When Tania Glyde told friends that she was giving up drinking, she got some supportive but bemused responses.

"I was known as less of a drinker than other people in my social groups," she says.

"I didn't have mad stories told about me dancing on tables and I didn't put vodka on my cornflakes.

"When I gave up drinking, people said they had no idea things were so bad for me. I was a master of concealing -- I could be depressed, feeling suicidal but if I drank half a bottle of wine and went out, I'd be okay."

In reality, Tania (now 41) drank alcohol nearly every day of her adult life.

"Drinking was my hobby," says the London-based novelist and journalist.

"For a long period of my life, I found that life was intolerable if I didn't have a drink. It was a vicious circle because the more I drank, the less able I was to take steps to improve my life."

She started drinking as a teenager, partly because it made her popular with her peers and also because she had a fractious relationship with her parents, particularly with her mother.

"At the age of 14, I was tall and looked old for my age. I was able to get served in pubs so I was instantly the drinks-getter. It was the path to being popular and it was something enjoyable to do. It also helped to block out things that hurt a lot."

She writes in her book, Cleaning Up, about being an only child and therefore the sole recipient of her mother's constant criticisms.

The drinking continued throughout her stint at university but it was when she moved to Turkey to work on a newspaper that, she says, "everything really kicked off".

She drank to deal with the stresses of the job but being part of the ex-pat community, it was natural to get together with others for long drinking sessions.

When she moved back to the UK, Tania made attempts to get some form of therapy but it never seemed to work out.

"I feel very strongly about the issue of mental health care on the NHS. It's responsible not to give therapy to someone drinking but it's very difficult to get clean on your own before they will help you with the problems. Essentially, you're self-medicating yourself with alcohol or drugs and that's a very dangerous thing to be doing when you're depressed."

As well as drinking, Tania eventually started taking cocaine and heroin, though she says she never got hooked.

"Cocaine seemed to enable me to drink much longer and it was the drug of choice for a lot of the crowd I knew. I think alcohol is the biggest gateway drug, more so than cannabis."

By the age of 35, the alcohol abuse began to take a toll on her body.

"Towards the end of my drinking, I went out on great big benders. I had only ever drunk after 6pm but now I was drinking vodka during the day. I was dehydrated, my teeth were damaged and my skin and hair went haywire.

"I was a husk -- basically I had three years of failure and rejection at work, health nightmares and a relationship that was emotionally abusive."

Things finally came to a head one night when Tania took some heroin, drank more vodka and tried to cut her wrists. Fortunately, it didn't work but she passed out later in the bath.

"I could easily be dead now," she says. "I'm lucky that I woke up in that bath and didn't drown."

There was no sudden epiphany that she was going to give up drink but she says something changed within her because of the suicide attempt.

She sought therapy (choosing not to go down the Alcoholics Anonymous route) and began taking anti-depressants.

"The first few months when I was sober are a bit of a blur," she says. "I didn't go out much because I was skint. My body took a while to get used to sobriety and I did a lot of sleeping.

"After a while, I started writing a problem page on the internet. I found that it was advantageous going out sober because I could actually remember what people said. I'm quite an introverted person and I had to work on those social skills.

"I found the relationship thing hard when I became sober. I did go on a vow of celibacy trip but that was because the final relationship before my breakdown was really quite damaging."

It's now five years since she gave up alcohol and she says it has been one of the strangest experiences she's ever had.

"I don't want to come across as serious and a bit tragic because the truth is that I had a great time being drunk. There's lots of light and dark in my story -- what I regret is the sadness.

"I don't miss the absolutely suicidal hangovers. I had long chunks of feeling suicidal anyway and the drink fed into that.

"What I do miss was being able to take a mini-holiday from myself when I was drinking. Time is all the same length now and you have to find ways to fill that time."

Since her book has been published, Tania has had the misfortune of experiencing two strokes.

She puts the cause largely down to working so hard as a freelance journalist and dealing with the aftermath of the death of her father.

But she's been asked the understandable question of whether her years of drinking contributed to the strokes.

"Could my previous lifestyle -- the years of drink and drugs -- have contributed to my stroke? I have not found an answer to this yet," she says.

Tania's book is partly autobiographical and partly a commentary on drinking culture nowadays. She is particularly vocal about the issue of women drinkers.

"You see this headlong rush of women to get hammered," she says. "There are so many pressures on women nowadays and they can also become extremely competitive with each other over their drinking with everyone calling each other out about being a lightweight.

"A friend of mine remembers me as a lightweight -- someone who went home after 24 hours out drinking! Women also drink because of an increased sense of entitlement; that they deserve their white wine after work.

"But I think that, politically, we women are numbing ourselves. We're already being paid less than men and then we spend so much money and energy on drinking."

Now recovering from her strokes, Tania is planning to write more non-fiction and is in a relationship.

"I've obviously put my neck on the line by revealing such personal things about me in the book. But that was me five years ago and if it can help somebody else, then it's a story worth telling."

Cleaning Up -- How I Gave Up Drinking and Lived is published by Serpent's Tail (e16)

- Lisa Jewell