While she’s sometimes hard to relate to because of her success and notoriety, when she opens up about her inability to control her drinking and the roads it led her down, she’s just another drunk telling a story. It took repeated rehab stays, destroying her family, and self-induced, life threatening experiences before she could come to terms with the fact that she was not “terminally unique”: neither in her drinking habits nor in her internal demons. Vargas writes with sophistication and grace about her drinking history but her stories are no different than those of alcoholics with less education, stature, success and wealth. Until it wasn’t just a glass or two but large quantities that she went to great pains to try and hide from those close to her. Initially, she found that a glass of wine or two made her high stress life just a little more tolerable. Starting early in her life, panic attacks gripped her and continued, even during her most successful and visible days as a leading woman in the news. But Vargas speaks of her sometimes paralyzing anxiety in great detail. She married successful singer-song writer, Marc Cohn, and they had two lovely boys together.įrom outside looking in, she had it all. She reported on the ground from the Iraq war, covered both Amanda Knox trials in Italy, reported on the Elian Gonzalez controversy and interviewed President Bush.

Vargas was a game changer in the news world, becoming the second female anchor (Connie Chung was the first) of a network world nightly news program.

Elizabeth vargas memoir