Lisa F. Smith was a bright young, Jew­ish lawyer at a pres­ti­gious law firm in New York City when alco­holism and drug addic­tion took over her life. What was once a way she escaped her inse­cu­ri­ty and neg­a­tiv­i­ty as a teenag­er became a means of cop­ing with the anx­i­ety and stress of an impos­si­ble work­load.

Girl Walks Out of a Bar explores Smith’s for­ma­tive years, her decade of alco­hol and drug abuse, divorce, and her road to recov­ery. In this dark­ly com­ic and wrench­ing­ly hon­est sto­ry, Smith describes how her cir­cum­stances con­spire with her pre­dis­po­si­tion to depres­sion and self-med­ica­tion in an envi­ron­ment ripe for addic­tion to flour­ish, pre­sent­ing a can­did por­trait of alco­holism through the lens of grit­ty New York realism.