Definitely Better Now Summary, Characters and Themes
Definitely Better Now by Ava Robinson is a contemporary novel about recovery, vulnerability, and the slow rebuilding of a life after addiction. Centered around Emma, a young marketing assistant in Manhattan, the story tracks her emotional, psychological, and relational evolution as she celebrates her first year of sobriety.
Told with sharp honesty and quiet humor, the novel explores how sobriety is not just about quitting alcohol, but about learning how to live again—truthfully and imperfectly. Through awkward workplace encounters, complicated family ties, budding romance, and unexpected grief, Emma navigates the messy aftermath of change while discovering what authenticity truly demands.
Summary
Emma, a twenty-something marketing assistant at Richter & Thomas in Manhattan, begins her day surreptitiously working on a personal speech meant for her Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) celebration later that evening—marking her one-year sober anniversary. Her sobriety is something she keeps hidden at work, where she operates as “Work Emma,” a polished, emotionally contained version of herself designed to ward off intimacy and avoid exposure.
A computer crash threatens to reveal the secret speech, symbolizing how close her private and public lives are to colliding. This tension heightens when she interacts with Ben, the company’s soft-spoken and unexpectedly charming IT director.
His presence is disarming, and Emma struggles to maintain her usual emotional boundaries.
Emma’s celebration that evening includes an awkward dinner with her mother, who she lives with in the same apartment she grew up in. Their relationship is affectionate but fraught, especially when her mother pushes her toward dating again now that her sobriety-required celibacy has ended.
Emma is hesitant; while her world has grown since getting sober, the vulnerability of emotional and physical intimacy still feels daunting.
At her Watch, an AA tradition to mark milestones in sobriety, Emma delivers a heartfelt speech. She reflects on her descent into alcoholism, her fractured relationship with her former best friend Susannah, and the shameful betrayal that alienated her from everyone she loved.
That emotional rock bottom led her to seek help. Though the speech is met with warm applause, Emma doubts her authenticity, especially after realizing she used a borrowed line from another speaker.
Nonetheless, she crosses the symbolic midnight into her second year of sobriety.
The following day, she grapples with a “vulnerability hangover. ” Her morning includes a meeting with Ben to fix her computer, during which he stumbles across the document containing her speech.
Caught off-guard, Emma lies, saying it’s a eulogy for a friend’s boyfriend. Though Ben doesn’t press her, the moment underscores her deep-rooted fear of being fully seen.
He eventually asks her out. She declines, though it’s clear that something is beginning to shift inside her.
In a session with her AA sponsor, Lola, Emma confronts the difficulty of living a life split between her sober identity and her professional persona. Her father unexpectedly calls, reigniting unresolved emotional wounds and exposing lingering resentment from their fraught history—much of it tied to his own substance use and absence.
Emma begins to understand that her sobriety isn’t just about not drinking, but about learning how to show up for herself and others without hiding.
Encouraged by Vanessa, a colleague at work, Emma decides to attend Friday Night Drinks with coworkers. The bar scene triggers memories of her drinking days, but she manages to navigate it sober.
She finds unexpected solidarity with Vanessa, who supports her sobriety, and a complicated emotional moment with Ben, who shares a non-alcoholic drink with her. Their conversation reveals glimpses of mutual understanding and growing attraction.
However, Emma’s discomfort escalates when colleagues create a dating profile for her without full consent and an executive, Mitchell, sends her inappropriate messages after matching with her. Emma’s attempt to balance workplace professionalism, personal safety, and the navigation of a sober social life proves challenging.
As Emma’s personal life becomes more unsettled—her mother announces she’s moving in with a new boyfriend—she starts to feel destabilized. A visit from her estranged father to help paint her apartment brings a mix of nostalgia, unease, and fragile connection.
Though their time together is tentative, it culminates in an act of symbolic closure when he sketches her apartment—a shared moment of stillness before he leaves again.
Emma is reluctantly drawn into planning the company holiday party as part of the “Fun Team,” further entangling her with Ben and Mitchell. Online interactions with Ben become more frequent, yet she remains anxious about how little her social media reveals about her true self.
Mitchell’s inappropriate advances intensify, creating a backdrop of discomfort that shadows her professional life.
