Read an excerpt from our upcoming book THE CRACKER FACTORY 2: WELCOME TO WOMEN'S GROUP on Twitter:
Welcome 2 Women’s Group!
Follow the women's group meeting, and read the excerpt,
on this Twitter List:
Have you, friends, or family suffered from alcoholism?
Take a seat and tweet... everyone is welcome 2 women’s group.
* * *
PROLOGUE of THE CRACKER FACTORY 2: WELCOME TO WOMEN’S GROUP from author Joyce Rebeta-Burditt
I’d like to welcome you to the Tuesday Night Women’s Group. But first I need to tell you how I got here!
The Cracker Factory was an autobiographical novel that told my story of alcoholism and finding sobriety. In the novel, Cassie Barrett was me, and Charlie was my husband, George.
Here’s a little background, in case you haven’t met Cassie yet…
Cassie is a twenty-something housewife, married at eighteen, three times a mom by twenty-two. Having gone straight from her father’s house yippie-skippy to her husband’s house, she’d lost something in the quick daughter-to-wife transition. Herself.
Overwhelmed by her responsibilities and frightened by her increasing anger and frustration, she’d taken to sipping, then nipping from the one-drink-before-dinner scotch until occa-sional blackouts and empty bottles hidden in the laundry hamper finally made her admit to herself that she might have a drinking problem.
Her husband thought she was too young to have a drinking problem. All the drunks he knew were over forty. Her mother advised her to learn to drink like a lady “but don’t quit because you’ll be no fun at parties.”
Cassie, who was becoming sicker and sicker, thought she might die from drinking before she was old enough.
With nowhere to turn, and in those days no treatment programs for alcoholism, Cassie Barrett had only one option. She signed herself into a pyschiatric ward she lovingly deemed “The Cracker Factory.”
In this book, The Cracker Factory 2: Welcome to Women’s Group, we pick up where The Cracker Factory left off. Cassie has embraced Alcoholics Anonymous and is a long-time member of a Women’s AA Group. Cassie and her fellow AA members help each other to live sober the lives that had become unmanageable while they were drinking. The issues they discuss—the husbands, lovers, kids, careers and emotions that sometimes threaten to go out of control—are the heartaches, triumphs and love stories shared by women everywhere, not only by those with a drinking problem.
What else, besides staying sober, has Cassie been doing for forty-plus years? I’d like to tell you that my alter ego formulated a brilliant plan and then followed it meticulously. But, I had no plan. Things happened, followed by other things, leaving me in a constant state of astonishment.
First surprise: The Cracker Factory became a bestseller, and it was made into an ABC-TV movie starring Natalie Wood! Then, things really started happening. The Eighties, Nineties, and up to the present have been a whirlwind of the Unplanned Life which could be subtitled “Little Alice from Cleveland Falls Down the Rabbit Hole and Lands in Wonderland (Hollywood).”
In alternating memoir chapters of The Cracker Factory 2, I’ll take you with me through years of Hollywood life as a network executive, writer, producer, and boggle-eyed witness to celebrities, chauvinism, big producers, studios, epidemic cocaine use, and actors (both sweet and sour), all seen through my (and Cassie’s) unrelentingly sober eyes.
Opposite these memoir chapters, Women’s Group invites you to sit at the table, pick up a script and play a part along with Cassie and her friends.
Why stay sober? Because sober is better. Richer. More fun. Always. Relax. Listen in. Women’s Group might just help you, too.
* * *
