"Withdrawal" begins with a vodka bottle on the kitchen table of a family of three on a Monday afternoon—and the question of how it got there. Did the narrator seriously forget it while his wife and child were at the playground? The novel opens with a writer who drinks to be able to write, think, and feel. Eventually, he drinks simply to drink, until the point where the question becomes: drink and die, or stop and live? He decides to check himself into a clinic. "Withdrawal" is a brutally honest novel; it deals with the complicated logistics of addiction, with betraying the people who matter most, with betraying oneself. And it tells, full of hope, of the path out of the hell of addiction, back to a life worth living, even sober.