THE WINE O’CLOCK MYTH
Lotta Dann
Allen & Unwin
REVIEWED BY ELSPETH McLEAN
Lotta Dann’s third book is a timely and well-rounded look at women and alcohol from a New Zealand perspective.
In it Dann, best known for her first book about her own drinking problem, the wonderfully titled Mrs D is Going Without, uses five themes to explore the subject.
These cover the ubiquitous place of alcohol in our society, how the drug affects bodies and minds, the liquor industry’s tactics and manipulation, why women drink and, importantly, what it is like not to drink alcohol and how you can change your habit.
She is rightly unsparing in her criticism of the alcohol industry’s view that everything would be fine if only we all knew how to drink moderately.
She says this personal responsibility and drinker-education approach ignores hundreds of thousands of people who struggle with the addictive drug and evidence that the best way to change habits is through better public policy.
Worst of all, the ‘‘rhetoric around personal responsibility serves to isolate and stigmatise people who are unable to moderate and control their intake’’.
A real strength of the book is the inclusion of stories from women about their personal relationships with alcohol, relayed in their own words and tied to the book’s themes.
Dann could have chosen to tell only the stories of those who had recognised they had a problem and dealt with it, but her decision to include women at a variety of stages in their understanding of their own drinking helps the reader understand how complex and messy relationships with alcohol can be.
As Dann says, the stories are ‘‘powerful, honest, revealing and raw’’, and ‘‘unremarkable as they are remarkable’’. They deserve wide readership from both women and men.
Elspeth McLean is an ODT columnist and former health reporter