Her relationship with Ben deepens when he invites her to lunch. Their quiet park date is both awkward and intimate, cemented by a small but caring gesture when she helps him clean bird droppings off his coat.
Emotional barriers start to crumble when Emma confesses that she lied about the funeral speech. Ben’s reaction is kind and nonjudgmental.
They continue spending time together, and Emma slowly opens up about her sobriety. Their honesty fosters a connection that feels safe and hopeful.
Things take a painful turn when Emma learns that her father is dying of liver cancer. The news sends her into shock, surfacing long-buried trauma and helplessness.
She chooses to call him from the Brooklyn Bridge, a place symbolic of her reckless past. Their phone conversation is raw, revealing his fear and their shared regrets.
It marks a turning point in Emma’s grief. Rather than relapse, she stays grounded in her recovery, recognizing how far she’s come.
Despite her mother’s resistance, Emma decides to visit her dying father. Her sponsor suggests leaning on AA, but Emma needs to process things on her own for now.
She goes home for a farewell gathering her stepmother calls “One last sunrise,” where she finally sits with her father and hears him express love and remorse. They stargaze together.
He calls Taurus her star, granting her a rare moment of acknowledgment.
As her father’s health declines, Emma finds strength in unexpected places. Ben continues to offer calm, consistent support.
He opens up about his own grief over a friend who died from an overdose, creating a deeper bond between them. Emma discovers her father’s AA Big Book, learning that he had once tried to get sober.
This complicates her understanding of him, replacing past bitterness with compassion.
Emma shares at a local AA meeting for the first time with full honesty. Surrounded by others in grief and recovery, she realizes she’s no longer trying to be the opposite of her father, but embracing the path they both once tried to walk.
She and Ben grow closer, their emotional connection giving way to physical intimacy—her first experience of sober sex. It’s meaningful and affirming, not colored by shame or confusion.
In the final pages, Emma marks two years of sobriety. She’s no longer haunted by the idea of being Sober Emma as a half-life.
Instead, she’s come to see it as her full self—flawed, grieving, hopeful, and surrounded by love. Through loss, she has learned how to live not just without alcohol, but with authenticity.
Characters
Emma
Emma is the emotional and narrative heart of Definitely Better Now, and her character undergoes a profound transformation throughout the book. She begins as a guarded, self-contained young woman navigating the demanding world of Manhattan marketing while quietly celebrating a year of sobriety.
Emma is someone who has curated multiple personas—“Work Emma,” “Fun Emma,” “Sober Emma”—in a desperate bid to compartmentalize her life and protect herself from the vulnerability of being truly seen. Her sobriety, though a badge of survival, is also a source of shame in her professional and social spheres, compelling her to lie, withhold, and evade intimacy.
As the story progresses, Emma wrestles with the ghosts of her past, particularly her fractured friendship with Susannah, and the family dysfunction inherited from her father’s alcoholism. Yet sobriety forces her to confront not only the consequences of addiction but also the complex emotional terrain of reconnection and self-worth.
Through budding romance with Ben, difficult exchanges with her parents, and her slow reintegration into both the workplace and sober community, Emma evolves into someone capable of embracing authenticity. By the end, she no longer defines herself by shame or self-protection, but by a brave, if imperfect, commitment to truth, love, and connection.
Ben
Ben is Emma’s gentle yet emotionally resonant counterpart in Definitely Better Now, providing a subtle but crucial foil to her internal chaos. As the IT director at her firm, he enters her world through an innocuous tech repair, but gradually emerges as a deeply sensitive and grounded presence.
Ben’s emotional maturity is underscored by his own quiet history of loss—particularly the death of his best friend Jason from an overdose—which aligns him with Emma in a place of shared grief and unspoken resilience. While initially reserved and cautious, Ben reveals layers of empathy, patience, and vulnerability that make him not just a romantic interest, but a safe space for Emma’s unfolding self.
His actions—from choosing seltzer at the bar to tenderly listening to Emma’s admission about her sobriety—speak volumes about his integrity and respect for her boundaries. Unlike many of the other men in her orbit, Ben does not seek to control, seduce, or judge; instead, he meets Emma with honesty and care, allowing her to grow without pressure.
