In 2012, Larisa Miller arrived in Abu Dhabi at the end of a life she had spent twelve years building, with a marriage that was ending in slow motion and a future that bore no resemblance to anything she had planned for.

What followed was not a comeback story. It was a rebuild from the foundation up, in a country where she did not speak the language, did not know the rules, and did not know who she was without the role she had carried for twelve years as an Army aviator’s wife. From a quilt guild in Abu Dhabi to the inside of a royal palace, from a friendship that changed the trajectory of her life to the founding of a specialized advisory firm operating across more than thirty countries, Larisa built an entirely new identity in plain sight of anyone watching.

I Drove My Guardian Angel to Drink is the story of how that happened, told with the candor of a woman who has stopped performing and the discipline of a writer who knows the difference between a confession and a memoir. The title belongs to her grandmother Betz, who watched her granddaughter walk into every bad decision and every good one with the same stubborn certainty, and who, Larisa suspects, raised a highball somewhere on the other side and laughed about it.

This is a book about inheritance, identity, and the particular kind of stubbornness that runs in some bloodlines. It is about the moments where you find out what you are actually made of, and the people who were standing behind you the whole time, even after they were gone.