People come to me and anymore almost everybody is medicated and I don’t know how they function in their lives.”īoucher included the stories of people she met through recovery and said she wanted a mix of stories and people. “I wanted to portray what alcoholism really looks like – what almost losing life and family, like my mother did, is like. “My mom passed away in 2011,” Boucher said. After graduating from Wright State University in 2006, she hadn’t planned on writing another book, but her mom encouraged her to write about the family addiction. Because of that, she decided to write a book, “Raising the Bottom: Making Mindful Choices in a Drinking Culture,” which recently published.Īlready a published author, Boucher had written four novels and had walked away from writing in 2005 to return to college. “My mom pointed it out to me.”īoucher said her decision to quit drinking, though not easy, was the best thing for her life and marriage, but that most people deal with a great stigma against sobriety in society today. “I wonder if people would still look at themselves as social drinkers if they knew this,” she said. Boucher said that’s a statistic she didn’t know about and found it eye-opening. “We have this culture of ‘normal social drinking’ – women in these parties that are really four-day ‘drunkathons’ and no one sees this as alcoholism.”Īccording to the NIAAA, anything over seven alcoholic drinks a week is considered heavy drinking for women and for men, it’s over nine. “I noticed that my drinking no longer looked normal,” Boucher said. Not only had she stopped drinking but never took any medication again in her life.

She went into treatment and never looked back.”īoucher said she was inspired by her mother after she had been sober for seven years. “After 35 years of doctors medicating her and telling her she was depressed, she went to Toledo and a doctor there told her she was an alcoholic. “My mother had a near fatal accident, fell down the stairs and broke her neck,” Boucher said. I was an emotional roller coaster.”īoucher now says that doctors could have simply told her to stop drinking but everyone was dancing around the real issue, the same way doctors had been treating her mother for decades. I couldn’t make good decisions and couldn’t stick with things that were important. “But it got to where I was disintegrating internally. “I was not a daily drinker back then,” Boucher said. But Boucher said her story is unique because she crossed the line and stopped drinking completely by the age of 29. When Boucher left home, she didn’t think her drinking was problematic or “alcoholic” in nature, though she admits she did use alcohol to self-medicate.

Raising the bottom by lisa boucher