Carrie Fisher, Augusten Burroughs, Leslie Jamison: 15 great recovery memoirs

If you struggle with anything related to body image, you won’t regret this read. This book may also help you see sobriety as a gift you’re giving to your body. These pages are filled with the teachings of ancient Stoics such as Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, and Epictetus. Stoicism is an ancient philosophy that believes self-control, courage, justice, and wisdom are the keys to happiness.

Addiction Memoirs

When she realizes sobriety is her only path forward, she keeps a diary of her road to recovery, from finding a sponsor to discovering a new social life not centered around alcohol. 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. It was not due to some kind of lineage of influence reaching back to De Quincey, but the inevitable result of applying the simplifying dictates of storytelling and lowest-common-denominator audience needs to roughly similar experiences.

‘The Woman in Me’

• Everything from inpatient rehab and sober living facilities to peer-support groups and outpatient care can move you or your loved one another step closer to long-term recovery.
• Granted, books certainly can’t replace treatment and professional guidance.
• The project is a subversive rethink of our relationship to introspection—which often asks for order and clarity, like in diary writing—that maps new patterns and themes in its disjointed form.

Even the second time around I found it so viscerally powerful that at times I was overwhelmed. It was every bit as gruelling and heartbreaking as the truth required it to be. And I can’t think of a better compliment to a writer of addiction memoir – or, indeed, any writer – than that. If I have any faith now, it’s in literature’s ability to help us redeem even life’s darkest realities by bringing them into the light. Although previous literary history had portrayed a number of addicts, only a very small number could be found outside fiction—although some well known examples were only fictional in a nominal sense.

The Art of Dying: Writings, 2019–2022 by Peter Schjeldahl (Release: May

• Kylie’s successful wine range includes an alcohol-free option for those not drinking.
• Next you’ve chosen to recommend Tove Ditlevsen’s Dependency, the third book in her Copenhagen Trilogy.
• It’s an inspiring and, at times, unbelievable tale told with unflinching honesty and a heavy dose of self-deprecation.

Some of the most memorable moments in entertainment become more vivid when recounted by those who lived them, and one of the most personal ways to learn what really happened from the perspective of our favorite celebs is by reading their memoirs. Though he largely keeps his sobriety journey private, Baldwin detailed many such experiences in his 2017 memoir Nevertheless. “I’m glad I got [sober] when I did ’cause not many people get sober when they’re young,” he told Good Morning America anchor George Stephanopoulos at that time. Know My Name by Chanel MillerThis should be compulsory reading in every high school. Miller was long known as Emily Doe, the anonymous victim of a sexual assault at Stanford University and the voice behind a viral victim impact statement that changed the terms of debate around consent, violence and rape. With this book she breaks her anonymity, describing the jarring moment of waking into trauma and victimhood, and the onerous emotional and legal battle that followed.

• Like Noughty’s sparkling chardonnay (above), this alcohol-free bevvy has a rich champagne yeastiness that justifies the price.
• You drank; period.” Tell the most comprehensive and glittering story you can about it, your addiction still won’t loose its grip on you.
• Neither are you the author of the story that, according to Jamison and millions of others, may set you free—nor, evidently, is anyone else.
• And I can’t think of a better compliment to a writer of addiction memoir – or, indeed, any writer – than that.

My guess is that most addiction memoirs involve some kind of compromise between the author’s aesthetic and ethical impulses. This ethical dimension (or an aesthetic impurity) is a distinctive aspect of addiction memoir as a literary form. 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. Helen ultimately escapes her marriage and pretends to be a widow, earning a living as an artist to care for herself and her young son.

Part memoir and part how-to, many former drinkers credit Alcohol Lied to Me with helping them to finally beat the bottle. Below are fifteen incredible books by drinkers who battled alcohol addiction and lived to tell the tale. 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. 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. Her first memoir is an inside look at her famous parents’ marriage and her own tumultuous love affairs (including her on-again, off-again relationship with Paul Simon). Most notably, it’s a brutally honest — and hilarious — reflection on the late writer’s path to sobriety.

• When something awful happens to us, our way to cope is to turn off and even turn against ourselves, as a method of resilience.
• If you’re feeling down about “missing out” on life if you cut back on alcohol or got sober, read this book.
• She highlights not only her relationship to alcohol, but also key takeaways from her many attempts to get sober.
• This year, the company is preparing for an impending billion-dollar merger.

Drunk Mom by Jowita Bydlowska

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 best alcoholic memoirs 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?

Best Books About Alcohol Recovery

Cupcake Brown was 11 when she was orphaned and placed into foster care. She grew up with a tragic journey, running away and becoming exposed to alcohol, drugs, and sex at a young age, and leaning on those vices to get by. A Piece of Cake is her gripping tale of crashing down to the bottom and crawling back to the top. This book reads like a conversation, and teaches us to get curious.