Bestselling Vermont author Jessica Lahey is done with keeping secrets.

In her new book, The Addiction Inoculation: Raising Healthy Kids in a Culture of Dependence, she reveals her best kept secret: she is an alcoholic. The story begins before she sips her first glass of wine, when she becomes aware that alcoholism runs in her family. Acutely conscious of this, she takes precautions to stay away from alcohol as a young adult. As a student at UMass Amherst, she becomes a drug and alcohol counselor, teaching her classmates about the perils of addiction.

But in her thirties, after having two kids, Lahey begins drinking wine. She is soon drinking a bottle a day, then more, then liquor. Finally, she blacks out drunk at a family birthday celebration, and her father confronts her.

“I know what an alcoholic looks like,” he tells her, “and you’re an alcoholic.” That night, Lahey attends her first 12-step program meeting. She has been attending meetings ever since.

“There are lots of people that are going through this and you don’t have to be alone,” she counsels.

Jessica Lahey, a former teacher and author of the 2015 bestselling parenting guide, The Gift of Failure, is now on a mission to teach parents how they can "inoculate" their children from substance misuse. “Inoculation theory” starts with knowing the facts about substance misuse and other risky behavior.

“It raises the likelihood that your children will refuse that high risk behavior -- which could be drinking, or sex before they’re ready, or driving in the car with someone who’s drunk,” says Lahey.