Veteran East Bay reporter Tony Hicks didn’t have a specific goal when he started jotting down stories about his wild past and decades-long bouts with alcohol.
“I wasn’t planning on writing a book and selling it. I was just getting this stuff off my chest, and it started feeling good,” says the author of the self-published “Lying Drunk” (Amazon, 206 pages, $21.99 paper, $9.99 Kindle, May 30, 2025).
“It never dawned on me that this was a self-help book,” says Hicks, 57, a Walnut Creek resident, staff writer at Bay City News (full disclosure: an affiliate of Local News Matters) and, most famously, a former music and film writer and columnist at Bay Area News Group (home of the San Jose Mercury News, East Bay Times and Oakland Tribune ) for 23 years.
However, soon after its release, “Lying Drunk,” he says, was No. 1 on Amazon’s list of 63 “new alcohol recovery books”: “So I had a couple of good weeks,” he adds, admitting he previously wasn’t familiar with “alcohol recovery” as a genre.
And even though, in 12 essays he details his down periods, often with humor—including drinking a half-gallon of vodka a day, hitting bottom, going through detox and rehab, facing cops, being incarcerated, losing his job, flirting with homelessness, falling out with work, friends, two wives, a girlfriend and his children—Hicks is hesitant to call the book a memoir.
“It sounds kind of weird when you say you wrote a memoir for a couple of reasons,” he adds. It means you think your life is worthy of memoir, or it’s something that people do in their final days.
Sober since 2020—he began to get clean during the pandemic, when most people were day-drinking, he notes the irony—Hicks says, “Now I don’t feel like I’m near the end of my life; I was probably closer to the end of my life before.”
“I think everybody misunderstood how much I really drank. On my 50th birthday, I went into the hospital with a .56 blood alcohol level, which is seven times the legal limit,” he says.
While Hicks sometimes flashes back, much of the action in “Lying Drunk” takes place in 2017, the year he split up with his second wife, quit his job, tried to get it back and failed. The same day he left work, he found out his dog was dying of cancer: “I had to go get my kids and take them to the vet to say goodbye.”
Though he had been drinking heavily and routinely for years, and it took a lot of alcohol for him to get drunk, in 2017, he says, there began to be consequences: “Things spiraled from there. That’s when I started drinking to the point where I was going to the hospital. That was when I had to go to 30-day rehabs. The first one I broke out of in Oakland. Then I came home for maybe a month and ended up back in the hospital, and they sent me to a different one in Scotts Valley down by Santa Cruz.”
More harrowing than rehab was a stint at a detox center, where there’s no medical supervision: “It’s basically a place to hold you while you whimper and throw up for five days. It was awful, worse than being homeless,” he says. At the time, he didn’t know how he got there; it turned out it was in Concord, the same town where he spent one night in a homeless shelter, an equally horrifying experience: “They don’t let you lie down. I had to sit up on the couch next to someone I didn’t know, while holding on to my backpack.”
In a chapter about cars, Hicks describes living out of his mother’s 20-year-old red Mustang, including spending a few somewhat “comfortable” nights in a Safeway parking lot near Rossmoor, not far from where he grew up. But “homelessness is a lot of work,” he writes.
Another “insane” car experience happened in 2010, on his way home after drinking with buddies, when he crashed his Saturn, hard enough to blow the tires and release the airbags, into a median not far from a police station. Somehow, he managed to maneuver the crippled vehicle home and actually go to bed. About an hour later, he was awakened by his wife and the cops.
In addition to addressing ongoing physical issues, Hicks, of course, touches on the emotional toll his alcoholism has taken on everyone around him. He didn’t realize just how mad people were about his lying, as much as his drinking, until he began to get sober: “When you’re in your addiction, you don’t necessarily differentiate. You’re all about keeping things from other people. … But you’re not fooling anybody. Everybody knows but you.”
Today, despite a relapse in 2024 involving ingesting White Claw hard seltzer on the morning after his daughter’s 22nd birthday, Hick is grateful that several of his daughters have forgiven him. And for his mother’s ongoing support. Her initial reaction upon reading “Lying Drunk,” he says, was that it “was darker” than she thought it would be. His response: “You were there for a lot of it.”
Calling the darkness “the reality,” Hicks concludes, “I’m not trying sugar-coat, to wrap things up nicely. And I’m certainly not trying to say, ‘Look at me, I came out of this and I am a survivor.’ I’m just trying to portray it. The point was to show how strong addiction is, how it takes over your life. Journalists like me, no matter what Donald Trump and half the country say, we like honesty when we’re doing our job; and for me, when I’m sober, I like the truth, OK?”
Commenting that there are “millions of alcoholics and are even more people who wonder about it,” Hicks thinks the audience for “Lying Drunk” is “pretty wide”: “Anybody who’s ever dealt with addiction, whether it’s them or someone they love, can relate.”
Meanwhile, Hicks hopes to be in a relationship, rekindle some friendships, and perhaps make some new friends. He says, “I have to be connected. That’s what I’m looking forward to: reconnecting with human beings. I’m cautiously optimistic.”
Editor’s note: Writer-editor Leslie Katz and Tony Hicks both are employees of Bay City News and its sister website Local News Matters.
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