11 Gripping Books About Alcoholism And Recovery

For additional info on other treatment providers and options visit It is profoundly sad, remarkably tender, and fueled by a sense of love and reverence that only a child knows. The bestselling author of Running With Scissors takes on his years as an alcoholic adman in this harrowing yet hilarious personal account among a depressing landscape of drunkenness, crack addiction, and the harsh realities of AIDS. Annie’s book is so important (and she’s a wonderful human to boot). She brilliantly weaves psychological, neurological, cultural, social and industry factors with her own journey.

From helping you relax to giving you a glimpse into another’s thoughts, reading can be a transportive activity. In fact, reading is such a powerful tool that books and poems have been used to help heal mental and psychological disorders. Although everyone’s addiction and recovery stories are different, the core of these experiences is often the same.

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This way, each disorder can be analyzed separately as well as together, and an understanding of their relationship can be determined. Before we dive into sobriety books, let’s address how alcohol use disorder relates to mental health in the first place. It wasn’t until he and his mother had both gotten sober, Mohr says, that they could repair their relationship. It’s literary lore that The Basketball Diaries is actually adapted from Jim Carroll’s real teenage diaries, and while this could just be PR invention, it wouldn’t be too surprising if it were true.

Nevertheless, she was a force for good in the mental health community. Before we jump into the list, however, a word of caution is in order. While none of the following memoirs seek to glorify or excuse drug or alcohol abuse, it is certainly true that all or most of them delve pretty deeply into the darkness experienced by a person with a substance abuse disorder.

Questions Youll Get Asked This Holiday Season If You Quit Drinking

Things get even more interesting when you have to do all this while battling manic depression, addiction, and visiting all sorts of mental institutions as addiction recovery books a result. This is a darkly comic book about the slow road through recovery, really growing up, and being someone that gets back up after screwing up.

From her first taste and throughout her young adult life, her increasing dependence on alcohol would lead to hospital trips, blackouts, and dangerous and destructive tendencies that eventually helped her see she should quit drinking for good. Find treatment facilities and programs in the United States or U.S. In addition to these services, the Port St. Lucie hospital also offersadultandsenior mental health programs, and apartial hospitalization program.

Unwasted: My Lush Sobriety By Sacha Z Scoblic

In keeping with his commitment as an activist for mental health and drug rehabilitation, Brand offers something of a self-help approach in Recovery. Looking for honesty spiced with humor and flavored with some ideas for strengthening your commitment to sobriety? Mary Karr has been credited with launching the spate of confessional memoirs in the ‘90s with her now-seminal memoir, The Liars’ Club. The anecdotes that comprise much of Lit don’t always have a direct link to her alcoholism, but Karr’s facile melding of lyrical language with candid revelations result in prose of breathtaking self-awareness. What undergirds Lit is not, in fact, the alcoholism that paralyzed Karr for so many years , but the journey to faith that her alcoholism catalyzed. In her literary debut, Carrie Fisher creates the character Suzanne Vale to narrate her personal struggles with having fame and being around the famous. Suzanne/Carrie turns to addictions and rehabs, learning to live without drugs to help solve life’s problems.

When author Kristi Coulter stopped drinking, she began to notice the way that women around her were always tanked, and how alcohol affected those around her. Iranian American novelist Porochista Khakpour’s elegant, vibrant memoir is primarily about being sick and trying to find answers. But it also details her journey with addiction to the pills prescribed to treat her insomnia and her struggles with mental health.

The 10 Best Addiction Memoirs

In this book, McKowen talks about her personal story along with how she faced the facts, the question of AA, and dealing with other people’s drinking. Although she doesn’t sugarcoat how difficult sobriety can be (and yes, it’s not without its struggles), she continues to write about the many blessings of living an honest life without the debilitating shame of addiction. Author Erica Garza grew up in a strict Mexican household in East Los Angeles.

We respect your privacy, and all information shared with us is completely confidential. Alumni praise the evidence-based treatment, plentiful amenities, and compassionate staff at this Southern California facility that aims to guide clients on a path of physical, mental, and spiritual health. A bestselling memoir about the author’s unconventional, poverty-stricken upbringing at the hands of eccentric, nomadic parents, one a frustrated artist and the other a brilliant, alcoholic. Here, Nikki shares the diary entries—some poetic, some scatterbrained, some bizarre—of those dark times. Joining him are Tommy Lee, Vince Neil, Mick Mars, Slash, Rick Nielsen, Bob Rock, and a host of ex-managers, ex-lovers, and more. Vote up the best binge-drinking memoirs, and be sure to let us know what you think in the comment section.

While based on her own sobriety journey, McKowen’s candidness has connected with thousands of readers thus far who have credited the book with helping them face getting sober. There are many resources available to help you reach your goal to stop drinking. Among them, literature supporting recovery from alcohol abuse, often referred to as “quit lit,” is a popular choice for informative support within the recovery community. Clegg seemed to have everything going for him—a good career, a committed partner, friends who loved him—and yet he was unable to maintain his sobriety after rehab.

We Are The Luckiest: The Surprising Magic Of Sober Life

Blackouts are a special horror and humiliation, and not all drinkers experience them. In this memoir, Hepola shares the science of blackouts and traces her own drinking life, focusing on the blank spaces where memories should be – piecing together nights out, near misses, bad decisions and also the kindnesses of strangers. Hepola’s tone is often funny and loose but she writes with a journalist’s precision and the book reads almost like a thriller.

