As an impatient she becomes a literary and diagnostic detective determined to crack the case of her 20-year migraine. Laura founded The Luckiest Club in 2020 and it’s now home to thousands of members worldwide. Together, we’re getting free from alcohol and saying yes to a bigger life. Weekly inspiration, new podcasts and music, reading and watching recommendations, and encouragement for your week. Plus up-to-date info on upcoming courses, events, podcast interviews that Laura is hosting or attending.
What are the 10 stages of addiction?
- Stage 1: Denial.
- Stage 2: Avoidance and Defensive Behavior.
- Stage 3: Crisis Building.
- Stage 4: Immobilization.
- Stage 5: Confusion and Overreaction.
- Stage 6: Depression.
- Stage 7: Behavioral Loss of Control.
- Stage 8: Recognition of Loss of Control.
But it’s easy to resonate with his emotions surrounding addiction, no matter your vice. 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. It is the account of his relapse after being sober for Sober House some time. He discusses the denial he experienced in the beginning of his relapse that allowed it to progress. Nic describes the secrecy and feelings of guilt that came up as a result of knowing he was disappointing his family, friends, and fans. He also shares about how he eventually gained the courage to own up to his relapse and begin the recovery process over again.
Signs You Are A Woman With A Drug Or Alcohol Problem
A 74-year old Native American found me at ten months in recovery. He showed me a path to follow, including opening a house of healing for other women. His teachings, spiritual principles, and a lot of work helped me achieve 32 years in recovery. Terry achieved long-term sobriety at one time, and she helped many women.
Even without a panacea, the rhythm in the memoirs gives me hope that my family’s stories, too, could be like Jamison’s or Karr’s or Knapp’s, told from a distance, removed by time. The comfort in these memoirs is in the repetitive story, a model that can be duplicated. They had enough space from their drinking years to mold a narrative arc from entropy, finding meaning, or at least a story that was useful to someone who had been through the same thing. Addiction narratives are full of people who did die, but also people who lived, who told their stories and helped others through their own. I feel like we’ve been stuck in the middle chapters of a drinking life like a skipping record. This part of the story is simultaneously melodramatic and routine, a slow and dangerous sink. Similar to Cherry, Ohio is also a devastating depiction of the aftermath of returning from war and getting swept up by the opioid epidemic and is set in Ohio.
2. I’m Black and I’m Sober: The Timeless Journey of a Woman’s Journey Back to Sanity by Chaney Allen
These authors have shown incredible bravery and resilience as they share their most painful experiences and deepest vulnerabilities in public. Have you ever read a book that perfectly blended memoir with cultural history, literary criticism, and reportage? The book re-examines the stories that we tell about addiction from the perspective of Jamison’s own struggles, and also includes her ongoing conversation with literary and artistic geniuses such as David Foster Wallace and Billie Holiday. Having been in recovery for many years, and working here at Shatterproof, I often get asked to recommend books about addiction.
I really liked this book because it focuses a lot on her spiritual crisis and how it related to her alcoholism. She is a Christian, as am I, and I often battled in my head with being a Christian and being an alcoholic. Eventually my faith brought me to my knees and I began my journey of sobriety after having a spiritual experience. There’s a new kind of thinking in the recovery world, and all of that is thanks to McKowen’s upcoming memoir . After quitting her career in order to dedicate more of her time to her family, Clare Pooley found herself depressed and feeling sluggish best addiction memoirs with a daily drinking habit to keep her company. With beautiful prose, Miller’s memoir is about recovering from a lifetime of difficult relationships and a home situation that seems desperate at times. Still, there is redemption at the end of the road as she details a complicated yet loving relationship with her parents, despite the odds. Recounting the progression from an idyllic childhood to a monstrous meth addiction, Amy Dresner explores her recovery journey in this insightful memoir. When Cupcake Brown was 11, her mother choked to death during a seizure.
Skeptical Parents, Cringey Hometown Dates, and Declarations of Love
In this tale of self-loathing and self-sabotage, readers can follow Marnell as she battles her inner demons and falls down further into despair — yet eventually making it through to the other side. A lot of recovery memoirs end when the writer gets sober, leading us to wonder, “What happened next? ” British writer Catherine Gray tells us, and the good news is that what happened next for her was pretty amazing. Maybe you’ve been leaning on alcohol too much to try to cope with the COVID-19 pandemic.
In this dark but incredibly comedic memoir, Smith tells all about her story and the road she finally took to recover from her perpetual numbing. Beneath her perfect life and incredible success hides a girl who thought she had cheated her way out of her anxiety and stress via alcohol, only to find that she has surrendered to the powers of this magical liquid. She is the perfect example of a high-functioning alcoholic whose life looks perfect on the outside, even as it crumbles on the inside. She’s just someone who uses alcohol to muster up the courage, and, well, survive life. This is just how it has always been since her introduction to Southern Comfort when she was fourteen. This book is beautiful, compelling, and a riveting retelling of Jackson’s life as well as those of his male relatives who have gone through similar journeys. You’ve probably already heard the name Augusten Burroughs or at least his first memoir , Running with Scissors. But in this memoir, Burroughs recounts his very regular and ordinary life of working in advertising and enjoying a drunken Manhattan life—until his employers force him to attend rehab. Here, Nikki shares the diary entries—some poetic, some scatterbrained, some bizarre—of those dark times. Joining him are Tommy Lee, Vince Neil, Mick Mars, Slash, Rick Nielsen, Bob Rock, and a host of ex-managers, ex-lovers, and more.
