Girl Walks Out of a Bar A Memoir

Lisa Smith was a bright, young lawyer at a prestigious firm in NYC in the early nineties when alcoholism started to take over her life. What was once a way of escaping her insecurity and negativity became a means of coping with the anxiety and stress of an impossible workload.  Girl Walks Out of a Bar is Smith's darkly comic and wrenchingly honest story of her formative years, the decade of alcohol and drug abuse, divorce, and her road to recovery. Smith describes how her spiraling circumstances conspired with her predisposition to depression and self-medication, nurturing an environment ripe for addiction to flourish. Girl Walks Out of a Bar is a candid portrait of alcoholism through the lens of gritty New York realism. Beneath the façade of success lies the reality of addiction.

Lisa Smith is a writer and a lawyer in New York City. Sober for more than ten years, she is passionate about breaking the stigma of drug and alcohol addiction, particularly for professional women.

Lisa’s writing has been published in The Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, AfterPartyMagazine, and Addiction.com. She is on the Board of Directors of the NY Writers Coalition and The Writers Room in Greenwich Village.

Prior to working for more than fifteen years in legal marketing, she practiced corporate finance law at a leading international law firm.

After attending Northwestern University, Lisa received a JD from Rutgers School of Law, where she served on the editorial board of the Rutgers Law Review.