THE BOOK

“An emotionally absorbing and swiftly paced multisensory experience.”      —New York Times Book Review

Named a Best Memoir of 2023 by Elle

In the vein of  Somebody’s Daughter, this wild, vivid addiction memoir from the host of the podcast The Only One in the Room “will inspire, awe, entertain, educate, and help so many readers” (Christie Tate, New York Times bestselling author of Group) with a journey to sobriety and self-love amidst privilege and racism.

After years of hiding her addiction from everyone—stockpiling pills in her Louboutins and elaborately scheduling her withdrawals between PTA meetings, baby showers, and tennis matches—Laura Cathcart Robbins is running out of places to hide.

She has learned the hard way that even her high-profile marriage and Hollywood lifestyle can’t protect her from the pain she’s keeping bottled up inside. Facing divorce, the possibility of a grueling custody battle, and the insistent voice of internalized racism that nags at her as a Black woman in a startlingly white world, Laura wonders just how much more she can take.

Now, with courageous and candid openness, she reveals how she started the long journey towards sobriety, unexpectedly found new love, and dismantled the wall she had built around herself, brick by brick. With its raw, finely crafted, and engaging prose, Stash is “emotionally riveting…usher[ing] in a new way for us to talk and read about the paradoxes of addiction, race, family, class, and gender.” (Kiese Laymon, acclaimed author of Heavy, Long Division, and How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America)

WHERE TO BUY STASH

THE REVIEWS

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On the lookout for your next book? This week’s recommendations include a deep dive into a public hospital and a thriller set in rural Arkansas.

Here are six paperbacks we recommend →

8 Books to Help You Drink Less, or Quit Altogether

In “Stash,” Ms. Robbins offers a candid look at a Black woman grappling with addiction. She was married to a Hollywood director and writes openly about how glamour and privilege could not save her from her problems.

Black authors are largely absent from quit lit, and the treatment landscape is very white-centric, said Ryan Cain, executive director of Fund Recovery, a nonprofit that provides access to treatment programs. But stories like “Stash” can help reduce stigma around addiction, he said.

“Black women are treated differently in recovery,” said Emily Lynn Paulson, recovery coach and founder of the Sober Mom Squad. “The expectations on them are different.”

Three Debut Memoirists Chart Paths of Chaos and Survival

“Robbins’s deft narrative is an emotionally absorbing and swiftly paced multisensory experience…[She] courageously wrote the memoir her recovering self craved — the book she knows others need, too.”.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/28/books/review/new-memoirs.html

The Best Memoirs of 2023 (So Far)

We know addiction defines class but do we really? At the peak of her pill use, Cathcart Robbins, now the host of the podcast The Only One in the Room, was a full-time mom married to an entertainment executive and living a high-end Los Angeles lifestyle. She was also dealing with the challenges of being a Black woman in an exceedingly white world. As a recovery story, Stash is both distinct and universal.

https://www.elle.com/culture/books/g43980400/best-memoirs-2023/

The Best Books of 2023 (So Far)—According to Real Simple Editors

In the early 2000s, Laura Cathcart Robbins was a budding author, had two young kids, and was married to one of the most powerful men in Hollywood. She was also severely addicted to pills. When she decided to get sober, she couldn’t find any “quit lit” books that reflected her experience as a Black woman. Her remarkably candid memoir, Stash: My Life in Hiding, fills that void, revealing how her race, self-image, and privilege influenced her addiction and eventual triumph over it.

Stash: My Life in Hiding by Laura Cathcart Robbins

Reviewed by Lisa Ellison Cooper

Being the only one in the room is something I know about too. During my senior year, I was the only Buddhist in my high school. In my twenties, I was the only survivor of suicide loss in my college classes, and in my early forties, the only one I knew with a prescription sleep medication addiction. It was that last experience that made me eager to read Laura’s memoir. 

Stash: My Life in Hiding is a cinematically written, raw, and vulnerable peek into the challenges successful Black women face when struggling with addiction. On the first page, Laura plunges us into a world that’s materially lavish yet emotionally bankrupt, then leads us through her dissent and eventual recovery. Until she enters treatment, her secret stays largely between narrator and reader. But within the confessional space of the page, she gives us everything: her efforts to fit into a white world, the conniving she’s done to feed her addiction, the unhappiness in her marriage, her fears of what might happen if she keeps using, and her doubt that she can stop. It’s only when she realizes she could lose her children during her high-profile divorce that she decides to get help.

