Coulter’s essays are short, smart, and with the heart that the (mostly male) addiction stories seem to miss. You know, the sad, serious boys, the John Barleycorn dreamers, or those lost souls who tell of rock bottom and redemption ... Coulter uses formal experimentation to write about recovery standards that could become cliché in a lesser writer — running after quitting, a riff on a Mary Oliver poem, an account of her favorite booze over the years. Even the tale of Coulter’s journey to the first AA meeting is full of surprises ... Unlike recovery stories that require epiphanies, and come equipped with insider language and bravado, Coulter shows the slow, painful walk out of addiction and into recovery ... Coulter proves that our stories can be as complicated and powerful as we are.
Coulter...had a great but high-pressure job and a wonderful marriage—a generally enviable life. She had also been working her way up to a bottle of wine a night ... Once she quits, her abstention leaves an emotional void that she continually tries to fill, and also a social one ... The essays in this collection, her first book, are about finding her way in a life that once revolved around drinking. They simultaneously address love, sex, vulnerability, and being a woman in the world, in general. At turns heartrending and hilarious, Coulter is wonderfully conversational and never preachy as she tells her story of sobriety.
...[an] extraoardinary new collection ... rich and satisfying from beginning to end. Full of humor, heart, and intelligence, the collection intersperses longer, fully realized and multi-strand essays with short, creatively formatted pieces: lists, diary entries, quizzes, letters, and bits of advice ... Coulter is an acrobatic writer, deftly juggling mood and verbiage ... The particular flavor of this book is not drinking while being a member of the upper-middle-class ... Although sober life is the spine of this collection, there is so much more to it than commentary on sobriety. Unlike other essay collections unified by a single topic, a full and colorful illustration emerges of the personality behind this book ... it specializes in hitting both the sternum and the funny bone at once.
The first time I read Kristi Coulter’s Nothing Good Can Come From This, I am sipping from a glass — a small glass! — of rosé. I am on vacation. It is summer. Someone offered it to me, and I am very polite. Later, I’ll e-mail a friendly professional acquaintance about 'drinks!' For an exceedingly light drinker, I am startlingly like the women Coulter is talking about ... A series of meandering essays ... Most of the pieces here end with a newfound appreciation of simplicity, and while that is a revelation, it is perhaps not a revelation every time. But if the essays are not all singularly earth-shattering, they are nonetheless deeply human. Taken together, the collection is about more than sobriety. It’s a celebration of the quotidian, a love letter to the beauty of the mundane.
You want to know what happens when you drink? Kristi Coulter can tell you, because she has had to deal with glugging, glassy-eyed folks at work parties and hotel pools, at holiday events and airport lounges, all while being stone-cold sober ... 'Once the third drink starts, people start repeating themselves,' Coulter told me recently. 'They get louder. Their opinions get more emphatic. Whatever they think, they think more. They cling to that idea.' ... These are some of the things she’s learned to do since quitting drinking five years ago, a decision she writes about in her new book of essays, Nothing Good Can Come From This ... The essays are wry and smart, honest and vulnerable. She writes about struggling to fill the time she had spent drinking, and almost having an affair with a co-worker...They are not so much revealing as freeing.
In this set of joined essays, Coulter describes herself as 'a grown, multi-degreed, loved, moneyed, professionally powerful woman.' For all that, she adds, she could not control her drinking, could not time it so that she wasn’t drinking all the time; she was, as the adage has it, powerless over the wine (and whatever else was on hand). Finally summoning up willpower, she quit ... In a strong opening gambit, she describes being newly sober and working her way through a Whole Foods store choked with sale wines and through a business day in which 'meeting' too often equals 'drinks.' ... There are some winning moments throughout the narrative, but too often the notes in Coulter’s book are repetitive, and the humor is more often forced than laugh-inspiring ... A readable but minor contribution to the literature of problem drinking.
