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Girl Walks Out of a Bar is Lisa Smith's darkly comic and wrenchingly honest memoir of her descent into and recovery from high-functioning alcoholism and cocaine addiction. From the outside, Smith's professional, well-heeled life as a lawyer in a big New York City firm looked great, and she played the part gamely. On the inside, though, she thought of nothing but her next chance to use and how to continue to hide her secret and the havoc it was wreaking in her life. One morning in 2004, out of drugs and feeling on the verge of death, Smith made a snap decision to go to detox. She inadvertently checked into a seedy psychiatric hospital. She returned to work the following week, not knowing how she could function in the world that she previously had navigated only while abusing substances.