No Lost Causes Club: An Honest Guide to Recovery, and How to Find Your Way Through It

Brutally honest, darkly funny, and deeply empathetic, No Lost Causes Club is a guide to the process of sobering up when it feels like the party's just getting started, from the voice of the popular Instagram @brutalrecovery.

When she was told that her life expectancy could be as low as twenty-five if she did not stop drinking, Lauren McQuistin felt absolutely nothing--then despair and disbelief. How was she here? Surely, sobriety was for middle-aged divorcées who'd lost everything, not young, struggling singers who didn't have anything to lose in the first place? Besides, when alcohol is the only medicine that makes the world feel bearable, how can you possibly stop taking it?

Six years later, Lauren has found her way to an intricate answer. Entwining practical, empathetic suggestions with intimate memoir, No Lost Causes Club is an intrinsically vulnerable and brutally honest exploration of what it looks like to live a full life after getting clean. From delving into the social complexities that often leave people hopelessly dependent on alcohol to centering the struggles of those newly navigating sobriety, this book is a soothing balm for anyone wondering how to carve out a beautiful life in a world that never made sense before.

Lauren McQuistin is a London-based Scottish musician and writer. No Lost Causes Club is based on her multiple years of sobriety and her Instagram account @brutalrecovery. There she creates content for recovering humans looking for identification, and a message with equal parts humor and hope. Lauren was a professional opera singer, winning the district round of the Metropolitan National Opera Competition three times. She uses her experience as a musician to teach trauma-informed musicianship and has been featured in the Journal of Singing for her research on trauma's impact on the voice.