From Beer to Maternity by Maggie Lamond Simone

One woman’s true life tale of beating the bottle and living to laugh about it.

 

It all started for Maggie Lamond Simone at the age of eight. Her second-grade teacher worried about a child so flippant at such a tender age. Twenty years later, as a police officer escorted a drunk Simone away from the car she had just wrecked, she asked him to drop her not at home but at the bar where her friends waited. Needless to say, he didn’t laugh.

Simone quit drinking the next day and when she finally came up for air a few years later, she was afraid she wouldn’t be funny without the alcohol. But she had a startling revelation: She wasn’t funny in the first place; the world was, and she started writing about it.

Enter: her hilarious, poignant and heartwarming new book, From Beer to Maternity.

“From Beer to Maternity covers the entire process of my growing up after sobering up,” says Simone. “From thinking men were impossible and obtuse to getting married and having children to hitting menopause, everything began getting clearer to me. People, especially women, I’ve found feel a certain sense of relief in knowing that your life can begin at any age, particularly when they’re in the beginning stages. I don’t guarantee a happy ending, necessarily, but I show them that anything’s possible - and funny.”

Growing up with an alcoholic father and an unstable childhood, Simone started drinking at sixteen and partied and drank her way through the late seventies and all of the eighties. At 29, she quit drinking and in the following six years went to graduate school, earned a black belt in karate, met and started dating the man she eventually married, had two children and began writing a weekly column in a major daily newspaper.

“All of the things I should have been doing in my twenties were done a decade later,” Simone reveals. “And the message I hope to impart? It’s ok. It doesn’t matter when you begin. Just make sure you do begin. I was lucky enough to live to tell my tale, and to recover. But most importantly to still be able to laugh.”

Through humor and the occasional dose of tears, From Beer to Maternity touches candidly on:

Alcoholism – quitting the bottle and still finding the humor in life
The physicality and emotionality of being a woman
The skills of parentingor in some cases the lack thereof
The process of growing up no matter what age you begin
The 4 M’s: men, marriage, motherhood and menopause

“Fifteen years and countless words later,” Simone adds, "I've addressed dating, marriage, pregnancy, motherhood and menopause with what I hope is a caustic wit and a healthy disrespect for perfection. I want people to know it is ok to laugh at themselves and that perfection is like a dog chasing a car – the fun is in the pursuit.”

Maggie Lamond Simone is a national award-winning columnist and author. Her humor and observational essays have appeared for seven years in Family Times, an award-winning monthly parenting magazine and for nine years in The Advertiser, a weekly newspaper. Her columns also appeared in the Sunday edition of the Syracuse Herald American (circ. 250,000) from 1995 through 2001. Her essays are included in Chicken Soup for the Soul: My Resolution (2008), Chicken Soup for the New Mom’s Soul (2007), and Chicken Soup for the Soul in Menopause (2007).

From Beer to Maternity can be purchased through any major bookseller.

Website: www.MaggieLamondSimone.com