But recovery isn’t easy when you’ve spent your life working to ensure your “brown skin blends in with [your] white, pink, and golden surroundings,” by trying to be “twice as smart and twice as good.” Laura honed this strategy while growing up with her abusive stepfather, Kenny. To survive his torment, she learned to “hide in plain sight” and “give away nothing” that would reveal her weaknesses. For much of her life, this worked extremely well. Despite dropping out of high school and a brief stint freebasing cocaine, she forms a successful public relations firm, marries a prominent Hollywood director, and has two beautiful children. In fact, she hides so well, she’s nominated for PTA president of her children’s exclusive private school while nursing a ten-Ambien-per-day habit.

At times, Laura hides in plain sight within her own story through the italicized interior monologue she embeds within her dexterously written chapters. When trying to score more pills, her prose portrays the “good patient” the doctor expects. “I try to keep my face composed as I search for the right answer… I fold my trembling hands on my lap out of sight and dig my nails into my palms.” But when this doesn’t work, we see past her smile. Herman, that nosy fucker, I should have known he was going to dime on me.

By revealing her shadow self and pulling no punches around her challenges, Laura explores the dichotomies addicts face. You can’t be good and jonesing for more pills. You can’t be successful and an addict. You can’t suffer and be accepted—especially if you’re Black. Her use of interior monologue to explore these dichotomies creates a window into an experience that might seem foreign to many white readers. Yet the intimacy she fosters as she carries us deeper into her world also serves as a mirror into who we are. In sharing her most private self, she forces us to confront the secret selves within us, the times when we compromise, and the emptiness that comes from hiding who we are.

I love her fresh metaphors, honesty, and grit. But sometimes I bristled at Laura’s wealth. Her recovery journey takes place in a world where doctors make house calls, you fly private to rehab, and anything can be delivered. At the height of my mother’s addiction, an empty refrigerator led to more than one “surprise” dinner at grandma’s house. Most of the other addicts I knew were trying to avoid eviction, not looking for pills in their Louboutins. Then I rewatched Chimamanda Adichie’s TEDx Talk “The Danger of a Single Story in preparation for an event I was hosting. As a young writer, all Chimamanda’s stories included scenes with snow and white characters who ate apples and drank ginger beer. At the time, she believed these details defined what a story was.

For many white readers, there’s still a single story of Blackness in America, one that’s largely based on newscasts about poverty, inferior education, violence, and lack. Laura fears these stereotypes so much, entering treatment feels like failure. “It’s official. I’m a Black drug addict mother going to rehab. I’m a cliché like a motherfucker.”

But not all clichés are visible. The lack of representation among BIPOC authors in the Quit Lit genre unwittingly reinforces a single story of recovery that’s steeped in whiteness. That’s why we need Laura’s book. Like the Cosby show of the 1980s that flipped the script on the prevailing stereotypes of what Black families looked like, Stash flips the script on Black addiction, not just by breaking through stereotypes like the destitute addict, but by revealing the unique hardships people of color face when they’re once again the only one in the room.

While watching Chimamanda’s TEDx Talk, I realized I had inherited a single story of what constitutes legitimate suffering. In my rustbelt hometown, we believed only the downtrodden truly suffered. As my education and wealth increased, I often dismissed my problems because they didn’t compare to what I’d grown up with. My love for Laura’s redemption story and the quality of her writing forced me to reckon with that viewpoint, and the toll it has taken. For a long time, my addiction, which came with a withdrawal as wicked as Laura describes, didn’t feel real, because it didn’t live up to my internalized expectations.

Chimamanda says that “When we reject the single story… we regain a kind of paradise.” In accepting the legitimacy of Laura’s suffering and the miracle of her sobriety, I began to appreciate the gift of my own recovery. It’s one of the many reasons I’m grateful for her book.

Source: https://hippocampusmagazine.com/2023/04/review-stash-my-life-in-hiding-by-laura-cathcart-robbins/