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What brings an alcoholic through the doors of an AA meeting? What brings a young person, perhaps still working his or her way through high school, into the basement of a church, into a meeting room where the other members there are often older, married with children, established in a career, engaged in community activities?

“No way was I going to spend all my time with those old fogies. They were all over twenty-five!” one member recounts in “Nothing Left to Lose.” But after more experimentation, more problems, and several more treatment centers, she returns.

“My options were very obvious: jail, the streets, or death. I was also suffering from liver disease,” the author of the story, “Homeless Bound” says. For him the repercussions of drinking were concrete and physical. For others, the devastation was more emotional and internal. “I couldn’t bear to look in the mirror,” writes the author of “Teen Nightmare.”

These and the other AAs in this Chapter, as well as throughout this book, have drinking histories that anyone can identify with. “I never went anywhere without a mug full of whiskey and cola. All but one of my friends had had enough of my erratic, violent, and rude behavior while drinking. I always drank to get as drunk as I could.”

The age they came into AA or the length of time they spent drinking are, in fact, small details. It is the loneliness, the alienation, the humiliation and sickness that comes from drinking alcoholically that finally brings them in, or finally convinces them to stay. “Alcoholism has no minimum age requirement. I realize that many fellow AA members have lost homes, marriages, and children to alcohol before I acquired any of those things. But I lost enough.”

Young or old, newcomers or old-timers, there is something of all of our stories here.