Drunk-ish - A Sobriety Podcast · Stefanie Wilder-Taylor

Best Of: Kathleen Wilhoite

·1 hr 8 min·4 clips

Kathleen says she passed out in the parking lot before a War of the Roses audition and woke up two hours later.

Stephanie Wilder-Taylor brings Kathleen into a loose, intimate recovery conversation. Kathleen comes in with the kind of easy history that only happens when two people have already done a podcast together, and the talk quickly lands in the place where shame, humor, and relief sit side by side. The focus stays on sobriety. Kathleen says she got sober on May 28, 1992, and talks about doing what she was told at first, even as pills stayed at the edge of the story. The year-chip story gets messy. She remembers a box of narcotics and pills that she and her ex found after someone died in their neighborhood during the end of the AIDS crisis, and she describes how that stash became part of the private logic that kept her lying to herself. She eventually had to say it out loud. Her ex-husband pushed her to stand up and admit that her clean-and-sober story was not the whole truth, and that humiliation forced her to tell her sponsor what was really going on. Pills were the pull. Kathleen says she loved pain pills, that Vicodin after dental work could quickly turn into a problem, and that the hard part was never just the feeling but the scramble to keep feeding it. That distinction matters here. The conversation keeps returning to the difference between drinking, prescription use, and the stories people build around agoraphobia, sleep, and medical excuses, without pretending any of those stories are clean. It stays funny too. Stephanie and Kathleen keep the tone warm and blunt, moving from old drinking and pill behavior into the plain, familiar comedy that shows up when two people stop polishing the truth. There is more than survival here. Kathleen also talks about the work she is doing now, including a second novel, the first novel she is sending to publishers and agents, house-cleaning as a daily reset, and the hope of writing her way out of self-tapes. Music is still in the frame. She mentions her songs and the possibility of making them easier to find, while making clear that creative work now sits closer to her center than old habits do. The ending lands gently. What remains is a recovery conversation that treats old lies, hard-earned honesty, and current-day ambition as parts of the same life.

As heard by us

A loose, honest recovery conversation that keeps its mess intact.

Drunkish is strongest when Kathleen Wilhoyt keeps the focus on the ugly, ordinary details of recovery. The curbside box of narcotics and pills, the year-chip lie, and the pull between drinking and pain pills give the story its weight, and the move from acting and music into that…

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Why you'd press play

For the listener who wants a sobriety story that gets messy before it gets clear.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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