The day before my first wedding (I married twice – both disasters that ended in two years) my entire extended family travelled for five hours to kick off the party with me.
My mother set a fancy table and cooked my favourite meal, but the guest of honour – yours truly – was a no-show.
I was drunk in a local pub. Hours later, after closing time, I would stagger through the door, barely able to stand up, as everyone else was heading to bed.
It wasn’t a one-off. Letting down friends and family (and myself) by drinking too much was a heartbreaking cycle that I would repeat over and over for 23 years.
I had my first drink when I was 17, fairly late for a Gen X-er. From then on, I’d drink regularly and to excess, often blacking out and having no memory of the night before.
I relied on friends to fill in the blanks for me – but more often than not I really didn’t like what they had to say.
At university, everyone drank, but few people drank like me. When I started, I couldn’t stop. I would often wake up in a stranger’s room with no idea how I got there. I remember once waking up next to a man who had a gun under his pillow.
From the beginning I was a Jekyll-and-Hyde drinker. Sometimes I’d be a happy, fun drunk; other times I’d be mean and aggressive, picking fights with friends, boyfriends and even strangers.
Corrine Barraclough says giving up alcohol in her forties was the hardest thing she’d ever done after 23 years of near-daily drinking. Then, at 48, a doctor said the words all women dread
Corrine was a ‘Jekyll and Hyde drinker’ – sometimes happy, sometimes aggressive
I cried, apologised – and truly meant it. But I also knew they were empty promises. As an alcoholic, I was a ticking time bomb waiting to go off. And I would do it again.
As the years went by, most friends walked away from me and I don’t blame them.
My drinking was out of control for a long time, and I had no intention of slowing down.
I specifically lived in cities where it was easy to catch taxis. I could never drive. I got a job as an entertainment reporter in magazines because it enabled my drinking. I was always off to a showcase of the next big band or a screening of a new movie.
I typed up my stories with a bottle of champagne next to my keyboard. I worked hard, played hard and flirted up a storm to get a good story.
While friends grew up, got into relationships, married and had children, I kept on partying. I drank my way around London for several years and then took myself to New York.
What could go wrong? A young girl alone in a big city, who frequently got blackout drunk…
I vaguely remember a barman in the West Village warning me while drunk that an older regular at the bar was suspected of spiking drinks. The next thing I remember is waking up with mascara tears down my face, crying as I tried to find my way home.
Corrine’s media career enabled her drinking as she’d often be at events with lots of booze
Suicide attempts were frequent. The first was in my early twenties. I have foggy memories of waking up in excruciating pain having slashed my wrists. On another occasion, I drank bleach.
These moments should have been my rock bottom. But nothing changed. In fact, things only got worse.
In the last decade of my drinking, it wasn’t rare for me to wander into a bar at the start of an evening having no idea I’d been there before and been barred.
I once fell down a flight of stairs after a press event and knocked out one of my front teeth. I drank again that night.
My addiction ripped through all of the relationships in my life. I never dealt with the heartbreak of two marriages; I kept running.
The first marriage was a nightmare that I fled; the second husband went out for a run and never came back. The problem was me.
Honestly, my heart breaks for that lost girl.
I knew I needed to get sober so I resigned from the career I loved, believing it had fuelled and enabled my addiction for far too long.
By this point, I didn’t even want to drink anymore but I was physically addicted, and topping up against my will.
I couldn’t stop so I staggered into an AA meeting, listened to people’s stories, and started to understand that if I wanted to live, the only way forward for me was total abstinence.
I was 41. It was the hardest thing I’d ever done.
When she was about seven years sober, Corrine was diagnosed with breast cancer, which she believes could have been caused by her heavy drinking
Corrine underwent chemo and a double mastectomy
After I got sober, friends started to be honest with me about how my behaviour had impacted them. Several of them told me they used to worry they’d receive a phone call from the police in the middle of the night telling them I was dead.
Then in 2022, when I had about seven years of sobriety under my belt, I felt a hard, pea-sized lump in my right breast. I went for a mammogram, was whisked for biopsies and saw a string of specialists.
I was diagnosed with stage 2 breast cancer at the age of 48.
Thank goodness I was well into my sobriety journey by then, because prior to AA, I had no other coping skills to deal with emotional turmoil. I know the old me would have drank herself to death upon hearing that news.
Corrine (pictured as a young woman) believes her years of alcohol abuse had ‘probably’ contributed to her developing breast cancer
I also believe that if I had still been drinking, I wouldn’t have been vigilant enough about my health to realise something was wrong until it was too late.
After my diagnosis, I began treatment in earnest: six months of chemotherapy and a double mastectomy.
Then I started reading about the connection between alcohol and breast cancer.
I didn’t want to consider the awful possibility I had done this to myself. That in addition to the years of shame and embarrassment, this was the ‘debt’ I had to pay for my alcoholism.
But I could not avoid the facts.
It didn’t take that long for me to learn that researchers had indeed found a link between alcohol and breast cancer – namely that drinking alcohol causes a rise in oestrogen receptor-positive (ER+) breast cancer – the most common form of breast cancer, and the type I had.
Alcohol harms DNA, it affects the body’s ability to absorb certain nutrients, and causes seven types of cancer.
Did alcohol cause my breast cancer? Maybe. Probably. It certainly didn’t help.
There is no point in me feeling guilty, regretful or angry. I have to believe that everything I’ve been through in life can be used to help someone else. That’s what keeps me sober, even just for today.
Thankfully, despite the challenges, I made it through my cancer treatment and several surgeries and was told I was NED (no evidence of disease) in September 2022.
Now, I’m counting down to three years in remission.
Corrine is now 10 years sober and close to three years in remission from cancer. She lives a peaceful life with her rescue dog Harry
I was confident in my sobriety before I got sick, but now I am more steadfast than ever. There is nothing like a serious health scare to make you want to take the best possible care of yourself.
I’m still angry about how normalised drinking is in our society, though. ‘Big Alcohol’ has a lot to answer for with relentless advertising, much of it targeted at women these days.
Round-the-clock alcohol delivery services certainly haven’t helped.
This year I will be 10 years sober. I have a brand-new life. I’m blissfully content with quiet days walking rescue my dog along the beach.
The drama and chaos of my twenties and thirties is not part of my life anymore – and even battling cancer couldn’t shake my foundations.
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