A memoir about what happens after survival.
Living After: A Memoir of Recovery, Fatherhood, and Finding Meaning in the Ordinary continues David Garcia’s story beyond treatment and early sobriety. It explores the quieter, harder work that begins when the crisis has passed: rebuilding trust, repairing relationships, confronting regret, rediscovering identity, and learning how to live without alcohol doing the emotional work.
Recovery kept him alive. Living After is about learning what to do with the life that remained.
About the Book
Living After begins where many recovery stories end: after treatment, after the meetings, after the applause. David Garcia is sober, but sobriety does not erase the life that came before it. Broken trust is still broken. Relationships still need repair. Responsibilities still exist. And the person who used alcohol to manage fear, anger, loneliness, and uncertainty now has to learn how to face those things without it.
The book follows the less dramatic—but often more difficult—work of recovery: making amends, rebuilding trust through actions rather than promises, learning patience, accepting consequences, rediscovering identity, and becoming present as a father.
Recovery gave David another chance, but it did not give him a clean slate. As he discovers, sobriety is not really about starting over. It is about finally being clear enough to face where the last chapter ended and responsible enough to decide what happens next.
Living After is ultimately about learning to participate fully in ordinary life—the work, relationships, uncertainty, disappointment, responsibility, and small moments that once felt impossible to tolerate without alcohol. Sobriety was not the destination. It was the invitation to begin living.
What Living After Explores
- Recovery after the crisis — What happens when treatment ends, the immediate danger has passed, and ordinary life becomes the real test.
- Rebuilding trust — Why sobriety does not automatically restore credibility, and why trust has to be earned through consistent actions over time.
- Fatherhood after addiction — Learning how to become present, dependable, and emotionally available without expecting immediate forgiveness.
- Identity without alcohol — Figuring out who you are when alcohol is no longer doing the emotional work for you.
- Amends and accountability — Facing the consequences of past choices without confusing regret with repair.
- Loneliness and letting go — Learning to sit with uncertainty, rejection, and loss without escaping into old patterns.
- Patience and ordinary life — Accepting that relationships, work, recovery, and personal growth often happen much more slowly than you want them to.
- Meaning after survival — Moving from simply staying sober to building a life that feels worth participating in.
Why the Title Living After?
Olive Oil was about surviving alcoholism and reaching the point where recovery became possible. Living After asks a different question: what happens when you survive—and then have to figure out how to live?
Treatment ended. The immediate crisis passed. Sobriety became part of everyday life. But the consequences did not disappear with the alcohol. There were relationships to repair, responsibilities to reclaim, amends to make, losses to accept, and an identity to rebuild.
David had spent years using alcohol to change how he felt. Without it, ordinary life became the challenge: being a father, going to work, sitting with loneliness, accepting uncertainty, letting people go, and learning that not every uncomfortable feeling needed to be escaped.
That is what Living After means.
It is the life after the dramatic moment. After treatment. After the applause. After simply being grateful to still be alive.
The book is about discovering that sobriety was never the finish line. It was an invitation to finally participate in life—to stop merely surviving and begin becoming.
Who This Book Is For
Living After is for readers who understand—or are beginning to discover—that getting sober does not automatically make life simple.
It may especially resonate with:
- People in recovery who have moved beyond the immediate crisis and are confronting what comes next.
- Parents rebuilding trust with children after addiction has affected the relationship.
- People making amends and learning that changed behavior matters more than promises.
- Readers struggling with loneliness, identity, regret, or uncertainty after major life changes.
- Anyone discovering that emotional health requires more than simply removing the substance.
- Family members who want to understand why recovery can remain difficult even after someone stops drinking.
- Readers drawn to memoirs about accountability, fatherhood, relationships, resilience, and second chances.
Book Details
Title: Living After: A Memoir of Recovery, Fatherhood, and Finding Meaning in the Ordinary
Author: David Garcia
Series: The Becoming Whole Series — Book Two
Genre: Memoir / Recovery / Fatherhood / Personal Growth
Language: English
Formats: eBook, Paperback, Hardcover
Publisher/Imprint: Independently published
Publication Date: July 4, 2026
Length: 140 pages
Paperback Size: 6 × 9 in
ISBN — Paperback: 979-8185473504
ISBN — Hardcover: 979-8185558478
About David Garcia
David Garcia is the author of Olive Oil and Living After, memoirs about alcoholism, recovery, fatherhood, accountability, and the work that begins after survival.
His writing focuses on the part of recovery that receives less attention: rebuilding trust, repairing relationships, confronting shame and regret, learning patience, and creating meaning in ordinary life.
Through The Becoming Whole Series, David writes from lived experience without presenting recovery as easy, clean, or complete. Living After is the second book in that series and continues the story beyond treatment into the longer process of becoming someone capable of living differently.
Read more about David Garcia →
Continue the Becoming Whole Series
Living After is Book Two of The Becoming Whole Series. It continues the story that began in Olive Oil: How My 6-Year-Old Accidentally Saved My Life from Alcoholism.
Where Olive Oil tells the story of addiction, consequences, and the fight to survive, Living After focuses on what comes next: rebuilding trust, repairing relationships, accepting responsibility, and learning how to live a sober life one ordinary day at a time.