Holly Whitaker, in her own path to recovery, discovered the insidious ways the alcohol industry targets women and the patriarchal methods of recovery. Ever the feminist, she found that women and other oppressed people don’t need the tenets of Alcoholics Anonymous, but a deeper understanding of their own identities. Quit Like a Woman is her informative and relatable guidebook to breaking an addiction to alcohol. This is one of the most compelling books on recovery and humanity ever written. Dr. Maté shares the powerful insight that substance use is, in many cases, a survival mechanism.

Survival Math: Notes on an All-American Family by Mitchell S. Jackson

The book helps readers understand the thought process of an addict. They find the writing style witty and lighthearted, making them laugh and smile. The author’s sense of humor is appreciated and the book makes them feel emotional. Starting off on the night of her last drink, Stumbling Home quickly reveals the author’s love-hate relationship with the legal drug. Customers find the book’s content inspirational and insightful. They appreciate the author’s honest and relatable storytelling.

Lit Up: One Reporter. Three Schools. Twenty-four Books That Can Change Lives

Finally, at the behest of his coworkers and boss, he ends up in a rehab that specifically caters to gay and lesbian patients. Once his 30 days are up, he has to figure out how to return to his New York City lifestyle sans alcohol. Burroughs’ story alcoholism is one of triumph and loss, professional success and personal failure, finding your way to sobriety, falling into relapse, and starting all over again. Prolific, brilliant memoirist Mary Karr shines a light on the dark years she spent descending into alcoholism and drug use as a young writer, wife, and mother. As her marriage dissolved and she struggled to find a reason to stay clean, Karr turned to Catholicism as a light at the end of the tunnel. Missed social cues, and could be rude of inappropriate without seeming to notice his effect on others.”

Gripping Books About Alcoholism and Recovery

Matt Rowland Hill was born in 1984 in Pontypridd, South Wales, and best alcohol recovery books grew up in Wales and England. His writing has appeared in The Guardian, The Independent, New Statesman, the Telegraph and other outlets. Well, of course I tried my best to steal from them whatever I could.

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.

• Nobody in my real life could meet that need, so I turned—as I always do when I need comfort, encouragement, or inspiration—to books.
• In his follow-up to his first memoir, Tweak, which dealt with his journey into meth addiction, Sheff details his struggle to stay clean.
• They find the writing style witty and lighthearted, making them laugh and smile.
• 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.

This book provides an amazing framework for embracing our true selves in a society that tries to tell us we’re not already whole as we are. If you struggle with anything related to body image, you won’t regret this read. This book may also help you see sobriety as a gift you’re giving to your body. This book reads like a conversation, and teaches us to get curious.

Lit by Mary Karr

They describe the book as wonderful, well-written, and entertaining. Readers praise the author’s courage to share his story in detail. Carol Weis unveils her two lives in a series of alternating chapters that reveal her transformation. You’ll meet a desperate young woman riddled with anger and fear from childhood trauma, and an equally desperate sober, single mom struggling to push those feelings aside to care for her young daughter.

It can be read alone, but why would you want to miss out on reading all three in order? Although the first two volumes aren’t overtly about Karr’s addiction, they show its makings in her traumatic home life and a lost adolescence. Only a handful of the addiction memoirs of recent decades are also, in my view, singular works of art. Although previous literary history had portrayed a number of addicts, only a very small number could be found outside fiction—although some well known examples were only fictional in a nominal sense. The eponymous hero of novel John Barleycorn (1913) is really its author, Jack London. Don Birnam in The Lost Weekend (1944) is really its creator, Charles R. Jackson.

• But the challenge is particularly acute when the story is about a life that, as the reader well knows, has simply gone on and on beyond the final page.
• Whether we’re talking about books or life, differing opinions can enrich a discussion when they’re offered for the purpose of greater connection and deeper understanding, which we whole-heartedly support.
• I think a trace of that worldview finds expression—again, in the best addiction memoirs—in the form’s tendency to value the authentically commonplace over sensational performance.
• However, her case against In Touch is dismissed shortly afterwards.
• I worked with Erin on a deeply personal essay when she was an editor at Ravishly and was so excited when her memoir was published.

Through the sessions, he came to see how “my parents loved me” and “I wouldn’t be under their roof forever.” “I remembered my writing him a note saying, ‘Dad, I wish things had lined up differently and I hope paying for all my school and stuff didn’t influence that,'” Gates says. He feels the most revealing part of the book was his decision to “explicitly” write that, had he been growing up today, he likely would have been diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder.

The Easy Way to Control Alcohol

For one kind of author, helping the reader is the whole point of writing an addiction memoir; for another, even to consider doing so would be aesthetically fatal. My guess is that most addiction memoirs involve some kind of compromise between the author’s aesthetic and ethical impulses. This ethical dimension (or an aesthetic impurity) is a distinctive aspect of addiction memoir as a literary form. They appreciate the author’s sense of humor and light-hearted writing style. Many readers find the book https://ecosoberhouse.com/article/how-long-does-weed-marijuana-stay-in-your-system/ heartbreaking, sad, and poignant. They appreciate the honesty and rawness of the author’s truths.