Page 417

I didn't go to AA to get sober. I went because my husband was going, and I was the supportive one. That's how Page 417 begins -- with a confession that will feel familiar to anyone who has ever sat in a folding chair telling themselves they were there for someone else. Ken Craig-Saunders is a traditional astrologer with forty years of experience reading addiction in other people's charts. He is also an alcoholic who didn't figure that out until he walked into his husband's AA meetings and, over the course of a few weeks, heard his own life described back to him by strangers. This is not a book about a dramatic rock bottom.
It's a book about the longer, harder journey that comes after: learning what acceptance actually means -- and why it feels, at first, exactly like dying. Page 417 draws its title from the most-quoted passage in the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous, a page that promises acceptance as the answer to all our problems. But nobody ever explained what acceptance is, why the word is so easy to say and so brutal to practice, or how to get from here to there. This book is the explanation.