Welcome to Seltzer Squad, the podcast about staying sober in the city with your host, Kate Sander and Jess Valentine.

Squad, if you don't know this by now, which you probably already do, we have Laura McAwan,

finally on the pod. And we're so excited to have you here. You sent us your book. And I was like,

fucking blown away. Yeah, Kate was texting me, I can't put this down. I couldn't put it down.

Yay. I read it in like two bedtimes. Wow, that's good. I'm a slow reader. So it takes me a little longer. Yeah, so I am really excited to talk about it. But before we dive in, do you just want to

introduce yourself to our squad and tell us about all the other things that you do besides write a book?

Sure.

Yes.

My first book is coming out in January 7th.

It's called We Are the Luckiest.

But before that, for most of my career, worked in marketing and advertising.

And then I hit the wall with my drinking around 35 and I had a lot of starts and stops to get sober.

I finally got sober in 2014 and started writing on a blog that is now my website.

It was called I Fly at Night at the time.

And then I started a podcast called Home with Hollywood occur and all of that stuff kind of started to turn into another job, but a job that I really

loved. And I'd always wanted to be a writer. I'd always wanted to, you know, have my name

on a book someday or many books. At that point at 35 or 37, 38, it felt like a distant dream because who changes the course of

their life at that age and I had a daughter. And getting sober on top of all of that, which is

essentially the hardest thing. Yeah. And getting sober. But sobriety is what made it possible in the

first place, right? There was all the space all of a sudden. Yeah, time. And time and all of this creativity.

Like, writing really saved me through sobriety and helped me get so where it really did. I say that

all the time. It was like finally doing the thing that I wanted to do meant so much to me and the act of

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