Read Seana’s Memoir Going Under

Going Under: A memoir of family secrets, addiction and escape

With a tender touch, Smith contemplates the two truths of her childhood: the wild island adventures and the brutal eruptions behind closed doors. Standing on the precipice of her own alcoholism, she realises that reckoning with the past is the only way to shape the future.

Jenny Valentish

Author of Woman of Substances

So much more than a book about the booze, Going Under is an intricate, often beautiful mosaic of family, the individuals caught inside its sharp-edged cracks, and the self yearning to make sense of all it all. The story of a woman emerging from the brokenness of the past and the never-ending pressures of the present to reclaim joy. 

With sparkling, musical prose and unflinching generosity of spirit, Seana Smith lays bare the facts of a life stalked by alcohol. A life that ricochets ‘between privilege and terror, between adventure and fear.’

Honest. Tender. Laugh-cry funny. Walking with Seana through her year of Going Under is to make a new and wise friend.

Kim Kelly, author of Ladies’ Rest and Writing Room