ABOUT THE BOOK

Lisa Smith was a bright young lawyer at a prestigious law firm in NYC when alcoholism and drug addiction took over her life. What was once a way she escaped her insecurity and negativity as a teenager became a means of coping with the anxiety and stress of an impossible workload.

Girl Walks Out of a Bar explores Smith’s formative years, her decade of alcohol and drug abuse, divorce, and her road to recovery. In this darkly comic and wrenchingly honest story, Smith describes how her circumstances conspire with her predisposition to depression and self-medication in an environment ripe for addiction to flourish. When her close-knit group of high-achieving friends celebrate the end of their grueling workdays with alcohol-fueled nights at the city’s clubs and summer weekends partying at the beach the feel-good times can spiral wildly out of control.

Girl Walks Out of a Bar is a candid portrait of alcoholism through the lens of gritty New York realism. Beneath the façade of success lies the reality of addiction.

Girl Walks Out of a Bar has received four independent press awards.

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY INCLUDED

Girl Walks Out of a Bar on its short list of Authors and Books to Watch For at the
American Booksellers Association’s Winter Institute 11.

"...Whether she’s having a driver turn a Town Car around so she can ditch her niece’s birth in order to meet her coke dealer or staging her own semi-intervention, Smith takes us into the mind of someone who’s completely in control while being radically out of control. This girl may have walked out of a bar but she’s walked into one of the best addiction memoirs I’ve ever read."

"A darkly comic, honest, and completely relatable inside look at high-functioning addiction in the world of corporate law. It's inspiring, informative, and impossible to put down."

“Raw, naked and unflinching, Girl Walks Out of A Bar catapults the reader into the sordid, desperate reality of high-functioning addiction: the booze, the coke, the lies; the denial, the depression, the blackouts. All are on full display as New York lawyer Lisa Smith loses herself in a deep and all-too-human descent into perpetual numbing. A chilling, cautionary tale.”