In 2013, Jowita Bydlowska released her groundbreaking memoir Drunk Mom, an unflinching account of how new motherhood sparked her full-blown return to alcoholism. The book was a vital addition to literature on the topic of addiction, and the recipient of both enthusiastic praise and inappropriately personal derision. Ultimately Bydlowska became, in her words, “the poster girl for sobriety,” the happy ending of a harrowing tale.

But the problem with happy endings is that they don’t always hold, and not long after Bydlowska became “the poster girl for sobriety who’s slinking in alleys, my hand getting all sweaty around the smooth shape of a mickey.”

Bydlowska’s latest memoir, Unshaming: A Memoir of Recovery, Relapse, and What Comes After, opens with her relapse during the early days of the pandemic, and how she was severely injured after getting into a bike accident while intoxicated. “A nice addiction story allows a bit of room for a relapse, but a repeated relapse is a lot less cute,” she writes. The details of Bydlowska’s story are unsettling: a shattered clavicle, a damaged cheekbone, the necessity of expensive dental surgery she can’t afford.

“Every night I check the GoFundMe page, but as money accumulates the rising amount parallels the guilt I feel,” she writes. “I didn’t lie about my injuries but I whitewashed my dirty story. In it, I’m a victim of terrible luck and a few bad decisions but none of them corrupt, which is how we see drinking too much—as a moral failing.”

In recounting these experiences and thoughtfully reflecting on them, Bydlowska articulates not only the why of her drinking, but also the nature of shame itself. By taking us through that accident on Toronto Island, then on a “disastrous visit” to Poland, followed by the troubled launch of her 2022 novel Possessed, and then back to Poland for a very different kind of trip, she explores where shame comes from, who is susceptible to it, and how it can be both a trigger and a paradoxical cure. Bydlowska also asks whether or not its burden has lessened due to shifting generational and cultural attitudes, referring back to the media-complicit public shaming around Drunk Mom more than a decade earlier.

“That’s how it is living with Shame—it makes you feel as if you’re pretending to be someone you’re not,” she writes. “This constant anxiety about being found out is a vicious emotional drain, and it contributes to a cycle of self-doubt, self-criticism, and diminished self-esteem.”

Unshaming at times tests the bounds of a reader’s comfort, but it feels like that’s precisely the point. If shame is linked to judgment, if it makes us live in fear of disbelief and disgust, the reader reserving theirs is the very thing that dismantles shame’s silencing and destructive force. Bydlowska has a distinctive narrative voice and she powerfully lays bare her personal experience with – and feelings around – alcohol, and the shame of being a “chronic relapser,” and in doing so offers healing, freedom, and empathy to those who have grappled with these kinds of feelings themselves – addiction-related or otherwise.

“Going public was a complicated triumph, one that brought on anxiety and more trauma,” she writes. “But it’s also shown me how powerful the simple act of speaking up is.”