Author Kristen McGuiness may claim not to be a writer anymore but the facts don’t lie: the author of the LA Times bestselling book 5150: The Magical Adventures of a Single Life has also been published in The Fix, among other publications, and these days writes grant proposals for non-profits. She’s also nearly a decade sober after a bout with alcoholism which took her from LA to Dallas to New York back to LA. Though she looks like the very picture of innocence, McGuiness hardly grew up in white picket fence land: her father was one of the biggest drug smugglers around (he’s in Blow, the book the Johnny Depp movie was based on) and so the family was constantly up and moving whenever the law got too close. McGuiness writes openly about this not only in her memoir but also in a piece I edited another lifetime ago for The Fix. In this episode, we discuss the time in her life when she wore pantyhose while working for Mary Kay, how the TV show based on her book didn’t sell after they took away her character’s alcoholism and speaking at her dad’s hearing after a bender that involved trying to hang out with some Texan drug dealers, among many other topics.
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