The main idea is pretty clear in the title. Heather Kopp is a Christian. And she was a straight up drunk. The book opens with her waking up in the guest room of her home—when she guesses why she spent the night there—again. Yup—she was wasted the night before. From the preface, she admits she didn’t even have a inkling that the end of her days drunken-dom (yes I just made up a word) were before her—but she writes:

“So instead, God comes to us disguised as our life, wooing is through our misery toward surrender.
At least, that was how it was for me.”

And from the moment she had a near out-of-town-shopping meltdown trying to lay her hands on some booze to slip in her purse in order to get her through a long evening—only to discover the beers she finally scored were too huge for her purse. So she dashed to a Sears, purchased a whopping purse with which she would carry her liquid sanity. But it wasn’t sanity. From this point, she was on her way there—with sobriety at the finish line.

Sober Mercies is hilarious. It is—no pun intended—sobering as well. This honest look at the underbelly of Christian existence—no wait—it’s not the underbelly—it’s just the human side of the Christian experience, and I love this book for this reason.