Jim Beach
Author
Author
The Gift of the Exile will be available in late spring 2026.
In September 2025, a contested vote separated an online A.A. community from the home group it had grown with for over five years. Within two weeks, fifty-four of those members had signed on to start over. Across eight Saturdays of formation meetings, they wrote a membership statement word by word, chose their name by ranked-choice vote, and built a new group governed by consensus as it sought its conscience. The Gift of the Exile is the story of what they lost, what they reclaimed, and what any community can learn from how they did it.