Dead Drunk

Dead Drunk is the moving and powerful story of a teenager who lost himself to alcohol addiction after the breakdown of his parents’ marriage. 

Paul Garrigan has written an honest (and often darkly humorous) account of the events that led him to travel the world and embark on a series of staggering drinking binges throughout the 1980s and 1990s. His adventures took him from the quiet suburbs of Dublin to begging on the streets of London, getting paid to drink in Oxford and swigging illegal booze in Saudi Arabia, before finally ending up in a remote Thai village where he fully succumbed to his addiction, and was determined to drink himself to death. 

Faced with the possibility of liver failure, and the breakdown of yet another relationship, Garrigan was ultimately forced to face his inner demons. While surfing the Internet one night he came across a highly unorthodox detox programme being offered by Buddhist monks, and in a last-ditch attempt at sobriety, he set out on what he was sure would be his strangest and most difficult journey yet. 

In his extraordinary and thought-provoking debut book, Garrigan describes the physical and emotional effects of his alcohol abuse. With disarming honesty he documents his journey to Thailand’s Thamkrabok temple, where he hoped to escape his addiction and turn his life around—for once and for all. Garrigan’s book is a rare first-person account of treatment at Thamkrabok temple.