The 9 Most Moving Memoirs About Addiction

It’s a memoir of her addiction to alcohol, and her subsequent recovery, and her conversion to Catholicism. Bettina takes a stand against her tyrannical husband, the man who nobody dared disobey without fear of retaliation. In this often heart-wrenching look into the life of one mother yearning for freedom and for her best alcoholic memoirs children’s happiness, you’ll find out just what a mother is willing to sacrifice for the sake of her children. New in recovery, a chance encounter with Gray Hawk, a 74-year old Native American, showed her that healing herself would include looking within, taking Steps, and creating a house of healing for other women.

This book provides an eye-opening perspective on and insight into how racism and white supremacy can lead to intergenerational trauma. Resmaa Menakem shares the latest research on body trauma and neuroscience, as well as provides actionable steps towards healing as a collective. These insights can introduce a whole new dimension of healing while on a sobriety or moderation journey.

The Big Chill: How to Tell People You’re Not Drinking

He viscerally paints the picture of the hope-tainted despair, anguish, and havoc that addiction wreaks on an entire family. 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 is one of triumph and loss, professional success and personal failure, finding your way to sobriety, falling into relapse, and starting all over again. 2009’s Lit is the volume that deals with Karr’s alcoholism and desperate search for recovery. It can be read alone, but why would you want to miss out on reading all three in order?

At its center is the loss of Strong’s cousin, Owen, early in 2020 to brain cancer, and how, in the depths of the pandemic, the comedian processes her grief over her cousin’s death along with the strangeness of the Covid era. A powerful meditation filled with life lessons and a splash of humor. In full appreciation of the genre, we’ve curated a list of a few recent releases intermixed with titles that have already established themselves in years past. Crying in H Mart is a must-read—it’s like nothing else in the category.

Biographies, Memoirs, & Quit Lit

A person of extraordinary intellect, Heather King is a lawyer and writer/commentator for NPR — as well as a recovering alcoholic who spent years descending from functional alcoholism to barely functioning at all. From graduating cum laude from law school despite her excessive drinking to languishing in dive bars, King presents a clear-eyed look at her past and what brought her out of the haze of addiction. Have you ever felt like you were too much for someone else, either too strong, too loud, or too much of a presence? There’s nothing like digging into a good memoir and immersing yourself in someone else’s story. Memoirs are a slightly different genre than autobiographies, which often span an entire life—instead, they build the narrative around a specific moment or series of defining events in the writer’s life.

• In Recovery, Russell Brand shares an amusing yet valuable story of addiction and the path to sobriety.
• A 74-year old Native American found me at ten months in recovery.
• She often blacked out, waking up with a blank space where four hours should be.
• Decades later, Cat reminisces about those days with Marlena and learns to forgive herself and move on from those days.

Many addiction memoirs evince a desire to repay the reader for all the dark places the story has taken them with a thumpingly joyous ending. For these reasons, in many addiction memoirs the end is the weakest part. Quit Like a Woman takes a groundbreaking look at America’s obsession with alcohol. It explores how society’s perception and targeted marketing campaigns keeps groups of people down while simultaneously putting money into “Big Alcohol’s” pockets. Whitaker’s book offers a road map of non-traditional options for recovery. It is well-researched, educational, informative, and at times mind-blowing.

Why did I love this book?

One of the first of its kind, Drink opens our eyes to the connection between drinking, trauma and the impossible quest to ‘have it all’ that many women experience. A captivating story of a highly accomplished well-known professional in the spotlight who was brave enough to share her story. Elizabeth Vargas takes off her perfectly poised reporter mask and shows you the authentic person behind the anchor desk. She shares her personal lifelong struggle with anxiety, which led to excessive substance use, rehab, and her ultimate triumph into recovery.

• Second, they contain sections describing the lurid drama and dreadful effects of addiction in unsparing detail.
• A stunning debut novel about a short but intense friendship between two girls that ends in tragedy, Marlena pinpoints both what it feels like to be the addict and what it’s like to be the friend of one.
• She highlights not only her relationship to alcohol, but also key takeaways from her many attempts to get sober.
• But when she returned to it — the day after she told her husband she needed to stop drinking — she read it cover to cover.

While self-help books are not a solution for long-term recovery, they can be very helpful for your “emotional recovery”. There is no replacement for a comprehensive treatment program to help anyone struggling with an alcohol or substance use disorder, but reading true stories from others with similar experiences can be an excellent complement to treatment. Have you noticed that our world is increasingly obsessed with drinking?

How to Murder Your Life by Cat Marnell

Although she makes faltering progress in building a simulacrum of grown-up life, her relationship with alcohol—“I had an appetite for drink, a taste for it, a talent”—steadily overtakes everything. By the end of her drinking she is reduced to crouching on a stairwell outside her apartment, glugging whisky with her one-year-old son and failing marriage inside. But even more than how it captures the bleakness of alcoholism, what I most value in this book is how she narrates her recovery with such brutal honesty. This is no joyful, linear skip towards sobriety and redemption. She keeps showing up to 12-step meetings, even when they do nothing for her.