Cleaning Up by Tania Glyde

This is a rather grim book about Tania Glyde’s battle addiction to alcohol. Grim, because Tania relates a great deal about her troubled relationships with her parents and her ‘friends’. Her most poisonous friend is the bottle, although she does later progress to hard drugs. Indeed, once Tania gives up alcohol after a troubled 23-year relationship, she then turns to smoking, so she quite evidently has quite an addictive personality. As well as being autobiographical, the book also provides a journalistic overview of Britain’s current problems with booze. Yet Tania is a rather extreme case of the young middle class drinker, who goes far beyond consuming the stereotypical bottle of Chardonnay a night. Since Tania’s experience is so extreme, I’m not sure how useful this book would be to dissuade any binge drinkers you might come across in, say, your own family or circle of friends. Then again, as Tania writes in the book, heavy drinkers don’t think that they themselves have a problem, and convince themselves that they do not fit the profile of true alcoholics. Everyone around the younger Tania in the book also seems to have a lot of disposable income to splurge on drink and drugs, as she appears to have a higher middle class background, so her experiences are far from being universal. Given that Tania seemed to be so miserable throughout all these experiences, it is very hard to emphasise with her travails, largely because there are just so many of them. Even when she becomes a published author, she’s still wretched. Although a recent report stated that people who work in the media have a tendency to drink excessively, I think this depends on what part of the media you work in – certainly, most people working in publishing don’t earn enough to binge drink every night. So I didn’t really identify with Tania whenever she embarked on an excessive bout of drinking prior to performing at spoken word events (maybe I’ve been going to the wrong ones!). Tania’s defence of astrology also seems a bit questionable, but I guess any prop that helps someone give up drinking is good. Tania is on far safer ground when depicting this country’s ineffective response to the treatment of mental illness, although it’s not a surprise that she also ends up having problems with prescription drugs. So, in essence, I didn’t particularly like this book, but it’s possible that it may help someone out there.

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