A Clean Mess

A darkly funny and emotionally raw memoir from the bestselling author of High Achiever

What comes after addiction?

“For as long as I can remember, my mind was like a train with only three stops. Stop number one: getting money for drugs. Stop number two: getting drugs. Stop number three: getting high. During the years I should have been learning to save money, file taxes, and pay bills, I was stuck on a train to nowhere. Now somehow my train was on a brand-new course to somewhere I’d never been, and I was the friggin’ conductor.”

After the opioid addiction and jail sentence that she chronicled in her first memoir, High Achiever, Tiffany Jenkins was ready for a fresh start. A chance to try life again, this time without drugs coursing through her veins. What she didn’t expect was just how fast life would happen once she was out of prison. In just two years, she went from inmate to married and sober mom of three. And life, as it does, just kept happening: a few years later, her marriage collapsed, a crisis that forced her to reckon with the foundations of her mental health and sobriety.

Told with dark humor and raw honesty, A Clean Mess is Tiffany Jenkins’s story of how she learned to live and feel for the first time without numbing herself with drugs—and how she discovered inner reserves of strength she didn’t know she had. From her tentative first days of sobriety when all her worldly possessions fit into a trash bag, to seeing two pink lines on a pregnancy test weeks later, to navigating anxiety, a new marriage, and motherhood at the same time, to surviving betrayal and divorce, Jenkins shows how she got through it all when her crutches and Band-Aids were taken away from her. An inspiring memoir that reads like fiction, A Clean Mess is a book that will buoy anyone seeking a life raft in hard times.