AUDIO – AND WROTE A NEW BOOK –
Mar. 11, 2026 – Toronto author Jowita Bydlowska told the world how she got sober in her 2013 bestselling memoir Drunk Mom.
What she didn’t expect was that her next book would chronicle her relapse in the years that followed. In Unshaming: A Memoir of Recovery, Relapse and What Comes After, Bydlowska confronts … confronts the shame of relapsing after becoming, as she puts it, the “poster girl for sobriety.”
The book opens with her regaining consciousness after a bike accident on the Toronto Island boardwalk in the summer of 2020.
She says she lied to doctors about how it happened, leaving out that she had been drinking, because she worried she wouldn’t receive the same care as she would if it was an “innocent accident.”
“I also believed myself to be someone who was publicly sober because of my memoir,” Bydlowska told The Current’s Matt Galloway.
