On March 5, 2015, Claire Pulley started a blog that was supposed to change her life more than she originally planned. “Three days ago no one knew how much I drank. I didn’t even know how much I drank. At first glance, my life seemed completely under control. I have never been infamously drunk. I never quit. I didn’t even pass out, ever. My children always came to school on time. […] I cooked healthy, wholesome food. My house has always been clean and tidy. But with all this, I was drowning in a sea of ​​​​wine, ”she wrote in her first post. He was then 45 years old, a successful head of the advertising market and, as he realized, an alcoholic. He drank up to two bottles of wine a day.

“I was so ashamed of what happened to me that I could not talk to anyone about it. But I knew that I had to somehow get some relief from what I had to go through, so my therapy was to write,” she told me when I met her in Athens at the launch of her third book “Passengers doka 5″ recently released. Metaihmio, and together we looked back at his progress.

“I studied economics at Cambridge, but reading and writing have always been my passion, my refuge and salvation.” She began writing on her blog, “Mom Was a Secret Drunkard,” every day. “I wrote about what happened to me, what I went through, how I felt, about alcohol and addiction.” Soon, her blog gained a huge readership, hundreds of thousands of readers around the world – today it has reached 3 million readers. So he decided to turn it into a book called The Diaries of a Sober Man, which came out in 2018 and achieved great publishing success. “By then, writing had become my new addiction—when I wasn’t writing, I got nervous. I needed to write, so I started writing novels.”

write in mind

Her second book, The Green Notebook, came out in 2020, at the start of the pandemic. “It was an idea that had been in my head for a while before I started writing it. I went through a phase of terrible insomnia. Then I discovered that writing stories in my head at night is a good way to stop worrying about my life, because of which I could not sleep at night. So I wrote The Green Notebook in my head in the middle of the night after trying to sleep for months.”

In the book, an eccentric artist leaves a green notebook in a cafe where he shared the truth about his life and invites anyone who finds it to do the same. The idea for the plot was again given by her own story. “When I started writing the truth about myself on my blog, if anyone saw my life on social media, it looked perfect. I had happy children, a successful marriage, I lived in a beautiful house, but the truth was completely different. So I began to understand that everyone is hiding something. When I started blogging, I was honest for the first time, and it completely changed my life and the lives of many people who read it, because it helped them understand that they are not alone and that there is a way to overcome addiction. So I started thinking about what would happen if other people told the truth about their lives.”

Her third book, Pier 5 Passengers, was written during the pandemic. “Then we were all in our boxes,” he recalls, “and I missed my friends, my relatives, and also strangers, people I rode on the train with, with whom I didn’t even exchange glances, even if and look.” One word – these are the rules of London trains. So I started thinking about what it would be like if I talked to these people on the train, what kind of adventure it would lead to. This gave me the idea for the book.”

The best ideas, she says, come to her between sleep and wakefulness. “I have found that the moment you wake up and are half asleep, you are at the peak of your creativity. So I wake up at 5 and before getting out of bed, in the dark, I think about the next scenes of the book. Then I go down to the kitchen – because although I have created a good place for writing, I still write at the kitchen table – and I write for 2-3 hours. Now writing, she admits, is, in addition to addiction, also her psychoanalysis. “I always use fiction to keep my sanity, it’s a great way to get away from the world for a while and live in someone else’s shoes.”