John Maytham interviewed journalist and author Rebecca Davis recently about her latest book titled Self-Helpless: A Cynic’s Search for Sanity.

Everywhere she looked, the world was in poor shape. And because she’d quit drinking, she no longer had the comfort blanket of alcohol to tamp down her anxiety. How did sober people stay sane?

Click on the link above for more about the book!

Davis is an award-winning journalist whose writing appears in The Daily Maverick and other South African publications. Her first book, a critically acclaimed collection of humorous essays titled Best White (And Other Anxious Delusions), was published in 2015.

‘So I quit drinking,’ Davis says, ‘and it was only in the wake of stopping to consume alcohol in excess weekly that I realised the degree to which many of us use alcohol as an existential crutch.

‘Maybe that’s stating the obvious, but until you cut alcohol out of your life, I think you do not fully apprehend the extent to which you are allowing alcohol to tamp down many of the niggling questions that otherwise plague people at night.’

Davis says she found herself with ‘vast swathes of leisure time’ that she had to fill, and started looking for other ways to find meaning in life.

Listen to the interview: 

Categories Non-fiction South Africa

Tags Interviews John Maytham Pan Macmillan SA Podcasts Rebecca Davis Self-Helpless Soundcloud