It’s been a decade since the worst year of Natalie MacLean’s life, and she’s finally ready to talk about what happened. When the bestselling author and four-time James Beard Award winning food journalist answers The Coast’s call days in advance of the Halifax launch of her new memoir, Wine Witch on Fire: Rising from the Ashes of Divorce, Defamation, and Drinking Too Much (happening June 12 at 7pm at Halifax Central Library’s Paul O’Regan Hall) she shares two quotes that’ve been the latitude and longitude that’s guided the quest to tell her story: “I was inspired by memoirist Gleynnon Doyle: She says write from a scar, not an open wound,” MacLean says. “I loved when poet Sean Dorherity said ‘Why bother? Because right now there is someone, somewhere with a wound in the exact shape of your words.’”
To recap, an army of trolls came for MacLean in 2012, after a blog post erroneously called her fair-use quoting plagiarism (fair-use was and remains a common practice, MacLean says: “quoting another wine review to provide more context about the wine, like Rotten Tomatoes does for movies”). “The bonfire really escalated when the trolls then turned their focus on me as a woman: And so it devolved into taking my body apart piece by piece in public. And then those pieces—because they were so sensational, great clickbait—they spread to other websites and even newspapers around the world, from New York to South Africa. It was crazy how fast it spread,” she recalls. Eventually, the tide of hate swelled to include rape threats. “And there were other wine sites, quoting reviews similar to how I was doing it—but they weren't attacked. So it really became evident as to what was going on after a while.”
While that sort of Lindy West living nightmare mightn’t be super-relatable, the undertow that pulled MacLean down that followed was: Divorce from a 20-year marriage, drinking too much, despair clouding what she calls the year that was her “worst vintage.” A lot of therapy and self-work later, she’s delivered what feels like this decade’s Eat Pray Love or Under The Tuscan Sun: A midlife story about finding yourself—and finding just what you’re made of. “I think we need to hear more women's stories. And as well, middle-aged women's stories. So we get lots of the ingenue, ‘young star rocketing off to fame.’ and then we get the lion in winter. But there's this whole missing gap in the middle,” she says, noting Cheryl Strayed and Elizabeth Gilbert as influences. “For me, memoir is one of the most life-affirming of all types or genres of books because it's really an open-hearted story of what it means to be human—and what it means to be a woman today.”
MacLean is quick with stats: In our pre-interview email thread, she states that there was a 323% increase in women drinking during the pandemic versus a 39% increase for the population overall. If you’re one of said women, she’s hoping her book can help you, because she used to be where you are now: “I wasn't a bystander in the whole wine mom culture. I was team captain,” she says. “I used to call my 5pm glass of wine, Mommy's Little Helper.” Quitting drinking entirely wasn’t an option because, as MacLean herself says, she “drinks for a living.” Instead, she now folds semi-sobriety into her self-care arsenal: “It's not a self-help book, but I have lots of tips in the book for how I moderated my own alcohol intake, from thinking ‘what’s the thought just before the thought that said ‘I need a drink?’ And was it about the stress or just pure enjoyment? And if it was about stress, could I find another way to deal with it?” she says.
“But back to wine mom culture: There's that two levels: It's all like laughing and whatever,” MacLean says, referencing the many memes about moms loving wine. “And then sort of the underlying issues, perhaps feelings of worthlessness or just depletion from being tired as mothers. But then there's that whole other sort of realm of wine being marketed to women that way: From some wine labels, you’d think we women are either babes or battleaxes. So we're going for brands like Stiletto and Little Black Dress, or we're reaching for brands like Mad Housewife,” she says, listing actual brands available on shelves. “So, the implied message is that women need a reason to have a glass of wine, whether it's girlfriends getting together for a fancy occasion or just another day of exhaustion. Whereas wine is not marketed to men that way. No one asks a man why he wants to have a drink. He has one because he wants one.”
But just as you don’t have to have weathered being run through the mud in the town square of Twitter, you also don’t have to be questioning your relationship with booze to get something from Wine Witch on Fire—not least because it’s as funny and irreverent as MacLean is in conversation, cracking me up over and over. During our interview, I tell her this book has serious book club potential, between the spicy online drama and the ripped-from-real-life devastation of divorce, it mixes spectacle with being seen. She tells me there is a book club guide included. “It's only useful to a reader if they can overlay their experience on yours and get something, draw something, from your story for themselves,” she replies. “A piece of themselves that are understood—not better understanding you as the author.”
