If you’re looking to break free of the social pressure of cocktails and bar hopping, this is the book for you. Not about her sobriety—about how hard-won it was, how necessary to her survival as both a writer and a woman—but about the value of a story that isn’t unique at all. Jamison is concerned from the outset that her book will not escape “the tedious architecture and tawdry self-congratulation of a redemption story”—that it will, in short, be boring. She needn’t have worried; such is her command of metaphor and assonance that she could rivet a reader with a treatise on toast.
“We Are the Luckiest: The Surprising Magic of a Sober Life”
- Here, Nikki shares the diary entries—some poetic, some scatterbrained, some bizarre—of those dark times.
- She provides actionable steps for anyone looking to drink less or none at all.
- Take our short alcohol quiz to learn where you fall on the drinking spectrum and if you might benefit from quitting or cutting back on alcohol.
- Dr. Brown gives us tools to shape and share our thoughts in the most honest way possible, which can be a crucial step towards healing.
- Probably the least-known work of the Brontë sisters, by the least-known sister, Anne’s second and last novel was published to great success in 1848.
If you’re looking for more sobriety resources, check out Monument’s therapist-moderated alcohol support groups and anonymous online forum. 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.
The books I picked & why
For example, he explains why stating alcohol is poison and repeating the tagline “Never Question the Decision” can help you change your unconscious thoughts about alcohol, and shift your mindset. This book is a great place to start if you’ve been feeling sober curious. Reading We are the Luckiest by Laura McKowen can quite possibly save your life.
- Before I was old enough to simply walk out of the house and literally escape, I hid inside my room and read entire afternoons away, happily lost.
- This is one of the best memoirs on alcohol recovery in my opinion.
- It is easy to use addiction as a crutch, a way to build plot or signal “here’s a bad dude,” but it is much harder to accurately and humanely depict the life-warping pain of struggling with alcoholism.
- Iwamasa injected Perry with ketamine at least six times a day in the days before his death and at least three times on Oct. 28, 2023, before Perry was found dead in a jacuzzi in his Pacific Palisades home.
alcoholism,
Early recovery has the quality of vigorous exercise, as though each repetition of a painful moment… serves to build up emotional muscle. I’ll mention some more in relation to the books I’ve chosen, but these are, I think, the four most fundamental ones. Ahead, see the 15 stories of struggle, failure, recovery, and grace that have moved us the most. This popular subgenre is filled with timeless, brilliant entries.
Ultimately, Augusten tells the story of how his most difficult experiences led him to getting clean and helping others. 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. best alcoholic memoirs Beyond being informative, this powerful book has helped countless people dive deeper into their relationship with alcohol and make positive changes in their lives. Ditlevsen’s trilogy, by contrast, plunges us into the perspective of a succession of her former selves. When she’s a child, we’re presented with the world as a child might see it.
2000’s Cherry picked up the story by showing Karr as an adolescent, already dabbling with drugs and profoundly lacking any sense of belonging. Ditlevsen’s failure of nerve, causing her to wrap up three volumes of the most trenchant and unillusioned autobiography ever written with a feeble daydream, is easily explained. She surely felt the reader (and perhaps the author) had endured too much pain in the preceding story to be sent away without solace. The fact that, in so doing, she effectively obeyed a formal convention of addiction memoir helps explain how many of those conventions arose. The fact that even a great artist like Ditlevsen can capitulate to such dictates, if only once, demonstrates how powerful they are.
Support Lit Hub.
From her childhood in suburban Slough to her chaotic formative years in the London music scene, we follow her journey to Australia, where she experiences firsthand treatment facilities and AA groups,…show more. Journalist Jenny Valentish takes a gendered look at drugs and alcohol, using her own story to light the way. Mining the expertise of 35 leading researchers, clinicians and psychiatrists, she explores the early predictors of addictive https://ecosoberhouse.com/ behaviour, such as trauma, temperament and impulsivity. Dry is a heartbreaking memoir of Augusten Burrough’s story of addiction, beginning with an intervention organized by his coworkers and boss and his first bout of sobriety. Alcohol Explained is a spectacularly helpful guide on alcohol and alcoholism. Author William Porter uses the science of the brain and psychology to help you understand the effects of alcohol on your body and mind.
Highsmith manages to humanely portray a murdering, rich, hapless drunk so that near the end, one inevitably feels more complicated and ravaged by both Highsmith and Bruno’s trickery. Often, when we think of books about addiction and specifically alcoholism (in my case), we think of important, tell-all works of nonfiction. Memoirs like Sarah Hepola’s Blackout, Augusten Burroughs’ Dry, and Drunk Mom by Jowita Bydlowska are recent, searing examples of first person accounts of being drunk and then, eventually, being sober. There are also the self-help books, the AA manuals, the well-meaning but often dry (no pun, and so on) tomes to help one acquire clarity and consistency in a life where addiction often creates chaos and disorder. Having been in recovery for many years, and working here at Shatterproof, I often get asked to recommend books about addiction. So here’s a list of my all-time favorite reads about substance use disorders.
Books by Matt Rowland Hill
“One is it demonstrates a level of callousness,” she explained. These ebooks can only be redeemed by recipients in the US. Recovery is not the end; it’s a beginning filled with possibilities for fulfillment. 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. We ask experts to recommend the five best books in their subject and explain their selection in an interview.