Recovery Reading List: 17 Best-Selling and or Award-Winning Books on Addiction and Recovery

Elie Wiesel was a teenager when he and his family were forced to Auschwitz concentration camp. Night is a brutal reminder of what evil looks like — and one of the most influential memoirs of human history. It’s the first in a trilogy, with Dawn and Day following, was translated into 30 languages, and is one of the most iconic works of Holocaust literature.

  • Taking readers through the ups and downs of her career, Wilson’s memoir ultimately teaches self-love with laughter along the way.
  • I very consciously looked to Karr for inspiration in how to write candidly yet lovingly about an imperfect family.
  • Meanwhile solidarity and communion are often touchstones among recovering addicts.
  • Blackout shows how you can grow into the person you want to be and leave alcohol in the past—no matter where you are now.
  • 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.
  • Only he has no recollection of how he got there—and he’s not sure he wants to remember either.

The Best Novels on Drug Addiction, recommended by Shazia Omar

  • A great starter book for anyone looking to begin changing their relationship with alcohol.
  • Tragic, inspiring, humorous and heart-wrenching—these true accounts of the struggle for sobriety will move you and maybe inspire you to see what the sober life is all about.
  • Gilbert helps us understand the noisy voice in our head, which can often be our greatest critic.
  • His first full-length memoir follows him from a seemingly endless rock bottom to a passion for running that leads him out of a life of self-destruction and chaos.
  • Winning career accolades by day and drinking at night, Knapp brings you to the netherworld of alcohol use disorder.

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. However, even after achieving national prominence as a radio personality, Charlamagne still found himself paralyzed by anxiety and distrust. Now, in Shook One, he is working through these problems—many of which he traces back to cultural PTSD—with help from mentors, friends, and therapy. Through therapy, he’s figuring out how to get over the irrational fears that won’t take him anywhere positive. Here is Mark’s life childhood as the son of a struggling writer, as well as the world after Mark was released from a mental hospital. At the late age of twenty-eight and after nineteen rejections, he is finally accepted to Harvard Medical School, where he gains purpose, a life, and some control over his condition.

Be Ready When the Luck Happens: A Memoir

Writers approach historical fiction from many different angles, explains the novelist Paul Carlucci—whose new, evocative novel is set in colonial-era Canada. Here, he recommends five of his favourite literary historical novels that manipulate form, character and setting in interesting ways while simultaneously summoning the atmosphere of the past. best alcoholic memoirs Matt Rowland Hill was born in 1984 in Pontypridd, South Wales, and grew up in Wales and England. His writing has appeared in The Guardian, The Independent, New Statesman, the Telegraph and other outlets. Early recovery has the quality of vigorous exercise, as though each repetition of a painful moment… serves to build up emotional muscle.

7 Memoirs About Addiction by Women Writers – Electric Literature

7 Memoirs About Addiction by Women Writers.

Posted: Tue, 05 Dec 2023 08:00:00 GMT [source]

“God and Starbucks: An NBA Superstar’s Journey Through Addiction and Recovery”

1author pickedWoman of Substancesas one of their favorite books, and they sharewhy you should read it. 3authors pickedGirl Walks Out of a Baras one of their favorite books, and they sharewhy you should read it. 6authors pickedDrinkingas one of their favorite books, and they sharewhy you should read it. 1author pickedI Swear I’ll Make It Up to Youas one of their favorite books, and they sharewhy you should read it. 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 turn in his journey.

best addiction memoirs

Wishful Drinking, Carrie Fisher

In other kinds, as in novels, endings are artifices of form, and the trick is not to let this feel true for the reader. 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. Life doesn’t provide moments of satisfying narrative resolution. How do you craft an ending that makes narrative sense but which feels complex and inconclusive in the way life so often is? 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.

  • Jerry Stahl was a writer with significant and successful screenwriting credits — Dr. Caligari, Twin Peaks, Moonlighting, and more.
  • Before he was a feted columnist for The New York Times, David Carr was a cocaine addict, frequenter of crackhouses, low-level drug dealer, heavy drinker, and brawler.
  • We see the world as Cree did―turned upside down, the richness of life muted and dulled, its pleasures perverted.
  • For now I’ll mention one more convention of addiction memoirs, although it differs slightly from the others because it’s more directly concerned with how they’re read than with how they’re written.

Woman of Substances: A Journey Into Drugs, Alcohol and Treatment

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best addiction memoirs

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