His steadiness and sincerity offer Emma the rare opportunity to build a relationship based not on fantasy or codependence, but on mutual understanding and emotional clarity.
Emma’s Mother
Emma’s mother is a complicated blend of concern, control, and emotional fatigue, shaped by years of navigating the unpredictable tides of her daughter’s addiction and recovery. In Definitely Better Now, she is portrayed as someone whose love often manifests in misguided ways—through awkward matchmaking attempts, passive-aggressive comments, or overbearing emotional presence.
Having shared a home with Emma for years, especially during her descent into alcoholism, her behavior reflects both deep-seated protectiveness and a subtle desire for Emma to return to a more “normal” version of life. The mother’s eventual decision to move in with a boyfriend and leave their shared apartment is a seismic shift for Emma, threatening the only anchor of stability she has known.
Yet, despite their tensions, she remains a steadfast figure, offering comfort when Emma receives devastating news about her father. Her complexity lies in the interplay between maternal warmth and unresolved grief—particularly toward Emma’s father, whose abandonment continues to echo through her demeanor.
In the end, she provides a counterbalance to Emma’s introspection, showing that healing often requires both distance and return, resentment and love.
Emma’s Father
Emma’s father casts a long shadow over her emotional landscape in Definitely Better Now, embodying both the generational inheritance of addiction and the ache of familial abandonment. For most of Emma’s life, he has been a distant figure, his presence more felt through absence and broken promises than through consistent love.
His alcoholism—denied, minimized, and excused over the years—becomes a mirror against which Emma measures her own journey. His terminal illness, revealed late in the narrative, catalyzes a powerful arc of reconciliation and grief.
Their reunion is layered with pain, memory, and tenderness, culminating in one of the most emotionally cathartic moments of the novel: a starlit conversation where he finally sees Emma for who she truly is, and she acknowledges the imprint of his love and loss. The discovery of his AA Big Book after his death reframes Emma’s understanding of him, revealing that he, too, once tried to fight the same demons.
In death, he becomes a paradoxical figure of inspiration—not because he succeeded, but because he tried, and in that effort, Emma finds a new dimension of empathy, clarity, and peace.
Susannah
Susannah, though largely a figure of Emma’s memory in Definitely Better Now, serves as a symbol of loss, betrayal, and unresolved guilt. Once Emma’s best friend and drinking companion, Susannah represents a period of chaotic camaraderie and destructive excess.
Their friendship was intense, co-dependent, and ultimately fractured when Emma, in a jealous and vulnerable state, betrayed her. That betrayal not only ended their friendship but also served as one of the lowest emotional points in Emma’s life—an event that pushed her closer to isolation and, paradoxically, toward sobriety.
A later amends meeting, where Emma attempts to repair the damage, reveals the irreversibility of some losses. Susannah’s wedding photo, glimpsed unexpectedly, becomes a devastating reminder of how much has changed and how far apart they’ve drifted.
She is a figure Emma cannot reclaim, but one who continues to shape her inner life—proof that recovery is not about reclaiming everything lost, but about learning to live with grief and guilt without letting them dictate your future.
Lola
Lola is Emma’s sponsor and one of the few people who truly understands the raw, unvarnished version of her in Definitely Better Now. Wise, direct, and deeply rooted in the AA philosophy of accountability and compassion, Lola acts as both a guide and a mirror for Emma’s growth.
She challenges Emma to confront her fears, especially around honesty and connection, and remains a grounding force even when Emma hesitates to fully open up. Unlike others who approach Emma’s sobriety with trepidation or misunderstanding, Lola treats it as both sacred and practical—a daily commitment that demands not just abstinence, but truthfulness.
Her advice to lean on the AA community during moments of personal crisis reflects a belief in the collective strength of shared experience. Though Emma doesn’t always follow her counsel immediately, Lola’s presence is a constant reminder that healing is a communal act, and that relapse doesn’t begin with a drink—it begins with silence and shame.
She anchors Emma in a system of care that transcends friendship or therapy, offering a path that is as spiritual as it is disciplined.
