An Evening with Cara Benson — An Armsfull of Birds | BACKSTAGE with The Sober Curator

Cara Benson did not come to love the easy way. She crawled through New York City subway tunnels as a heroin addict, partnered with an abusive man, and waitressed in a polyester uniform at Friendly’s while sobriety closed in on her one stubborn night at a time. Then she got sober. Started walking the woods of upstate New York. Met Jon, the man who would become her great love. And after years of building a life with him, she lost him to suicide.

This book is what came next.

An Armsfull of Birds: A Personal Field Guide to Love, Loss, and Commitment is structured like nothing else in the recovery memoir space. Each chapter is named for a bird, and each bird carries a piece of Cara’s story. American Goldfinches mark the night she met Jon. Crested Caracaras score her last gasp of drinking. Common Starlings show up the moment she crashes into sobriety and into the woods. By the final chapters, she’s grieving Jon and tracking grackles, ravens, and the ruby-throated hummingbirds that visit her former-church home in the Hudson Valley.

It’s a recovery story. It’s a love story. It’s a climate memoir. It’s the kind of book that gets endorsed by Jenny Lawson AND Bill McKibben, which almost never happens.

Cara is joining BACKSTAGE for an intimate one-hour conversation. We’re going to talk about:

• The decade-plus path from heroin and alcohol to a sober life she actually wanted
• Meeting Jon, choosing commitment after addiction, and what “second chance lovers” actually means at midlife
• Surviving her partner’s suicide while staying sober
• Why she retreated into birding and nature as a way to process grief
• How writing a memoir cracked her wide open and what it taught her about telling the truth

Bring your questions. Bring your coffee. Bring tissue.

This is a closed BACKSTAGE event. Members only. RSVP to receive your Zoom link via email. The replay will live in the BACKSTAGE Replay Vault for members who cannot attend live.

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About Cara: Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, Orion, Sierra Magazine, Boston Review, and Best American Poetry. An Armsfull of Birds is published by Health Communications, Inc. and hits shelves May 19, 2026. She lives in a former church on the ancestral homelands of the Stockbridge-Munsee Band of Mohicans in upstate New York.