Between Breaths reveals how she lived in denial and secrecy for years before finally entering rehab and a life of sobriety. 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. I read this book before I became a parent and was floored, but have thought about it even more since. It is the heartbreaking and astute account of Sheff’s experience of his son, Nic’s, addiction and eventual recovery.
Drinking: A Love Story by Caroline Knapp
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. In his first novel, Burroughs gives a vivid, semi-autobiographical account of heroin addiction in the early 1950s. 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.
Heavy: An American Memoir by Kiese Laymon
- I’ll mention some more in relation to the books I’ve chosen, but these are, I think, the four most fundamental ones.
- Memoirs of mental health and addiction can also fill in the gaps of knowledge that those on the outside need to relate to those struggling with mental illness and addiction.
- In his first novel, Burroughs gives a vivid, semi-autobiographical account of heroin addiction in the early 1950s.
- Carr delves into his past, meticulously investigating his own story to unravel truths about his battle with addiction, recovery, and even his experience with cancer.
- His writing has been published in Pitchfork, The Guardian, Wired and Hazlitt.
Eventually, hospitalized and diagnosed as bipolar, she was prescribed a medication that came in the form of three pink pills—lithium. Born to Persian parents at the height of the Islamic Revolution and raised amid a vibrant, loving, and gossipy Iranian diaspora in the American heartland, Melody Moezzi was bound for a bipolar life. At 18, she began battling a severe physical illness, and her community stepped up, filling her hospital rooms with roses, lilies and hyacinths. “Charlotte Pierce-Baker did everything right when raising her son, providing not only emotional support but the best education possible.
Day Treatment vs. Inpatient Programs
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. Meanwhile solidarity and communion are often touchstones among recovering addicts. 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. Prozac Nation is one of the most influential memoirs about mental illness, often credited as one of the first modern memoirs in the wide-ranging genre we know today.
Achieve Sobriety with Virtual IOP
Most are forgettable and forgotten, but some accomplished authors—like Caroline Knapp and Sarah Hepola—have created very good books by bringing real skill to the standard formula. And James Frey’s 2003 A Million Little Pieces achieved huge success (commercially, if not artistically) without straying far from the form’s conventions—except, as it later turned out, a longstanding convention that nonfiction shouldn’t be fiction. Rather than dwelling on the pain of addiction,Tracey focuses on her journey of recovery and rebuilding her life, while exposing the failings of the American rehab system and laying out a path for change. Starting with the first step in her recovery, Tracey re-learns how to interact with men, build new friendships, handle money, and rekindle her relationship with her mother, all while staying sober, sharp, and dedicated to her future. Based on Fisher’s hugely successful one-woman show, Wishful Drinking is the story of growing up in Hollywood royalty, battling addiction, and dealing with manic depression.
- With the same wit and candor found in his other popular works, we follow the writer from a rehab reality check back to the bustling city, where he must learn to navigate life on the wagon.
- Stefanie Wilder-Taylor has always had a complicated relationship with alcohol.
- Books diverging from the genre’s hallmarks are already easy to find.
- She also writes at length about social and emotional repercussions of losing memory.
Oar Health Member Stories: A Family History of AUD
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 https://ecosoberhouse.com/ 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.
Quit Like a Woman by Holly Whitaker
He viscerally paints the picture of the hope-tainted despair, anguish, and havoc that addiction wreaks on an entire family. Ryan Hampton is a former White House staffer and opioid addict who is now a national recovery advocate with ten years clean. Overall, the message is uplifting, giving hope of new directions and possibilities best addiction memoirs for treatment. “Heart Berries is a powerful, poetic memoir of a woman’s coming of age on the Seabird Island Band in the Pacific Northwest. Michael Pond has treated people with addiction for years as a psychotherapist but finds himself homeless, broke and alone when he succumbs to his own battle with alcohol use disorder.