Vanessa
Vanessa is a minor but meaningful presence in Definitely Better Now, offering Emma a glimpse of what friendship can look like outside of the codependent dynamics of her past. As a coworker who is unexpectedly supportive of Emma’s sobriety, Vanessa provides a contrast to the more judgmental or oblivious colleagues in their office.
Her reaction at the bar—open, accepting, and non-intrusive—helps create a safe space for Emma to exist authentically in a social setting. Though her gesture of setting up a dating profile for Emma without full consent is a clear boundary overstep, it’s also indicative of a certain well-meaning social naïveté.
Vanessa represents the kind of normalized, sometimes clumsy, but ultimately harmless interaction that Emma must learn to navigate as she rebuilds her social identity. She is neither savior nor antagonist, but a middle-ground figure through whom Emma can begin to relearn the rhythms of friendship—ones not built on crisis or control, but on shared humanity.
Themes
Sobriety and the Complexity of Recovery
Sobriety in Definitely Better Now is not treated as a straightforward success story or a singular achievement. Instead, it is depicted as a daily negotiation—a dynamic state of being that encompasses more than abstaining from alcohol.
Emma’s first year of sobriety is framed through a constellation of emotional challenges: shame, vulnerability, anxiety, and the ever-present threat of relapse. The Watch, where she delivers a speech marking her anniversary, is not portrayed as a triumphant closure but rather as the threshold into a more complicated chapter of self-awareness.
The fragility of Emma’s sobriety is underscored by the rituals and mental vigilance she must uphold, like drafting her speech in secret or scanning bar menus for non-alcoholic options. Even when sobriety gives her clarity, it also exposes her to new discomforts.
Emma doesn’t romanticize her transformation; instead, she acknowledges that sobriety reopens old wounds, amplifies social insecurities, and magnifies the emotional weight of everyday interactions. This nuanced depiction emphasizes that recovery is not a static endpoint but a recalibration of identity, relational habits, and emotional response.
When Emma learns about her father’s attempt at sobriety through his AA Big Book, her perspective shifts again—sobriety becomes a shared but uneven terrain between them, neither heroic nor tragic, but human and deeply complex. Emma’s refusal to drink even in the face of deep grief shows not moral superiority, but a hard-earned reorientation of self.
Sobriety, then, becomes both the architecture and the mirror of her emotional life—fragile, unfinished, but real.
Identity and the Performance of Self
Emma constructs multiple versions of herself—Work Emma, Fun Emma, Real Emma, Sober Emma—each tailored to specific settings and expectations. These selves are not simply masks she wears but adaptive responses to an internalized fear of exposure.
Her professional environment is particularly hostile to vulnerability; typing out her AA speech in secret while at work underscores how deeply she compartmentalizes her identity. The dissonance between who she is and who she performs to be is felt most acutely in social scenarios like Friday Night Drinks, where her decision to remain sober is met with curiosity, awkwardness, or misunderstanding.
The presence of Ben threatens these borders. His quiet empathy and growing closeness force Emma to confront the artificiality of her compartmentalization.
The act of coming clean about her sobriety to him is less about revealing a fact and more about testing whether she can integrate these selves into one coherent person. Even her social media presence becomes a site of existential tension—scrubbed, curated, void of emotional history.
The creation of a dating profile without her full consent further complicates this performance, reflecting how others often impose identities onto her. Emma’s journey is marked by a painful but necessary erosion of these compartments.
As she begins to speak openly in meetings, rekindle familial connections, and accept love without pretense, her identity moves from fractured and performative to integrated and sincere.
Shame, Secrecy, and the Fear of Exposure
Much of Emma’s behavior is shaped by an undercurrent of shame that finds expression in her secrecy. The fear that others will judge her for her past drinking, her mistakes, or her mental fragility makes her hypervigilant.
When Ben stumbles upon her speech on the computer, Emma instinctively lies, claiming it’s a eulogy—a moment that exposes how quickly shame overtakes her ability to trust. Her shame is not only about her alcoholism, but also about her perceived failure to have healed perfectly, to have moved on “gracefully.
” She worries about being pitied, misunderstood, or worse—defined entirely by her lowest point. Even in moments of professional and personal affirmation, like her Watch speech or her flirtations with Ben, Emma struggles to believe that she deserves her current life.
