A Thousand Wasted Sundays (Victoria Vanstone, Pantera)

Since quitting alcohol in 2018, Queensland-based writer Victoria Vanstone has been sharing sobriety advice as a blogger and as co-host of the Sober Awkward podcast. Now, in her memoir, A Thousand Wasted Sundays, Vanstone reveals a detailed account of her personal relationship with alcohol. She structures the book around two timelines. One part charts with fearless honesty the formative experiences that shaped her drinking behaviour (family culture, teenage raves, expat drinking experiences). The other part zooms in on the period beginning in Vanstone’s mid-30s, when pregnancy became the catalyst for her sober journey. It’s a storied life, recounted here in Vanstone’s trademark style: slangy, conversational, and above all, funny. Never one to shy away from the bodily indignities of childbirth, hangovers, or travel misadventures, her writing is most colourfully inventive when most crude. The only moment when her approach gave me pause was in two short sections of dialogue, when Vanstone attempts to convey a language barrier by imitating non-fluent English—moments that perhaps could have benefited from the deep self-reflectiveness she shows elsewhere in the book. With her knack for finding the humour without minimising her hard-fought struggle or the moments of real anguish and insight, Vanstone has created a wise and witty guide for anyone on a similar path. The book will also appeal to fans of memoirs that tackle heavy topics with a light touch, such as Jennette McCurdy’s I’m Glad My Mom Died, or Adam Kay’s This Is Going to Hurt.

Books+Publishing reviewer: Megan Koch is a writer and bookseller based in Adelaide. Books+Publishing is Australia’s number-one source of pre-publication book reviews.

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