We opened this one up to everybody. Members, readers, the sober curious, the person who found us through a Brad Pitt comment section. This is what a Wednesday morning BACKSTAGE looks like, and Suzanne Warye was the perfect guest to show it off.
Suzanne is the author of The Sober Shift, host of The Sober Mom Life podcast, and the woman who once spent a full five minutes with me on the podcast talking about ALF. On Sept. 16 she came BACKSTAGE to talk about the paperback relaunch of her book. We got there eventually. First we had to get through sticker books, Hypercolor shirts, a 99-cent Esprit tote and the Brad Pitt of it all.
The paperback drops September 29 (with confetti and stars)
The Sober Shift comes out in paperback Sept. 29, 2026. Same book, new cover. Her publisher added confetti and stars to the front, “because it’s a party.”
The stars are a full-circle moment. Four and a half years ago Suzanne built the first Sober Mom Life podcast art in Canva by slapping gold stars around her face. Now there are stars on her book.
Signed paperback copies ship from The Book Stall, her independent bookstore in Winnetka, Illinois, on release day. The hardcover, ebook and audiobook are already out, and she narrated the audiobook herself. More on that below.
Why Gen X is buying back its childhood
I have a $75 sticker book. Suzanne has a puzzle book. Neither of us is sorry.
Every Gen X woman in the room had a version of the same story. LEGO sets. Charm necklaces. The Esprit reboot at Costco. Lisa Frank. Trapper Keepers. I found an original Esprit tote at Goodwill for 99 cents (it goes for about $300 on eBay, and no, it is not for sale).
Suzanne’s read on it is the smartest thing anyone said all hour. “Our generation went from the Challenger explosion as kids to 9/11 right out of college, and the outside world has not calmed down since. Going back to what you loved before you cared what anyone thought is not regression. It is repair.”
“Our generation went from the Challenger explosion as kids to 9/11 right out of college, and the outside world has not calmed down since. Going back to what you loved before you cared what anyone thought is not regression. It is repair.”
“13, 14-year-old me was onto something,” she said. “She wasn’t asking permission. There’s something so healing, for my sobriety, about being able to say: I’m not asking permission, or what you think about how I quit drinking. I’m just over here puzzling and watching ALF reruns.”
Her puzzle method, for the record: finish the 1,000-piece puzzle, flip it, duct tape the back, slide it into a giant puzzle book. If it falls apart in the flip, you do it again another day. That is the whole philosophy.
The gift you never got
I asked the room what they wanted for Christmas and never opened. Guess jeans (me, three Christmases running). Girbaud jeans and a Hypercolor shirt that lasted five minutes before she and her brother microwaved it (Suzanne). The Snoopy Sno-Cone Machine, replaced by a well-meaning dad with a hand-crank ice crusher (Amy). Head-to-toe Oilily (Izzy, who got neon instead and made peace with it).
If you are 45 to 60 and sober, you already know why this question hits. You finally have the money, the taste and the clear head to go get the thing. So we do.
Sobriety on screen, and the alcohol nobody needed
Here is what I believe: we are archiving, in real time, the evolution of modern sobriety. When I got sober in 2006 there were three books at Barnes & Noble and no podcasts. Twenty years later, celebrities the tabloids used to mock are using their platforms for good, and the characters on our screens are starting to look like the actual population.
The Lincoln Lawyer is not a show about recovery, but Mickey Haller is sober and sometimes goes to a meeting. Running Point has so many addiction storylines written correctly that I would bet money someone in that writers’ room is sober. Miranda’s arc in And Just Like That got introduced and then abandoned, which Suzanne called out: “It could have been such a cool through-line, and they just plopped it in.”
Suzanne’s bigger point is about the alcohol that does nothing. “Since becoming sober, I notice how much alcohol is in novels, and it doesn’t have to be. They could be drinking coffee. It doesn’t move the story forward. If there’s no point in them drinking, just don’t have them drink.”
Brad Pitt was hotter sober. Suzanne stands by it.
A few weeks ago Suzanne posted that Brad Pitt was hotter when he was sober. The internet lost its mind. She has been creating content since 2014 and has been called every name in the book, so the trolling did not rattle her. What surprised her was that this was the post that did it.
What people actually did not like, she thinks, was the second half: that Pitt seems to have spent his sobriety treating drinking as a privilege he gave up, rather than treating sobriety as the privilege. His own words from 2019 back her up. He said he had taken drinking as far as he could take it and lost his drinking privileges.
She also connected the dots most people skipped. The same news cycle brought an Esquire piece glamorizing hangovers, and Suzanne’s take is blunt: that is Big Alcohol at work, it just does not look like it. Alcohol sales are declining. That is in every business headline. “Big alcohol isn’t gonna go down without a fight. It’s not going to be very obvious that big alcohol is the driver behind things.”
Her position on moderation as a goal is the throughline of her whole platform: she thinks it is dangerous, and she said so. My position, for the record, is that I wrote a whole article in the spring about how good his skin looked in F1. Sobriety looks good. We will save him a seat.
“That’s just your algorithm, sweetheart”
Suzanne quit drinking in January 2020, right before the pandemic, when there were a handful of quit lit books and almost no sober podcasts. People now tell her they want to start a sober podcast or Instagram but there are already too many.
Her answer: your voice has not been out there yet. “We need all the voices we can get. No one’s gonna be able to do it like you can.”
Mine: do not assume it has all been covered. That is just your algorithm, sweetheart. Most of the world is not talking about sobriety at all. And when you do show up, tell us what you are doing to stay alive and thrive. Nobody asked you to dog the programs you do not like.
Writing a book is 10 percent writing
Suzanne narrated her own audiobook, eight and a half hours in her closet, after a lifetime of refusing to read out loud in class. Her editor told her that if she cried on the chapter about her dad, she should keep going, because the reader needs to hear it. You can.
Her advice for anyone writing a personal book: keep going. “Writing is 10 percent writing and 90 percent doubting that you can write.” And then the line I am putting on a bookmark: “I don’t black out from drinking anymore, but I black out from writing.”
What’s next for Suzanne
A smaller paperback tour, Denver and Nashville, the two cities she missed last year. Her Mountain Shadows retreat in Scottsdale Oct. 22 to 25 is sold out; the February Mexico retreat waitlist opens in early November. Her five-year plan is that she does not have one. “I’m a build-the-airplane-while-I’m-flying-it kind of person. If I planned five years out, I’d be doing myself a disservice.”
Get the book, come Backstage
- The Sober Shift in paperback, out Sept. 29 on Amazon
- Signed copies from The Book Stall in Winnetka Pre-order a signed and personalized paperback copy here. *Please note, the because The Sober Shift doesn’t publish until September 29, attendees won’t be able to receive their books before the event—preorders will ship on or shortly after the release date.
- The Sober Mom Life podcast
- Watch the full conversation on YouTube
This episode was open to everyone. Most of them are not. If you want in on the next one, BACKSTAGE is where we do this every month with authors, experts and the occasional bedazzled Mickey. Join BACKSTAGE
THE SOBER CURATOR PODCAST: From Blackouts to Boundaries: Suzanne Warye’s Sober Shift for Moms
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