Hi, you.

I’m Holly Whitaker, a writer, artist, cultural critic, researcher, teacher, and builder of strange little worlds for people who don’t fit very well into the worlds they’ve been given.

I wrote the New York Times bestseller Quit Like a Woman (Dial Press/RH), the guide 30 Days to a New Relationship with Alcohol (Audible), write Recovering on Substack, and run Baby Steps, a live online workspace for women in transition. I am the co-author of the forthcoming How To Be Lost deck (Chronicle) and How to Relapse (Tin House/Zando).

Most of my life has been one long project of finding better language and structures for things that didn’t fit the available ones. My work moves through addiction, recovery, identity, family systems, neurodivergence, spirituality, culture, power, and the strange machinery by which people learn who they are.

I am darkly and inappropriately funny; intense; aesthetically obsessive: painfully curious; combustible; and unusually interested in what gets erased when we tell simplified stories about human beings. I tend to follow questions much farther than is reasonable, which is putting it lightly.

Other things about me: I live in the country I am an awkward introvert who loves planting pollinator gardens, organizing drawers, and talking on the phone. I’m neurodivergent (ADHD, sensory processing differences), live with CPTSD, am perimenopausal, and in long term recovery. My favorite things are gardening, saving things to buy on The RealReal, playing cards, reading, reggae, watching TV, jumping in streams, and doing nothing with other people who are also doing nothing.

I may not know you, but I care about you. You are welcome here.