How to Stop Screwing Up: Twelve Steps to a Real Life and a Pretty Good Time

by Martha Woodroof

Martha Woodroof is an award-winning broadcast reporter whose stories are heard on National Public Radio and Marketplace. How to Stop Screwing Up is her account of how she used the Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous not just to deal with her addictions, but to stop screwing her life up in many other ways as well. Woodroof cheerfully lays out the Twelve Steps (long the hallowed turf of those recovering from addictions) as a workable guide for anyone who wishes to replace a bad habit with a good one. A masterful storyteller, Woodroof weaves personal anecdotes--from wacky to worrisome to whimsical--among practical suggestions for working each step. Perhaps most refreshing, How to Stop Screwing Up encourages readers to work the steps privately and at their own pace, without any reliance on public disclosure or the dogma of religion. Woodroof's unique spiritual connection with her own Higher Power, whom she's dubbed "Alice," has filled an enormous void in her own life, and she encourages readers to solidify such a relationship in their own personally comfortable way. How to Stop Screwing Up fuses humor with humility, drawing on popular culture, Popeye and poetry to create a comfortable, even cozy, context for some startling insights delivered by a very fresh voice.

Genres: Self Help

174 pages, Paperback

First published February 26, 2007

About the author

Author of SMALL BLESSINGS, on sale 8/12/14, MARTHA WOODROOF was born in the South, went to boarding school and college in New England, ran away to Texas for a while, then fetched up in Virginia. She has written for NPR, npr.org, Marketplace and Weekend America, and for the Virginia Foundation for Humanities Radio Feature Bureau. Her print essays have appeared in such newspapers as the New York Times, The Washington Post, and the San Francisco Chronicle. Small Blessings is her debut novel. She lives with her husband in the Shenandoah Valley. Their closest neighbors are cows.

Reviews

[Nancy · Rating 1 out of 5]

This was sitting on the "new books" shelf at the library and the title jumped out at me. Since I had often wondered if the 12 step program of AA would apply to other mistakes people make, (and not being familiar with the 12 step program) I though this would be an interesting read. Well... not so much. The examples from the writer's point of view and the exercises she put there don't have enough punch to make it interesting or even that informative. I think reading an autobiography of someone who went through the process would be more interesting and then I could have drawn my own conclusions.

[Betty Kaye]

Not what I thought it would be.