When alcohol takes all
Blind Drunk: A Sober Look at our Boozy Culture
by Veronica Woodruff
New Westminster: Tidewater Press, 2025
$24.95 / 9781990160462
Reviewed by Ginny Ratsoy
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From Evelyn Lau’s Runaway (1989) to Jowita Bydlowska’s Drunk Mom (2013), harrowing memoirs of substance abuse have been finding a place in Canadian literature. Blind Drunk joins this sub-genre, sharing with its predecessors a spotlight on their respective writers’ responses to personal events, rather than focussing on larger historical events, as typical of earlier memoirs. This is not to say that Veronica Woodruff (or, for that matter, her predecessors) is overly emotive. Her narrative is certainly evocative, and strengthened by the interspersal of alcohol-related background information and statistics – from a history of the rise of the martini to the genesis and growth of the Mothers Against Drunk Driving movement – that add objectivity to this very personal account. As significantly, the narrator’s developing agency propels the narrative beyond a victim scenario.
When her father schooled Veronica, at 8 the eldest of three adopted children in the Sommerville family of Toronto, in proper cocktail preparation, he cemented the course of her early adult years in more ways than one. In both her personal and professional life, alcohol would remain a constant.
Veronica’s father was a corporate real estate lawyer whose career trajectory was initially rapidly upward: the family moved into successively more posh environments and the children attended more exclusive schools, to the delight of her style-conscious mother Diane and deal-maker dad Jeff.
However, signs of decline lay just below that polished surface, in the unpredictable, unstable home life facilitated by two alcoholic parents. Diane’s dinner menu could vary from the latest gourmet offerings to spray cheese and unhealthy cold cuts, and Jeff’s doting charm could turn to corrosive anger after the third martini. After Diane’s lavish 35th birthday celebration is cut short when paramedics arrive to deal with her epileptic seizure, 9-year-old Veronica consciously begins to rationally cope with the varying moods of her parents. When circumstances permit, Veronica takes increasing solace in nature – the forest behind their tony neighbourhood – an approach that also prefigures her later life’s course.
If the upward mobility of the family was rapid, the downward spiral was lightning quick. Veronica’s childhood was proving riches-to-rags, as Jeff lost various positions, relatives and friends tired of bailing out the family, beer substituted for martinis, and cheap motels and social assistance replaced social cachet.
Not surprisingly, teenaged Veronica, now in a public high school, embraced a risk-taking partying culture. Even so, as her home situation became increasingly dire, she was responsible enough to take on part-time work and seek help. With assistance from Children’s Aid, she leaves her family and gets a job as a gardener for the City of Oakville – an appropriate fit, as it helped her develop a skill set in the outdoors she worshipped. When the family with whom she was placed proved unsuitable, she temporarily returned to her parents, at that point in reasonable rental accommodations; however, that reunion is predictably short-lived as her parents sink into new depths of depravity.
After some couch surfing and other precarious housing, Veronica finds another good fit in nature: she enrols in a fish and wildlife program at a college in Lindsay, Ontario. That, combined with her summer job as a bartender, establishes a pattern she repeats when she moves to Whistler, BC, where she find work in conservation, serving, and, eventually, bartending. In Whistler, as in Lindsay, life centres on a seemingly unlikely pairing – nature and alcohol. However, skiing and other mountain activities are high risk, as is drinking – and, of course, the risk is exacerbated when the two are combined.
Even as she indulges in a risky lifestyle, Veronica continues in a variety of conservation positions that give her life meaning. Yet alcohol continues to dominate her life, especially after she accidentally runs over her beloved dog. She is only able to break a pattern her father never could – and her mother could only manage in her senior years – when she faces the fact that she needs to quit drinking, that moderation is not an option for her. Saved by self-knowledge, love, parenthood, and her beloved natural world, Veronica is in her 40s when she finally quits drinking. Personal and professional success ensues: she starts a successful company, completes a Master of Arts in leadership, teaches in a college program, and meets several athletic goals she has set for herself.
Blind Drunk is a harrowing look at the direct negative impact of alcohol on three lives – and indirectly on many more. However, Woodruff is to be commended for eschewing preachiness: she does not pontificate on the ills of drink so much as illustrate the deleterious impact a culture focused on alcohol can have on particular individuals, while drawing on research to reinforce her lived experience. A cautionary tale rather than an injunction, the memoir is also a tribute to the redemptive powers of the natural world. Furthermore, it is inspirational in its affirmation of resilience: Veronica learns well how to get back up from a fall.
Incorporating some elements of autobiography (by providing a start-to-present, chronological overview of Woodruff’s life) in a conventionally writer-focused memoir, Blind Drunk borrows from the techniques of fiction’s narrative arc to provide readers with a powerful subjective account, bolstered by relevant data, of the effects of cultural mores regarding alcohol consumption on the individual. Although at times the transitions between the research material and the main narrative could be smoother, Blind Drunk rings true – and loud and clear.
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Ginny Ratsoy is Professor Emerita at Thompson Rivers University. Her scholarly publications (co-authored and edited and co-edited books and numerous peer-reviewed articles) have focused on Canadian fiction, theatre, small cities, third-age learning, and the scholarship of teaching and learning.
She spends her retirement walking and travelling with her husband, writing, drinking near beer, and volunteering for literacy organizations and the Kamloops Adult Learners Society. Her most recent course for KALS examined literature written by women and set in the BC Interior.
[Editor’s note: Ginny has recently reviewed books by L. R. Wright, L.R. Wright, Jennifer Cooper, Sara Cassidy, Kallie George, and Bill Richardson for The British Columbia Review.]
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The British Columbia Review
Interim Editors, 2023-26: Trevor Marc Hughes (non-fiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction)
Publisher: Richard Mackie
Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an on-line book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.
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