In her early 20s, writer Jamison started drinking daily to ease her chronic shyness and deal with the stress of getting her master’s degree at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Identifying with accomplished writers whose creativity seemed to thrive in a haze of intoxication, she fell further into the depths of alcoholism before hitting rock bottom. After failed attempts at sobriety, she found a combination of treatments—attending meetings, sharing her story and the 12-step AA program—that worked for her. Despite being published less than a year ago, Jamison’s memoir is a gritty and honest must-read. In this piece of quit lit, the reader is challenged to quit drinking alcohol for 30 days to re-evaluate their assumptions about alcohol. During the 30-day journey, Grace offers insight into addiction, includes exercises for mindfulness, and discusses how to recognize destructive habits connected to drinking. Alcohol Explained by William Porter takes a science-based approach to discussing alcohol addiction.

Maybe you enjoyed a successful Dry January, so you’re questioning alcohol’s role in your life. Maybe you’re a pretty moderate drinker, but you feel like booze just isn’t your friend anymore. Maybe none of these things apply to you when it comes to alcohol, but there’s something else in your life that’s not a positive force. When she was drunk, writer and editor Hepola was a creative force. But she was also reckless, often finding herself soberly apologizing for things she didn’t remember doing, waking up next to men she didn’t remember meeting and caring for bruises she didn’t remember getting. Subtitled “Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget,” Hepola’s debut memoir is a vulnerable story about refocusing her attention from finding her next drink to learning how to love herself without liquid enhancements. King is a writer, lawyer and NPR contributor whose memoir chronicles her decades-long downward spiral into alcoholism, from her small New England hometown to seedy restaurants where she waitressed and cockroach-ridden lofts where she lived.

She wasn’t self-medicating and was able to truly feel her feelings and live honestly. We Are the Luckiest is a life-changing memoir about recovery—without any sugarcoating. From inspirational bestsellers to celebrity memoirs, these tales of addiction and recovery offer advice, encouragement, and tips to help you face the challenges of sober living head-on. Janelle Hanchett chronicles the story of embracing motherhood through the devastating separation from her children at the height of addiction. Her quest for sobriety includes rehabs and therapy—necessary steps to begin a journey into realizing and accepting an imperfect self within an imperfect life.

Gripping Books About Alcoholism And Recovery

Without scare tactics, pain, or rules, she offers a strategy to give you freedom from alcohol. By addressing causes rather than symptoms, it is framed as a permanent solution rather than lifetime struggle. It removes the psychological dependence; allowing you to easily drink less . Parents often deal with feelings of helplessness, frustration, guilt and more as they watch their child battle addiction. This moving story discusses addiction from a parent’s perspective. Many parents of addicts can relate to the father in this memoir.

Provides information about alcohol and drug addiction to children whose parents or friends’ parents might have substance abuse problems. Advises kids to take care of themselves by communicating about the problem and joining support groups such as Alateen. Situated in the heart of St. Lucie County, our retreat-like environment provides a tranquil setting in which our patients can heal. We offer 24 hour mental health services provided by licensed professionals in various disciplines. The hospital has varying programs that can be tailored to patient needs, as well as the traditional 28 day inpatient treatment program for patients with dual diagnosis issues. In We Are the Luckiest, author Laura McKowen emphasizes appreciating the gift of sobriety instead of lamenting the loss of casual alcohol use.

The story reads fast going from dialogue between characters to narratives, as the process of addiction is told through Fisher’s voice. Miller’s memoir, her first book, describes a bizarre life growing up with a heroin-addicted father; a passive, hand-wringing mother; and an abusive brother.

• Her story tells the story of a minister’s daughter who grew up poor in Alabama, eventually moving to Cincinnati and falling into substance use disorder, all while raising children.
• What makes a book a must-read for anyone who has been affected by addiction?
• I too was a high-functioning professional with a drinking and cocaine addiction.
• She had already beat alcohol in the past and there was nothing wrong with celebrating the birth of her child with some champagne, right?
• Mary Karr’s memoir, set in Boston , chronicles her path toward sobriety with crackling honesty and wry humor as she effectively connects her family dynamics as a child living in a chaotic home to her adult state of perpetual chaos.

With incredible wit and skill, Sacha Scobie manages to tell you both what alcohol used to mean for her and how her sober life is going now. She relied on alcohol, so now that this is no longer an option she has to re-evaluate everything in her life, which leads to some great and very witty observations on her newfound life.

If you’ve never read St. Aubyn’s fantastic Patrick Melrose novels now is the time to do so, as the TV version starring Benedict Cumberbach has already aired in the UK and airs in the US on Showtime on May 12. St. Aubyn’s books trace Melrose’s life from living with his rich, terrible parents—dad is actively abusive, mom is a checked out New Ager—to becoming a hardcore drug addict. The passages about scoring and using drugs in the Addiction novels are as harrowing as in any memoir, and Melrose’s many attempts to clean himself up are moving and frustrating in equal parts. Ann Dowsett Johnston brilliantly weaves her own story of recovery with in-depth research on the alarming rise of risky drinking among women. The marketing strategies employed to sell booze to women are as alarming as the skyrocketing number of women who qualify as having alcohol use disorders.