A Clean Mess
A Memoir of Sobriety After a Lifetime of Being Numb
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4.8 • 5 Ratings
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
The bestselling author of High Achiever chronicles life after addiction—the raw, the dark, and the hilarious—from setting out with nothing but a backpack to discovering her marriage was built on a shakier foundation than she’d ever imagined to staying sober when life fell apart.
“Tiffany Jenkins illustrates that recovery is not just about sobriety, but about learning to live and feel again. Her compelling story is a testament to the power of resilience, humor, and hope.”—Sarah Levy, author of Drinking Games
A Clean Mess opens with the moment that changed everything. Tiffany is about to go on stage when she receives an odd message from her husband: “Hey Babe, some of the guys here are making some stupid decisions. Not me. But I just wanted to let you know in case you heard it from some of the other wives.” By the end of the night, Tiffany knew her life would never be the same.
This wasn’t the first time she had to start over. After the opioid addiction and jail sentence that she chronicled in her bestselling memoir, High Achiever, Tiffany was ready for a fresh start. A chance to try life again, this time without drugs coursing through her veins. In A Clean Mess, she takes us back to those early days of recovery, and the whirlwind that she entered the moment she was out of prison. In just two years, she went from inmate to married and sober mom of three.
Told with humor and honesty, A Clean Mess is Tiffany Jenkins’s story of how she learned to live and feel for the first time without numbing herself with drugs—and how she discovered inner reserves of strength she didn’t know she had. From her tentative first days of sobriety, to seeing two pink lines on a pregnancy test weeks later, to navigating anxiety, a new marriage, and motherhood at the same time, to surviving betrayal and divorce, Jenkins shows how she got through it all when her crutches and Band-Aids were taken away from her. An inspiring memoir that reads like fiction, A Clean Mess is a book that will buoy anyone seeking a life raft in hard times.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
The day-to-day difficulties of life are a given but, as Tiffany Jenkins details in her raw and funny memoir, the level of hard goes up exponentially when staying sober is the goal. Picking up her life after addiction landed her in jail, she rushed into getting married and starting a family, which worked fine until her husband’s own sobriety backslid. The subsequent reexamination of her choices, shared in a painfully honest fashion, revealed cracks in the life she had built during recovery. Her struggle to come to terms with the realities of her marriage hits a vein so deeply personal that it’s like watching a good friend flounder through a rough patch. That Jenkins can find humor in the agonizing bouts of self-realization is an extraordinary gift. Even though her road to recovery was filled with potholes, A Clean Mess inspirationally demonstrates how Jenkins navigated it without breaking.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Jenkins takes readers on a rollicking ride-along through her addiction and recovery in the moving and darkly comic follow-up to High Achiever. In 2013, after Jenkins completed stints in jail and rehab for stealing to pay for drugs, she joined a halfway house, found work in her recovery program, and started serving probation. Then, in rapid succession, she met her husband, had a child, and started raising a family. Suddenly stable and sober, Jenkins sought help from a therapist after her husband broke his own sobriety. Their sessions helped Jenkins understand her addictions as covers for feelings of inadequacy and anxiety—particularly related to fears that she and her husband weren't compatible. As Jenkins grappled with the possibility of ending her marriage, her father was diagnosed with terminal cancer, throwing her life further out of whack. Jenkins's raw reflections have the rueful quality of diary entries ("During the years I should have been learning to save money, file taxes, and pay bills, I was stuck on a train to nowhere"). Throughout, she avoids facile empowerment messages while still providing hope for those lingering near rock bottom. This inspires.
