliminates the time and place barrier for people in remote areas where meetings are sparse or for working parents or stay-at-home moms who may find it incredibly hard to get to a physical meeting. We’ve also fostered an incredibly inclusive, non-dogmatic culture. We don’t believe there’s one “right” way to recover, and we welcome people exactly as they are. The TLC team is also absolutely incredible. Everyone is in recovery and is so dedicated to helping other people get free from addiction.

If someone is ready to take the next step into getting sober, what three tips do you have for her?

1. Tell someone the truth about what’s going on, even if the truth is that you’re just sick of the way drinking makes you feel! You don’t have to have some huge bottom to have a valid reason for wanting to stop. Everything changes when you open your mouth.

2. Join a community. As annoying as it is (I’m a non-joiner!) you simply cannot do it alone. Find a community, whether it’s The Luckiest Club or something else, and put yourself in a place to hear people tell the truth.

3. Don’t give up. It’s a process that rarely sticks on the first try. It took me over a year to finally stop for good.

What do you hope the legacy of your work will be?

I hope my legacy is that by telling the truth, I helped people get free.