She Bets Her Life: A True Story of Gambling Addiction by Mary Sojourner

Gambling addiction is a serious mental condition that should be addressed in the right way. For many people, it’s quite helpful to get information from recovered gambling addicts themselves. This is exactly why Mary Sojourner has written this book. Mary Sojourner is an American writer, columnist, and social justice activist. She spent significant years of her life fighting for women’s mental health rights. One of the main reasons for that is her own experience as a gambling addict.

Mary Sojourner is not a typical gambling writer because she has written seven books so far and only one of them is dedicated to gambling. She Bets Her Life: A True Story of Gambling Addiction is one of her most successful books.

She Bets Her Life: A True Story of Gambling Addiction by Mary Sojourner Review

She Bets Her Life: A True Story of Gambling Addiction is actually a memoir and this is what makes this book worth reading. This is a deeply personal journey to the traps and horrors that gambling addiction brings. It’s also a wakeup call for all compulsive gambling. Of course, this is not an anti-gambling book because the author herself admits that it’s not the games that make people addicted, it’s their personal problems. It takes a lot of courage to tell a story like this because apparently gambling made Mary do some desperate things.

She Bets Her Life: A True Story of Gambling Addiction by Mary Sojourner is available as a paperback book and as a Kindle book. This book is 288 pages long and it was published by Carroll & Graff back in 2010. The book contains over a dozen chapters where the author covers different topics. We really like the fact that Mary has pointed out why she is writing this book in the first place. It’s obvious that she cares about women (and men) facing mental problems related to addiction. So, this book is more like a guide for these people. It lets them understand how, where and what went wrong in their lives and why they became addicts.

After the introduction, there’s a chapter called Meet the Sisters where you will get familiar with the characters in this book. The story is developing gradually and you can feel the tension building up. Not one part of this book is boring because Mary Sojourner has an excellent skill to describe things in details without getting boring.

She pays attention even to the smallest details of her story, which makes it even more personal. Even the titles of the chapters are intriguing and explain a lot about the things that you can expect like Crossing the line, Dopamine is queen, Freud was wrong, Girls’ night in and The Party’s over.

In this book, readers will find useful information that will help them recognize the signs of women who are addicted to gambling. At the same time, you will also learn more about the difference between male and female compulsive gamblers. Additionally, there’s a strong criticism against the casino industry. According to the author, the casino industry is well-aware of the flaws of the human brain and knows how to turn ordinary people into gambling addicts and they are using these things against us. Yet, she also points out that by addressing your personal problems in a timely manner, you won’t be able to become an addict.

For years, women addicted to gambling were not a topic of discussion, but thanks to Mary things are changing. The book served as inspiration for few other authors to come up with stories about gambling addiction. Generally speaking, the book is easy to read, but there are a few complex topics that are presented in the book as the science of the brain, but they are explained well. What most readers like is that this book contains many precise statistics related to gambling addiction and women. It also comes with a wide array of images that make reading this book much easier and more enjoyable.

This is one of those books that explain what’s going on in the human brain (female human brain) when they start gambling and how an ordinary pastime activity can become an addiction. She Bets Her Life: A True Story of Gambling Addiction includes stories of a few women that have problems with gambling and it looks like the author has included parts of her own story in each scenario. You can find personal stories that have a lot of information and many of these stories are easy to relate to.

Another thing that is worth mentioning is that the book comes with a 12-step material. Some readers may find this attractive, but others may find it a little bit unattractive. In any case, it may be a good idea to read this material even if you are not a big fan of this approach. Keep in mind that Mary doesn’t say that this 12-step problem is the key to the solution. She just points out that people may find it useful. She also says that there are many other ways that can help you solve your problem. The reason for this is simple – not every individual is the same.

She Bets Her Life: A True Story of Gambling Addiction by Mary Sojourner is an excellent book. People of all ages can benefit from reading this book because gambling addictions and addictions, in general, are not limited to specific age groups. In this book, you won’t find a preaching voice telling you that you need to seek help. On the contrary, you can find stories that show the horrors that addicted individuals are going through and how they can ruin the lives of people around them too.

This book should be given as a gift to a person who is trying to recover from gambling or someone who is seriously worried about the gambling habits of a person close to them.

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For more books on the topic of gambling addiction, visit our list of gambling addiction books. 

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