My Sobriety Story with Marya

“It’s never been easy, and I’d never go back.”

This series showcases personal stories of addiction recovery and sobriety. Today’s edition features

Marya Hornbacher

, an award-winning journalist, New York Times bestselling author, and recipient of numerous awards for her work. Shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize, Marya has spent a prolific quarter-century writing and teaching across genres. Now, she’s tossed all that experience into a truck and a camper to focus more on questions than answers. Find Marya’s newsletter at: Going Solo at the End of the World.

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When and how did you get sober?

I had a couple of brushes with sobriety—or at least with the awareness that there were people who were sober, they had a way of being sober, they had at some point not been sober and, for whatever their reasons, found it necessary to become sober—in my early teens, when I seemed mysteriously to be getting in a great big heap o’ trouble everywhere I went.

I got good and thoroughly sober about a decade later, pursuant to a regrettable sequence of events including but not limited to a) calling my father from a snowbank on a city street at 9 a.m., drunk and holding an empty handle of generic vodka and sniveling that I’d run out of booze and the liquor store wasn’t open early enough for my taste, b) getting hauled off to the drunk tank by a deeply nonplussed cop, c) convincing the staff that there’d been a terrible mistake because I was a professor (relevance, your honor?) and talking them into letting me walk home, d) getting hauled off to the drunk tank again, that same night, after putting my foot through my fiancée’s windshield in a fit of pique about whatever, e) being transferred by ambulance (I’m watching taxpayers’ dollars swirl down the drain even now) from drunk tank to hospital psych ward, where I guess they keep drunk professors? and where, the next morning, the doctor—who seemed unreasonably cross—demanded, Do you know what your blood alcohol was when they brought you in last night? I said I did not. He yelled, It was .35! I asked, Is that high? (I really didn’t know.) Whereupon he threw his hands in the air and stormed out of the room, f) and sent me back to the drunk tank by cop car, where I harangued the poor beleaguered tech, insisting that if she didn’t give me my benzos I’d go into withdrawal until she said, Lady, I don’t know how to tell you this, but you’re in withdrawal, and g) by the time I was sober enough to sit up and eat my standard little jails-institutions-or-death peanut butter sandwich a couple days later, a social worker showed up to present me with my options: rehab or a women’s prison upstate.

I went to rehab.

I got clean at 26. I’m 51 now. Lots of things have helped me along the way. Rehab interrupted the cycle of active addiction and taught me a ton; several 12 Step and other recovery fellowships provided and continue to provide invaluable guidance, examples of how to live sober (and how maybe not to), and community. Ultimately, it’s a choice. I just keep choosing not to use. I don’t have to think about it consciously anymore—it becomes habit, default, to stay clean, same way using becomes habit and default when we’re still in the shit—I keep making that same choice. It’s never been easy, and I’d never go back.

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What was the turning point in your decision to get sober?

Thinking as a writer, it’s tempting to point to a single plot-driving point—the crisis, the epiphany, the resolve. But thinking as a sober person who’s been trudging along a while, I hesitate to think in terms “what it was like” (backstory, rising action), “what happened” (turning point, crisis, narrative climax), and “what it’s like now” (resolution, denouement), because that’s a shitty story—I mean, look at this.

See? That makes it look like the whole story happens in the first act and a half or so. What have I been doing these past 25 years? Twiddling my thumbs? Sobriety is the action. I get sober and then we get to the interesting part.

Sobriety isn’t like a story—sobriety is like life. The only way in which it’s like a story, really, is this: a plot, a story, can be understood in its most simple form as follows:

Plot is change over time.

Sobriety is, too.

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What surprised you about getting sober?

That I continue to be an asshole, and so does everyone else. While I didn’t expect to magically transform into a Good Person, and I certainly didn’t expect the world to arrange itself so I could more easily understand the word “serenity,” it did take me a while to understand and have compassion for the fact that sober people—me included—are just people. We drag our little carry-on of personal, social, and cultural bullshit everywhere we go.

In building a life from which I don’t want to escape, I also have to become a person who actively contributes to the greater good of the world. That’s not getting sober—that’s being sober. That’s living a sober life. The process of becoming a better, more ethical person is a deeper process than getting clean. While I do think those of us who are clearly unable to keep our shit together on substances have a moral obligation to get off them, to interrupt our own worst traits by getting clean, the larger obligation is to become moral people living moral lives.

Unfortunately, as a practical matter, the only person who has to stop being such an asshat is me.

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What’s the biggest challenge you’ve encountered on your recovery journey?

Life. Life really does keep throwing me for a loop.

There’s no shortage of challenges, but the big thing is that sobriety is dynamic; it changes, because the world changes and life changes and we change. In 2001, I was spending damn near every waking hour in a sober clubhouse because I was so pickled I couldn’t drive or work or function or find my ass with both hands and the people were nice and they gave me coffee and let me be weird and silent and sullen and I felt safe. In 2025, I spend more time on a meditation cushion or a hiking trail than I do at meetings, but am an integral part of a virtual recovery community, my friendships are strong and decades long, and even as the world is collapsing around our ears, I’m able to both find hope and solace and give those things to someone else each day, which I somehow couldn’t manage when my life was objectively easier but I was objectively a drunk.

Even though alcohol seemed like my solution for a long time—and the prospect of having no solution was terrifying—the fact is that it solved nothing. It didn’t even solve discomfort, which I believe is the Big Bad Scary Thing most of us are trying to dodge—just degrees of plain old-fashioned discomfort, big or small. So I always have that choice—I can drink and make literally everything worse, or I can go punch a heavy bag at the gym and take a cold shower and calm down a little without ruining my day and blowing my sobriety and making a fool of myself and drunk-dialing my poor long-suffering friends who are long since sick of my shit and endangering my own or anyone else’s life for no real reason and go to bed like an adult without puking on my shirt or winding up in jail.

Either way, as the piano man sang, you wake up with yourself.

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What are the biggest benefits or gifts of sobriety?

I trust myself.

The idea of being “right sized” has been crucial for me. I’m not the worst drunk that ever was, and I’m not the best sober person you’ll ever see; I’m just a schmuck trying to muddle my way through making less of a mess, finding some joy, and bringing some hope where I can. When I stopped thinking in these stupid dichotomies—Biggest Fuckup on Record vs. Saint Sobriety—it got a lot easier to just do my best. That, in turn, allowed me to show up, follow through, and eventually learn that I’m generally pretty trustworthy, and I learned to trust myself.

I don’t always make all the right choices, but I trust myself to make a good faith effort to choose well. I trust myself not to self-destruct when I fuck it up. I don’t pretend to be someone I’m not; I trust myself to be myself. That counts for a lot.

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What words of advice would you give someone who’s considering sobriety or newly sober?

As bad as any situation may be, there’s nothing we can’t make worse by getting drunk. So we’ve got that going for us, which is nice.

There’s nothing magic about sobriety. We don’t have to crack a secret code. There’s no test. There’s no perfect equation, no precise system, no guaranteed recipe for “good” or “bad” sobriety. It’s just a choice and then another choice. We choose to get drunk, or we don’t. We choose to clean up our act or we stay a mess. We choose to trudge our way through the tough times, or we choose to go limp and flop onto the floor like a toddler and scream. It’s never an easy choice, and the options aren’t great, but it’s always a choice.

There are a lot more elegant ways to say this, but I don’t trust people who try to make sobriety sound elegant. It’s not. It’s just life. I can always choose to blow up my life, but that would be dumb, so that’s not the choice I make.

Want to share your sobriety story?

Thank you for sharing, Marya! We look forward to connecting with you in the comments.

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