Maybe you’ve been leaning on alcohol too much to try to cope with the COVID-19 pandemic. 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. Augusten Burroughs’ memoir covers a decade-long battle with sobriety, with a variety of wins and losses along the way.
Irritable Hearts: A PTSD Love Story by Mac McClelland
Recovery is a tumultuous process, and recovering individuals often benefit from learning about the experiences others have undergone in their quest to live substance-free. 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. Recovery isn’t just about quitting a substance; it’s also about reconnecting with oneself. Many books emphasize spiritual sobriety and the importance of nurturing one’s whole being—emotionally, spiritually, and mentally.
The Biology of Desire: Why Addiction Is Not a Disease by Marc Lewis
“Sobriety often felt like gripping onto monkey bars with sweaty metallic palms,” she writes, describing how it was to quit drinking again after a relapse. Jamison gets sober almost exactly halfway through the book, and avoids the dull tone that can creep into the “sober sections” of these narratives. “The first day of my second sobriety, I crashed my friend’s car into a concrete wall,” she writes, as if to bang home how wild, mistake-filled, and exciting life without drinking can be. The Recovering’s insistence on the need for a different sort of addiction story is a tad unfair. Books diverging from the genre’s hallmarks are already easy to find.
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Now, it’s up to Kan herself to reach for the dreams society told her she could never achieve. Inheritance tells the story of Dani Shapiro, who learns that the man she called Dad for 50 years isn’t her biological father after taking a genealogy test. Shapiro’s novel is a poignant examination of identity and what happens when one’s wholeness and understanding of who they are is completely uprooted. From her excessive drinking and smoking to disordered eating and falling for the wrong men, Caroline Knapp is seemingly attracted to anything and everything that isn’t good for her. She drinks to cope with life’s difficulties, like the death of her parents, but it’s only after twenty years of dependency that she sees how the “cure” to her stress best recovery memoirs and anxiety is the real problem.
Vargas’s memoir has been described as “honest and hopeful,” and that tone comes across in the author’s accomplished and moving narration of Between Breaths. Through reading this book I came to better understand myself, my body’s physical reactions, and my mental health. It’s a tough book to read due to the descriptions of horrific traumas people have experienced, however it’s inspirational in its message of hope. Van der Kolk describes our inner resilience to manage the worst of life’s circumstances with our innate survival instinct.
Alcohol Lied to Me by Craig Beck
While This Naked Mind shows that you have the tools to reprogram your mind and Substance abuse live a life free from alcohol, Cold Turkey offers practical steps to get you through the first month of recovery. Like Annie Grace, Mishka Shubaly uses his own messy history with alcoholism and recovery to show just how difficult the road to recovery can be. The author argues that “one-size-fits-all” plans, like 12-step programs, do not set you up for success. Rather, to become truly free from addiction, he recommends finding a way to define sobriety in your own terms. Shubaly narrates his work exclusively for Audible, and his reading feels like a good friend telling you a story and offering advice.
- In this tale, author Catherine Gray describes the surprising joys you can experience when you ditch drinking.
- Maybe you’ve been leaning on alcohol too much to try to cope with the COVID-19 pandemic.
- Dr. Maté shares the powerful insight that substance use is, in many cases, a survival mechanism.
- She documented that months-long journey in this Pulitzer Prize-winning book, piecing together the evidence to paint a loving, long-unseen picture of her sister.
- My guess is that most addiction memoirs involve some kind of compromise between the author’s aesthetic and ethical impulses.
Her breakthrough arrives as much through exhaustion as some kind of epiphany. She discovers in Catholicism a spirituality that makes sense to her and seems to keep her sober, but she doesn’t proselytise or become too holy for irony. Instead she presents herself as a kind of Godly schmuck, chronically slow on the spiritual uptake. For readers who’ve followed her over three searingly honest books, where survival let alone redemption often seemed unlikely, her final discovery of a bruised and hard-won peace feels like an instance of what can only be called grace. Wurtzel’s book clearly illustrates the link between mental health issues and addiction.
- This book offers inspiration for alcohol-free drinks and activities, and tangible tips on how to navigate a month (or beyond!) without alcohol.
- Authors like Russell Brand, Tiffany Jenkins, and Amy Dresner offer relatable, often humorous accounts of addiction and recovery.
- For more resources in sobriety, online alcohol treatment programs like Ria Health can help as well.
- Ironically, Charlamagne’s fear of failure—of falling into the life of stagnation or crime that caught up so many of his friends and family in his hometown of Moncks Corner—has been the fuel that has propelled him to success.
- Belle’s consistent messaging on our faulty thinking led to a major mindset shift for me.
- Stephanie Foo is a writer and radio producer, most recently for This American Life.
The Addiction Recovery Workbook: Powerful Skills for Preventing Relapse Every Day
In Recovery, Russell Brand shares an amusing yet valuable story of addiction and the path to sobriety. As a wildly famous celebrity, he struggled with more than just alcohol. But it’s easy to resonate with his emotions surrounding addiction, no matter your vice. The Sober Diaries follows the narrative of author Clare Pool’s journey in quitting drinking.
Three years sober, Jowita Bydlowska celebrates the birth of her first child with a glass of champagne, and just like that, she is spiraling back into the life of drinking she thought she had escaped. Bydlowska depicts life as a new mom while under the influence with honesty and humility, discovering she can overcome the seemingly impossible for her child. Cupcake Brown was 11 when she was orphaned and placed into foster care. She grew up with a tragic journey, running away and becoming exposed to alcohol, drugs, and sex at a young age, and leaning on those vices to get by. A Piece of Cake is her gripping tale of crashing down to the bottom and crawling back to the top. In college, my friends and I joked that it’s not alcoholism until you graduate.
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