Part memoir and part how-to, many former drinkers credit Alcohol Lied to Me with helping them to finally beat the bottle. Functioning and fun-loving, this author’s love for wine hardly seems like a problem until her attempt to cut back proves much more challenging than she had imagined. She begins to share her attempts to sober up anonymously online and ends up finding support, community, and the strength to battle her addiction in the most unlikely of places. Stefanie Wilder-Taylor has always had a complicated relationship with alcohol. The esteemed and late New York Times columnist David Carr turned his journalistic eye on his own life in this memoir, investigating his own past as a cocaine addict and sifting through muddied memories to discover the truth.

Loud in the House of Myself: Memoir of a Strange Girl by Stacy Pershall

She also writes at length about social and emotional repercussions of losing memory. When women are in a blackout, things are done to them,” one expert tells her. The late New York Times media critic David Carr wrote another notable “addiction memoir that’s not a normal addiction memoir” with 2008’s Night of the Gun, in which he investigated his own descent into cocaine addiction.

The best memoirs of drug and alcohol addiction

It’s a deep meditation on something like growing up poor, or having a debilitating mental illness, or living in a racist America. Here, we dig into some of the most influential memoirs of all time. Sometimes it seems that around every corner there is someone pretending to function who’s ingested bottles of whiskey or sniffed lines of cocaine when no one was looking. She looks after her children, enjoys drinks with friends, and is a successful writer. But she recognizes her relationship with alcohol is different than that of the casual-drinking moms in her friend group.

Will We Ever Understand Addiction?

Dr. Maté shares the powerful insight that substance use is, in many cases, a survival mechanism. When something awful happens to us, our way to cope is to turn off and even turn against ourselves, as a method of resilience. The book discusses drug policies, substance use treatment, and the root causes of substance use. best alcoholic memoirs More than anything, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts provides a voice of kind generosity and understanding to anyone who is looking to learn more for themselves or a loved one. This powerful memoir follows Cain’s life as she navigates a substance use disorder, incarceration, and sex work over the course of 19 years.

The information on this website is not intended to be a substitute for, or to be relied upon as, medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of a physician or qualified health provider with questions regarding a medical condition. If you are grieving while in recovery – you are in the middle of one of life’s most difficult experiences.

Audiobooks to Support You in Your Addiction & Recovery Journey

When she realizes sobriety is her only path forward, she keeps a diary of her road to recovery, from finding a sponsor to discovering a new social life not centered around alcohol. The Empathy Exams author’s stunning book juxtaposes her own relationship to addiction with stories of literary legends like Raymond Carver, and imbues it with rich cultural history. The result is a definitive treatment of the American recovery movement—a memoir in the subgenre like no other.

Recovery-related books, AKA ‘quit lit,’ can be great for seeing how others have navigated similar experiences, gaining tips that can help you along your journey, and learning more about the science behind substance use. This Naked Mind by Annie Grace is one of the most loved sobriety books ever written. In it, Annie talks about her own experiences with addiction while keeping things deeply relatable to anyone who’s questioned alcohol’s role in their life. Employing an integrative, 7-step program for addiction, The Addiction Recovery Skills Workbook helps readers to better understand the roots of their substance misuse issues.

• Maybe you’re a pretty moderate drinker, but you feel like booze just isn’t your friend anymore.
• Shortly after accepting she had a problem with alcohol, she thought a lot about how some people are lucky enough to be able to drink normally without it controlling their life.
• Funny, informative, and authentic, Poole has a welcoming light-hearted voice on the very serious topic of substance use.
• Wurtzel reveals how drugs fueled her post-breakout period, describing with unbearable specificity how her doctor’s prescription of Ritalin, intended to help her function, only brought her down.
• Meanwhile the reader is tacitly licensed to enjoy all this mayhem and calamity with a degree of voyeuristic relish and, equally, to take a vicarious pleasure in the author’s recklessness and transgression.

This powerful book narrates his ups and downs, setbacks, and unimaginable challenges in recovery. Ultimately, Augusten tells the story of how his most difficult experiences led him to getting clean and helping others. Interestingly, Russell Brand was fourteen years sober at the time of writing Recovery. Overall, this book is perfect for anyone who’d enjoy an entertaining and surprisingly uplifting story about ending the cycle of addiction. In Recovery, Russell Brand shares an amusing yet valuable story of addiction and the path to sobriety.

• Michael Pond has treated people with addiction for years as a psychotherapist but finds himself homeless, broke and alone when he succumbs to his own battle with alcohol use disorder.
• Whereas my progress was from religion to addiction, Mary Karr’s was the other way around.
• 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.
• Recovery also develops from these same forces and that’s why one-size-fits-all treatment doesn’t work.

After fifteen weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, a magazine investigation found much of the book to be fabricated after they couldn’t find Frey’s mugshot. Police records didn’t match his story, and Frey later admitted to embellishing key facts. Substance abuse can be just as destructive for loved ones as for addicts themselves, as journalist David Sheff’s devastating memoir of his teenage son’s methamphetamine addiction attests. He worries ceaselessly, continuously anticipating another late-night phone call, from Nic, from an emergency room, from the police. 10,000+ authors have recommended their favorite books and what they love about them.Browse their picks for the best books aboutalcoholism,substance abuse,androck music. Drinking felt like freedom, part of her birthright as a strong, enlightened twenty-first-century woman.

• Tara Westover’s memoir shook the world when it came out in 2018, and has since spent more than 125 weeks on The New York Times Best Seller List.
• She started researching The Recovering while completing her doctorate at Yale; her dissertation focused on the literature of alcoholism and recovery, and The Recovering contains the research from that academic project, retooled into a literary one.
• We have a handful of interviews devoted to books about addiction.
• Here is Mark’s life childhood as the son of a struggling writer, as well as the world after Mark was released from a mental hospital.

We Are the Luckiest: The Surprising Magic of a Sober Life by Laura McKowen

The author, Kristi Coulter, engages the reader with her deep insight and quick wit. This combination makes her story heartening, funny, and thought-provoking at the same time. Coulter shares her struggles with alcohol use and also the challenges of getting sober. This is a very refreshing book in the world of recovery memoirs. In the literature world, you can find books about addiction and recovery in a genre known as “quit lit.” Quit lit is full of authors sharing their personal experiences and resources to help others who are where they’ve been.