7 Powerful Addiction Memoirs

He made me think about what I was doing in ways nobody else had done before. Knapp was a writer by trade, which makes her story all the more captivating. She’s a successful, privileged woman and, at the same time, fundamentally flawed and messy. I felt so much shame towards the end of my drinking and couldn’t talk to anyone about it.

Blackout by Sarah Hepola

• Van der Kolk describes our inner resilience to manage the worst of life’s circumstances with our innate survival instinct.
• Memoirs are often the very best way to learn about an individual and his or her experiences, as the audience gets an up close and personal account of his or her life and journey from a very personal point of view.
• The ‘sober curious‘ movement has spawned non-alcoholic bars in cities as different as Nashville and New York, zero-proof liquors and a whole lot of memoirs written by addicts in recovery.
• Carr’s investigation into his past self also reveals a dark side that is shocking even by the grisly standards of addiction memoirs; he beat women.
• But then she falls for Booker, and her aunt Charlene—who has been in and out of treatment for alcoholism for decades—moves into the apartment above her family’s hair salon.

She takes the reader on a very humbling journey through her recovery and experience with AA where she (rightfully so) gets knocked off her high horse and into a reality that I believe saves her from herself. 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. Because alcoholics and drug users have notoriously terrible memories, he went back and interviewed the people in his life who had been there to try to piece together what really happened. This is the second addiction book I read at the beginning of my sobriety, and I loved it for vastly different reasons. There were successful, smart people out there who shared these same struggles. I know I’ve already touched on the importance of books in my recovery journey, but let me explain a little more.

Recovery by Russell Brand

The Sober Diaries is one of the best books in the quit lit category. Funny, informative, and authentic, Poole has a welcoming light-hearted voice on the very serious topic of substance use. This book serves as a beacon to anyone who’s looking to change their relationship with alcohol. This is a lesser known series of essays on the intersection of alcohol and womanhood.

• 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.
• Quit Like a Woman takes a groundbreaking look at America’s obsession with alcohol.
• 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.
• In addition, the book offers an unflinching look at the impact of addiction and the challenging journey toward recovery.
• I’ve dug into memoir after memoir, tiptoed into the hard science books, and enjoyed the fiction from afar.

Laura June on Representations of Addiction in Fiction

This book is a great place to start if you’ve been feeling sober curious. I could not put this book down (literally), talk about gut-wrenching honesty and not holding anything back. When I worked in beauty, Cat was a beauty editor at Lucky and xoJane.com, so I knew of best memoirs about alcoholism her. I found this book uncomfortable at times and very funny at other times.

I chose Atlas of the Heart because it touches on the important theme of second chances. (And for good reason!) Atomic Habits offers practical strategies for making meaningful changes to your habits and routines, one tiny step at a time. Punch Me Up to the Gods is a beautifully written series of personal essays that describe Brian Broome’s experience growing up Black and queer in Ohio, and the effect early substance use had on his upbringing. Ditlevsen’s trilogy, by contrast, plunges us into the perspective of a succession of her former selves.

I love her perspective on drinking as an act of counter-feminism—that in reality it actually dismantles our power, our pride, and our dignity as women, though we intended the opposite. She thought the normal people who could drink casually were lucky. She wasn’t self-medicating and drug addiction was able to truly feel her feelings and live honestly. We Are the Luckiest is a life-changing memoir about recovery—without any sugarcoating.

The story explores themes of addiction, love, and sexuality, shedding light on the struggles of a working-class family rarely depicted in fiction. She also courageously opens up about her painful experiences of abuse and her struggles with drug and https://creativefluxdigital.com/why-do-i-have-bruises-after-drinking-6/ alcohol addiction. From the challenges of sober holidays to confronting the replacement of one addiction with another, her story goes beyond the conventional rehabilitation narrative, making it utterly compelling.