8 Powerful Addiction Memoirs that Sober People Love

This book serves as a beacon to anyone who’s looking to change their relationship with alcohol. In this tale, author Catherine Gray describes the surprising joys you can experience when you ditch drinking. She covers why alcohol is so detrimental to a person’s well-being, and how your life and health can blossom without it. Ultimately, books about addiction serve as a bridge, connecting people in recovery with the wisdom, empathy, and insights of those who have walked the same path.

#2 – Smashed: Story of a Drunken Girlhood by Koren Zailckas

They are a source of strength, empowerment, and understanding, providing the knowledge that recovery is not just possible but a pathway to a more fulfilling and joyful life. Best-selling memoirist Mary Karr longs for the family and stability that eluded her in childhood. When she marries and becomes a mother, she finds that with so much to lose, she still cannot control her drive to drink. A car accident, the slow and painful unraveling of her marriage, a stay in a mental hospital and an eventual spiritual awakening finally free Karr from the substance that nearly took her life.

Reborn on the Run: My Journey from Addiction to Ultramarathons

Although I think they can all be considered addiction memoirs, and share a familial resemblance with other examples of that form, none of them feel remotely imprisoned by its conventions. And yet—even though each of these books goes its own way, never hesitating to flout a trope or trample a norm to serve its story—they don’t go in terror of the conventions either. Where the story they have to tell echoes others, they let us hear that echo. One characteristic I think I discern in the best addiction memoir is a certain humility that doesn’t strive after innovation for its own sake. Serious addiction has a way of annihilating your sense of exceptionalism, stripping away your autonomy and character, and reducing you to the sum of your cravings.

In Pain: A Bioethicist’s Personal Struggle with Opioids

• Dr. Jamison is one of the foremost authorities on manic-depressive (bipolar) illness; she has also experienced it firsthand.
• Why else would I have been mesmerized by When a Man Loves a Woman or 28 Days in my early 20s?
• Our culture puts alcohol at the center of most social activities.
• This is an approachable recipe book using everyday healthy ingredients to make delicious alcohol-free drinks for every occasion.
• There’s a climactic epiphany snatched from a debauched bottom, then an earnest striving toward sobriety.
• Authors Amanda Eyre Ward and Jardine Libraire met shortly after getting sober.

In a brilliant narrative style, she constantly flips back and forth between her personal story and the history of the alcoholic creatives who came before her, their lives intersecting in fascinating ways. Carr understands addiction and the personal destruction that leads you to it. He made me think about what I was doing in ways nobody else had done before. Reading is so much more than just a temporary distraction from the reality of your daily life. The books you choose can help you gain a new perspective on your own struggles or better understand what the people you care about are going through. Here is best addiction memoirs Mark’s life childhood as the son of a struggling writer, as well as the world after Mark was released from a mental hospital.

Alcohol Lied to Me by Craig Beck

Zailckas’ story is similar to the millions of youths who engage in binge drinking at dangerously young age. Throughout the course of the book, Zailckas reveals the underlying emotional pain and lack of confidence that she tried to express through excessive drinking. She also closely examines both the internal Twelve-step program and external factors that drove her to seek help in ending her destructive cycle of binge drinking.

• She offers generous vulnerability in her lessons and encourages you to find your gift within.
• Unvarnished accounts of the havoc and disaster of addiction, whether played for farce or pathos, are as reliably found in the most artistically ambitious addiction memoirs as in the least.
• Sober celebrities, reality stars in rehab and the sudden ubiquity of mocktail recipes… the culture is shifting, and abstinence is in.
• I said this convention concerned reading more directly than writing, but—since all good writing involves deep sensitivity to the reader’s experience—the two things are ultimately inseparable.

The heady thrill of meeting with her psychiatrist, Dr. Adam N. Kohl―whose relationship with Cree is at once sustaining and paralyzing―comes to be the only bright spot in her days. Feb. 9, 2021 – In early recovery, the stories of others are an invaluable resource. We hear stories around our recovery meetings, read stories online, and find hope in the stories of individuals who have gone through the same thing as us. The life of a high-powered New York City magazine editor is undeniably stressful.

• Memoirs about addiction are recommended by Matt Rowland Hill, an expert on the genre (he read dozens of them while undergoing rehab himself) and author of Original Sins.
• I very consciously looked to Karr for inspiration in how to write candidly yet lovingly about an imperfect family.
• In Blackout, Sarah clearly explains why there’s nothing benign about it and describes what is actually happening to the brain when we reach that point of alcohol-induced amnesia.
• With a reputation for hilarious honesty, as read in previous memoirs detailing her struggles with everything from mental illness to single life, Bryony Gordon is true to form in this detailed account of her alcohol-fueled downward spiral.

The Sober Diaries by Clare Pool

There are countless books that have been written about addiction and recovery. The following list recounts 10 of the most notable books on this subject. In this memoir, beloved 20/20 anchor Elizabeth Vargas goes beyond her struggle with alcoholism to look at how her experiences and her history led her to the moment where she admitted in an interview that she was, in fact, an alcoholic. She recalls her childhood experiences with anxiety, her time in rehab, and the guilt she felt as a mother who was seemingly never able to find the balance between work and family life.