Big Girl: How I Gave Up Dieting and Got a Life by Kelsey Miller
5,387 authors have recommended their favorite books and what they love about them. Browse their picks for the best books aboutalcoholism,substance abuse, androck music. This was the first book I read on this subject, and I instantly could relate to her feelings. She made a huge impact on me and is someone I will always be grateful to. 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. I wanted clarity, answers to questions she wouldn’t or couldn’t give me, answers I couldn’t find from studies on rodents. Addiction is in many ways a dual life shrouded in half-truths and omissions.
On the list of 5 best addiction memoirs — for its historical importance mainly. It’s quite a weird book though, I think?
— Matt Rowland Hill (@mattrowlandhill) July 12, 2022
Electric Literature is a 501 non-profit organization founded in 2009. We publish your favorite authors—even the ones you haven’t read yet. A darkly comic, honest, and completely relatable inside look at high-functioning addiction in the world of corporate law-a sort of ‘Sex and the Psych Ward.’ It’s inspiring, informative, and impossible to put down. Excessive drinking has numerous impacts on your body and mind, ranging from mild to severe. Learn which signs to look out for, and how to care for your well-being. Her work has appeared in many publications, including The New Republic, the LARB, The Believer, TLS, the CBC, and Lit Hub, where she is a contributing editor. She is also a columnist and contributing editor to Crime Reads, which she helped found. She is currently finishing her MFA at Goucher College where she is working on a collection of essays called The Impatient an account of her transformation from literary critic to a desperate patient to defiant impatient. Using her critical skills and the writings of fellow migraineurs like Sigmund Freud, Susan Sontag, Edgar Allan Poe, and Virginia Woolf, she created an idiosyncratic history of migraine within the current context of chronic illness.
In a relatable style, Lush explores the ongoing addiction crisis amongst middle-aged females. In 1992, Mishka Shubaly survived a mass shooting at his school, his parents divorced, his father abandoned him, and he swore he would right all the wrongs for his mother. Instead, he began a love affair with the bottle and barely crawled out, but he did, and we cheer him on at each twist and best addiction memoirs turn in his journey. Dr. Roy took the time to talk to us about harm reduction, the effectiveness of addiction medications, and the inspiring resilience she sees in her patients. When she looked around she couldn’t help but notice that she was very much not alone. Lush explores the ongoing addiction crisis amongst middle-aged females through Cohen’s lenses in a very relatable style.
Substance-fueled revelry begets accelerating recklessness—blotted-out nights, disastrous sexual encounters, careers skidding into limbo, glee followed by horror. It’s fun until it is scary-fun until it is scary, an entropic joyride that ends in an inevitable, spectacular crash. There’s a climactic epiphany snatched from a debauched bottom, then an earnest striving toward sobriety. For the most part, the story arc is tidy, allowing readers the rubbernecky thrills of second-hand vice with a dose of hard-won redemption as a chaser. It’s like scarfing a bacon cheeseburger and washing it down with a shot of wheatgrass. Among several of Leslie Jamison’s books about addiction, The Recovering describes Jamison’s experience with addiction. In this book, she also highlights the struggles of addiction based on the lives of addicts famous for their talents, including John Cheever, John Berryman, Jean Rhys, and Amy Winehouse.
- In this darkly comic and wrenchingly honest story, Smith describes how her circumstances conspired with her predisposition to depression and self-medication in an environment ripe for addiction to flourish.
- Her struggle is beautifully portrayed, and you also get to emerge with her on the other side once she regains her sobriety once more.
- Mary Karr is known for her wit and charming style, and in these pages, she discusses pretty much all her life struggles, not only those with alcohol.
But humans recover from all manner of trials and they do so in ways that defy the traditional arc of addiction lit – a hero’s journey through denial to rock bottom and back up again. Cat Marnell began to unknowingly “murder her life” when she became addicted to ADHD medication her psychiatrist father prescribed to her at the age of 15. Her memoir explores the progression of her addiction, from Xanax to cocaine, ecstasy, and prescription drug abuse. She recounts how she manipulated her doctors, lied to her loved ones, and her challenges with maintaining her career during active addiction.
Especially not when you’re a crucial part of the cultural phenomenon called Star Wars. Things get even more interesting when you have to do all this while battling manic depression, addiction, and visiting all sorts of mental institutions as a result. This is a darkly comic book about the slow road through recovery, really growing up, and being someone that gets back up after screwing up. When women are in a blackout, things are done to them,” Hepola writes.
Only a small number of people—a boyfriend and her best friends of the moment—knew the truth. Every person who struggles with addiction has a different story. And yet, there is something relatable and valuable within every person’s journey. For some, hearing stories about addiction might be triggering when in the thick of their own personal battles. But for many, many others, audiobooks about addiction and recovery help them feel less alone and provide a source of inspiration and empowerment. If you’re among those who find listening to stories about addiction and recovery helpful and reassuring, here are some heartfelt, well-researched, and highly recommended options. The Recovering is a wide-ranging and frequently excellent book about addiction, but it is stymied when it attempts to be too zoomed-out. Addiction, with its cyclical copping, its single-minded want, is a monotonous thing.