Description
As a child, Nicola Barry just wanted her mother to be normal – to make the family’s meals, to care for their home, to look after her and her siblings. But Nicola’s mother was a chronic alcoholic and there was nothing normal about life in the Barry household.
A trained medic and the wife of a consultant anaesthetist, Nicola’s mother drank from the bottle every day. Happily, at first. Then increasingly miserably. Behind closed doors, she was drinking herself to death. Alcohol turned her from a once beautiful woman into a shrunken old lady. Alcohol distorted family life into something dysfunctional and degrading.
Mother’s Ruin is the powerful story of how Nicola loved and hated her mother in equal measure: loved her when she was sober, hated her when she was drunk. It is the story of how a young girl spent her childhood caring for a sick parent, rather than being cared for herself And it is the story of how that child also became an alcoholic, but, desperate to throw off her mother’s legacy, emerged the other side of her addiction – a survivor.
Soft cover, 245 pages. In excellent preloved condition.