About Melissa Huray

Television news reporter by day, blackout drunk by night – no one suspected that capable and competent Melissa Huray was dependent upon triple A’s – attention, amphetamines, and alcohol. Despite her paper thin public persona, the squeaky-clean girl from small-town Minnesota much more comfortable on a bar stool than behind a news desk.

Booze and attention helped to mute the festering abandonment wound. Anxiety was constant, and people-pleasing became a powerful counterfeit that overshadowed the one with real saving power.

Dutiful, pleasant, and Minnesota Nice, she longed for an 80’s sit-com family, but reality screamed the truth – her dad was a drunk.  Melissa felt forgotten within a family of emotionally distant figures passing like ships in the night. Television and junk food tempered her frequent panic attacks, but something stronger arrived when she was fifteen.

A world of synthetic promise opened through endless kegs and shiny silver cans, but the frequent blackouts that followed ushered in an awful, insidious portal to hell. Melissa was not like the other teenage  experimenters, not by a long shot. And she knew it.

Blackouts highlighted every weekend and the painful price tag escalated on to the age of thirty.  

The deadly cost of gambling on alcohol’s temporary relief brought multiple arrests, harrowing car crashes, and pathetic attempts to quit. Melissa’s pledges to stop always crumbled, and she was eventually blindsided by a deep knowing – an accident or overdose would surely take her life.

With gritty candor and jarring emotion, Blackout to Blessing invites the reader into Melissa’s journey through childhood dysfunction, the fleeting relief found in alcohol and empty relationships, and the dreadful daily grind familiar to the functional addict. Only one solution remained – total surrender. But can she? Will she?