As a teenager in Smithers, B.C., Susan Juby – author of the popular Alice MacLeod series for teens – was not exactly on the road to success. She was an imaginative kid who loved to write stories, but she was socially awkward and didn’t have many friends. In the opening chapter of Nice Recovery, her memoir of teenage alcoholism (due this month from Viking Canada), she lays partial blame for her former friendlessness on the likes of Trixie Belden and Anne Shirley.

“Books misled me about a few things,” Juby writes. “In books and in my family, having a good vocabulary was crucially important. When I went to school, it turned out to be a serious liability.” On her first day of high school, fed up with being the least popular student, she lined her eyes, shortened her words, and joined the tight-jean, high-hair set in the smoking section. Though she finally had friends and the attentions of boys, she now faced a whole new set of problems.

By the time she was 14, Juby was a champion binge drinker, more often seen projectile vomiting at metal shows than showing up to English classes. Nice Recovery, which she wrote as a sort of cautionary tale, chronicles her journey to sobriety at the ripe old age of 20. The memoir’s final section, “And This Is Now,” is devoted to interviews with recovered addicts of all stripes, and includes advice for those looking to navigate a route out of alcoholism. 

According to Juby, the idea for the memoir came out of conversations with her readers, who’ve surprised her with their interest in her personal life. In public appearances, she would drop hints about her wild-child past and people would often ask, “Why don’t you tell that story?” Originally, she conceived of the book as a tongue-in-cheek What to Expect When You’re Recovering, but she gradually came to see the value of a more forthright work. “I know this sounds cheesy, but I wanted to honour where I came from.”

Though she acknowledges that today’s young addicts face different cultural circumstances and might be into harder drugs than alcohol, she thinks the book should still apply. At bottom, she says, all addiction is the same. “If you set it really honestly and specifically, then the story’s going to have some resonance, even if it’s not somebody else’s frame of reference.”

Unlike many addiction memoirs, Nice Recovery isn’t a hot mess tell-all. Like Juby herself, it’s honest and funny, but avoids over-sharing. By the end, readers feel they know all about her addiction, but not all about her. “I could have gone into a lot more detail, [but] I wasn’t out to give anyone sick thrills,” she says. “Editors … in the U.S.  have said things like, ‘There’s … not enough nastiness. Where are the needles? Did she at least have sex with the whole hockey team?’ … Even if I did have sex with the whole hockey team, I’m just not putting it down there.”

Luckily for Juby, Canadian editors weren’t put off by the lack of salaciousness. In fact, she was wooed away from her usual publisher, HarperCollins Canada, by Viking Canada, due to its enthusiasm for the project. (Juby will resume her relationship with HarperCollins with her first work of adult fiction, Republic of Dirt, due in fall 2010. It’s a novel about rural life, an homage to Stella Gibbons’s Cold Comfort Farm, which Juby considers one of the greatest comic novels of all time.)

Another reason for downplaying the scandal-sheet stuff, according to Juby, is that so many memoirs about alcoholism end up glamorizing addiction. “The reality is, if you keep romancing that, you’re never going to get better.”

In the book’s preface, Juby makes it clear that part of her aim was to reclaim the addiction memoir from the likes of James Frey and his weeping-on-the-webcam predecessors. “Fabulists have given the genre a bad name,” she says, adding that “addicts and alcoholics are notorious fabricators.” Accordingly, she takes pains to point out in her introduction that though her memory of timelines and specifics may sometimes be inaccurate, she’s done “the best [she] can with the tattered remnants of [her] abused memory.” In conversation with Q&Q, she qualifies that statement by adding that “there are no huge made-up things, but it’s not a take-it-to-the-bank recollection.”

Though the book is being marketed to young adult readers, Juby says she hopes it will appeal to anyone interested in addiction issues, specifically “anyone having trouble with substance abuse, or parents who have kids with substance abuse issues.” If you’re drawn to Juby’s work because she’s more Liz Lemon than Elizabeth Wurtzel, however, rest assured she hasn’t abandoned her sense of humour. As she sees it, Nice Recovery is ultimately just like all of her other books: an uneasy mixture of “the dark and the light.”