Recovering: a newsletter from Holly Whitaker
Hello friend! I’m so glad you’re here.
You might know me from my 2010-era blog Hip Sobriety, or from the recovery program that blog eventually grew into (Hip Sobriety School), or even the venture-backed startup that grew from it called Tempest (RIP). You might also know me from 2018-era sober feminist mag I founded (The Temper), or my New York Times best-selling book, Quit Like a Woman (Penguin Random House 2019), which so far has sold about 600,000 copies world wide and has been translated into six languages and counting.
Or, maybe you don’t know me at all. Either way, let me tell you what we’re doing here.
A decade ago, I led the conversation on the patriarchal structures inherent in recovery from alcohol use disorder. Today, I’m continuing that work but expanding it—sparking conversations about relapse, complex trauma, hormones, neurodivergence, and harm reduction, and how all of it impacts our recoveries.
As a free subscriber, you’ll receive about half or less of the content (I send one or two fully free posts a month).
By becoming a paid subscriber, you’ll have full access to:
Essays (short and long-form)
Resources (booklists, links, recommendations, how-tos)
Interviews with experts
Monthly live Q&As with me
Occasional chats and threads
I believe the key to our collective freedom (and our way out of this current fresh fucking hell) is not our self-optimization; not wellness. It’s our individual paths to healing. It’s true and genuine recovery, including from oppressive structures, which I believe our current “recovery” landscape is.
This is not a newsletter to give you one more thing to do or one more way to fix yourself. This is a newsletter dedicated to reminding you we are not supposed to adapt or self-optimize through the end times; we are supposed to do the best we can while remembering how good we are, how enough it already is.
This is a newsletter to remind you that we won’t get there from there, that we have to start here, and here is so very, very good.
