In a new interview with the New York Times, Anne — who turned 41 in November — opened up about aging and shared one of her proudest achievements.
“There are so many other things I identify as milestones,” she told the outlet. “I don’t normally talk about it, but I am over five years sober. That feels like a milestone to me.”
Anne first talked about giving up alcohol during an appearance on The Ellen DeGeneres Show in early 2019, when — inspired by her then-2-year-old son, Jonathan — she revealed that she’d recently decided to stop drinking for the next 18 years.
“I’m gonna stop drinking while my son’s living in my house,” she said. “I don’t totally love the way I [drink], and he’s getting to an age where he really does need me all the time in the mornings… I did one school run one day where I dropped him off at school, I wasn’t driving, but I was hungover, and that was enough for me. I didn’t love that one.”
In a subsequent interview with Modern Luxury, Anne emphasized that her sobriety wasn’t “a moralistic stance,” but had more to do with her hangovers and how they were impacting her work and family life.
“I just want to make this clear: Most people don’t have to do such an extreme thing. I don’t think drinking is bad,” she told the outlet in April 2019. “It’s just the way I do it — which I personally think is really fun and awesome — is just not the kind of fun and awesome that goes with having a child for me.”
And while she said in 2019 that she could potentially see herself drinking again once her kids are grown up, it sounds like Anne is feeling good five years into her sobriety.
“My personal experience with it is that everything is better,” she told Vanity Fair in March. “For me, it was wallowing fuel. And I don’t like to wallow.”
