I'm Just Happy to Be Here

January 8, 2018
Renegade Mothering blog creator Hanchett offers a startling account of her struggles with alcohol and drug addiction in this raw and riveting memoir. Pregnant at 21, Hanchett married the father of her child, a 19-year-old slaughterhouse worker, and the two settled into his parents’ ranch outside Davis, Calif. Hanchett, raised (for a time) as a Mormon, didn’t do well with the church’s rules and regulations; she was bored with life as a stay-at-home mother and suffered from postpartum depression. She couldn’t shake her alcohol problem, despite seeking help, and she and her husband eventually became addicted to cocaine. Hanchett intersperses her account of these dark times with humor, calling out “Type II” moms who drink kale smoothies out of mason jars, or “Type III” PTA moms, around whom she can’t “drop the F-bomb.”After settling her kids with her divorced mother, the author briefly left her partner and moved into a trailer with another addict, eventually winding up in the hospital following a near-fatal overdose. Relentlessly battling her addiction, the author called on her love of family, as well as the sage advice of an “ex–gutter drunk” she serendipitously encountered outside a meeting hall. Readers will cheer Hanchett toward her triumphant recovery. Agent: Richard Abate, 3 Arts Entertainment.

February 15, 2018
A popular blogger's tragicomic account of how early motherhood and marriage propelled her into a cycle of drug and alcohol addiction from which she narrowly escaped.Hanchett, the creator of the Renegade Mothering blog, was a senior in college when she discovered that she was pregnant by Mac, a 19-year-old rancher's son she had been dating for three months. Feeling she had let down a family that believed she would "do something impressive in life," the author gave birth to a baby girl, married Mac, and settled into uneasy domesticity, which she made more manageable by "remain[ing] drunk about 40 percent of my waking hours." Eventually diagnosed with postpartum depression, she tried to ease the tedium and isolation of stay-at-home life by taking a job as a receptionist. Instead, she found herself drinking more heavily and fighting with Mac, who drank in codependent solidarity with her. She left Mac and then returned and became pregnant again, vowing to make her family life work. Instead, she and Mac continued drinking and doing drugs together. After a psychiatrist diagnosed her with borderline personality disorder, Hanchett began what would become an ongoing search for a "rehab that would cure me." But she found no relief. Her clinic stays became islands of temporary sobriety in a life that seemed to become increasingly dedicated to self-destruction. Her body and marriage on the verge of irrevocable collapse, the author unexpectedly found salvation in the counsel of a fellow recovering alcoholic she named "Good News Jack." His brutal honesty forced Hanchett to realize that in order to rebuild her life, she had to let go of reason and put her faith in "the pulse holding the stars...[and] the thing that makes me alive beyond breath." By turns painful and funny, the book explores the pressures of modern motherhood while chronicling one woman's journey toward acceptance of her own limitations and imperfections.A searingly candid memoir.

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