"Deeply human. Taken together, the collection is about more than sobriety. It’s a celebration of the quotidian, a love letter to the breathtaking beauty of the mundane." —Rachel Sugar, Minneapolis Star Tribune
“At turns heartrending and hilarious, Coulter is wonderfully conversational and never preachy as she tells her story of sobriety." —Booklist
"Kristi Coulter charts the raw, unvarnished, and quietly riveting terrain of new sobriety with wit and warmth. Nothing Good Can Come from This is a book about generative discomfort, surprising sources of beauty, and the odd, often hilarious, business of being human."
—Leslie Jamison, author of The Empathy Exams and The Recovering
"Women can talk about anything with one another, but we can't seem to talk about the insidious ways that alcohol has taken over our friendships, our social lives, and every aspect of our womanhood. Nothing Good Can Come From This is equal parts uncomfortable and important, and needs to be read by every woman who has wondered if she really should 'rosé all day,' or who regrets whatever happened at the last book club." —Nora McInerny, author of It's Okay to Laugh
“Brave, whip-smart, and laugh-out-loud funny. Kristi Coulter does not pull any punches tackling the taboos in so many women’s lives: addiction, sex, money, privilege, ambition, adultery, and power. In these essays, she bares her own soul to a greater end, writing with unflinching honesty and unexpected poetry. Although this is framed as a book about drinking, it’s ultimately about so much more: the insidious reasons why so many of us might polish off an entire bottle of Chardonnay in the first place—and how we might better serve ourselves in the end. Coulter herself is addictive to read. She’s a fresh, uncensored voice, offering up more than a drop of insight and hope.”
—New York Times–bestselling author Susan Jane Gilman
“What’s the opposite of disappointment? Oh right, pure joy.That’s what I felt reading Nothing Good Can Come from This. I was dazzled by Kristi Coulter’s honesty, her humor, and above all her beautiful, perfectly tuned sentences. Rarely do formal invention and real emotion coexist so comfortably; in other words, both intelligence and heart are on full display here. It’s difficult to imagine a more, well, joyous reading experience.”
—Claire Dederer, author of Love and Trouble
“Perfectly observant down to the smallest details, this account of drinking, sobriety, and starting (and then restarting) a manageable life is one of those books that is deeply serious, witty, and wonderfully compelling. The miracle of Kristi Coulter’s narrative is that it looks back at the reader and asks, ‘And how do you live?’ Nothing Good Can Come from This seems to speak for a whole generation, and it does so with great charm and brilliance.”
—Charles Baxter, author of The Feast of Love
"Kristi Coulter’s Nothing Good Can Come from This is powerful medicine—healing in its fearlessness and elegant in its form. It is an inspiring account of a human being committed to examining her own life and mind in the midst of a toxic and tuned-out contemporary culture, and is recommended reading for anyone interested in doing the same.”
—Bonnie Nadzam, author of Lamb
“Kristi Coulter says all the things you’re not supposed to say and points out all the things you’ve kind of noticed but never quite articulated. Nothing Good Can Come from This is equal parts hilarious and poignant, beautiful and wise. These are clear-eyed, fresh, and vital essays about addiction, sex, money, love, and the messy, terrifying work of being a person in this world.”
—Diana Spechler, author of Skinny and Who by Fire
“Nothing Good Can Come from This is a refreshing, candid, and very funny look into the life of a woman trying to learn how to be sober in a world that seems to want everyone to keep drinking. In unapologetic and deeply intelligent prose, Kristi Coulter exposes her own flaws while also turning a critical eye to our alcohol-drenched culture. This book is about sobriety, but it’s even more about a woman trying to define herself on her own terms, outside the frames of work, sex, and family.”
—Tom McAllister, author of How to Be Safe
2018-07-09
A memoir of drinking and its hold on all the other aspects of life.In this set of joined essays, Coulter describes herself as "a grown, multi-degreed, loved, moneyed, professionally powerful woman." For all that, she adds, she could not control her drinking, could not time it so that she wasn't drinking all the time; she was, as the adage has it, powerless over the wine (and whatever else was on hand). Finally summoning up willpower, she quit in an evening she recalls mostly for its drab ordinariness: wait for the longing to hit, resist it, go to bed after "wandering and wanting and saying no." As she writes, the author was fortunate to have a companion who, having enabled her drinking, enabled her sobriety as well; she was also fortunate to have the resources, psychic and otherwise, to be able to negotiate a path through a grown-up culture in which alcohol is everywhere. In a strong opening gambit, she describes being newly sober and working her way through a Whole Foods store choked with sale wines and through a business day in which "meeting" too often equals "drinks." "Booze is the oil in our motors, the thing that keeps us purring when we should be making other kinds of noise," she writes. There are some winning moments throughout the narrative, but too often the notes in Coulter's book are repetitive, and the humor is more often forced than laugh-inspiring ("Croutons count as dinner. The starving people of the world will tell you croutons count"). On the plus side, the author deconstructs and often finds wanting the usual chipper here's-how-to-quit advice, such as the thought that one shouldn't drink in moments of sorrow, anxiety, loneliness, or other emotional stress, to which her knowingly world-weary answer is, "That's funny."A readable but minor contribution to the literature of problem drinking, without the depth of now-classics such as Caroline Knapp's Drinking: A Love Story.