This fear is compounded by external forces: a workplace culture that discourages vulnerability, a romantic interest who might see her as damaged, and a family history where emotional transparency was scarce. Mitchell’s inappropriate advances at work represent a different, predatory form of exposure—one where her appearance and presence are misread and objectified.
The arc of the narrative gradually reveals that healing from shame requires its opposite: radical honesty. When Emma finally speaks her truth in a local AA meeting after her father’s death, it’s not a performative confession but a quiet, dignified act of self-acceptance.
In that moment, secrecy loses its power, and shame begins to dissolve.
Grief and Reconciliation with the Past
The death of Emma’s father is the emotional climax of the story, but its power lies not only in the event itself, but in the long shadow of unresolved grief that precedes it. Their relationship is rooted in disappointment, abandonment, and addiction—an emotional landscape that Emma has spent years avoiding.
When news of his terminal illness arrives, it collapses her emotional defenses, not by force but by inevitability. The Brooklyn Bridge phone call and their final deckside conversation become sacred moments where emotional honesty is exchanged not in sweeping gestures but in simple admissions.
Her father’s acknowledgment of her, his regrets, and their stargazing create a brief but profound space of connection. The discovery of his AA Big Book reorients her view of him—not as a villain to define herself against, but as a deeply flawed man who tried, who struggled, and who ultimately failed in some ways but also left behind a quiet legacy.
This reframing does not erase the pain of his absence or his addiction, but it allows Emma to stop being tethered to an ideal of reconciliation that depends on transformation. Instead, she accepts reconciliation as the ability to see the truth clearly and to still choose compassion.
Her father’s death becomes a mirror reflecting her own growth: the same person who once collapsed in shame after her first Watch now carries loss without alcohol, with clarity, and with the ability to mourn without unraveling.
Romantic Connection as Risk and Possibility
Emma’s budding relationship with Ben is not written as a traditional romance but as a reflection of her psychological readiness for intimacy. From their early, tentative interactions to the emotionally loaded kiss in Union Square and eventual physical closeness in a motel room, each milestone reflects Emma’s evolving capacity to trust and be seen.
Ben is not a savior figure; he is someone who brings his own grief, history, and emotional complexity. His quiet presence provides Emma the space to be herself, even when she’s unsure what that self is becoming.
Their shared vulnerabilities—his past as a soldier and her recovery—form a language of connection that is more powerful than flirtation or chemistry. The emotional safety Ben offers stands in stark contrast to the workplace toxicity embodied by Mitchell.
Emma’s resistance to Mitchell’s advances is not just about rejecting impropriety; it is about asserting her right to control how and when she is seen, touched, and loved. The real risk with Ben isn’t harm—it’s being known.
That risk, in Emma’s world, is monumental. Her eventual decision to be physically and emotionally intimate with him, without the shield of alcohol or detachment, signals a radical shift.
Love, in this narrative, is not a reward for healing; it is a space where healing continues, where wounds are seen but not judged, and where presence becomes the ultimate form of commitment.
Community and the AA Fellowship
The AA community in Definitely Better Now serves as a recurring touchstone in Emma’s life, shaping not only her sobriety but also her evolving understanding of what support looks like. These meetings are not grand spectacles but modest, imperfect gatherings of people trying to live differently.
Emma’s early experiences in AA are marked by ambivalence: she attends, she listens, but she rarely speaks. Her sponsor, Lola, plays a crucial role in gently guiding her toward deeper engagement without forcing disclosure.
The culture of shared experience becomes a lifeline, especially when other structures—family, romance, work—feel precarious. Her decision to finally speak in a local meeting after her father’s death is a moment of convergence: past, present, and future align in a single act of speech.
In doing so, she reclaims her story not as one of shame, but of survival and growth. The AA tradition of Watches, the shared lingo, and the invisible threads connecting speakers across meetings all represent a kind of secular ritual through which Emma finds belonging.
Even her resentment and awkwardness within the community become part of her process—it’s not a perfect support system, but it’s a real one. When she discovers her father had once attended AA, it retroactively deepens the emotional resonance of the fellowship; the community becomes not only a source of strength, but a bridge between generations of struggle.
In this light, AA is not a backdrop, but a vital structure within which Emma learns how to live in truth, among others.