7 Powerful Addiction Memoirs

Finally, at the behest of his coworkers and boss, he ends up in a rehab that specifically caters to gay and lesbian patients. Once his 30 days are up, he has to figure out how heroin addiction to return to his New York City lifestyle sans alcohol. 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.

What to read when recovering from substance abuse

• He showed me a path to follow, including opening a house of healing for other women.
• Drawing from his personal experiences, Brand introduces actionable strategies for overcoming addiction.
• Ann Dowsett Johnston brilliantly weaves her own story of recovery with in-depth research on the alarming rise of risky drinking among women.
• The result is a definitive treatment of the American recovery movement—a memoir in the subgenre like no other.

Burroughs talks about being hooked on “Bewitched” as a child, a show that exhibited an alcoholic husband among other things. Lauren Smith has worked as a journalist and copywriter for the last decade, covering a range of topics including health, energy, and technology in the US and UK. The Italian cardiologist and fellow of the International Association for Cannabis as Medicine proposes five books on Medicinal Marijuana and explains why we should be reading them.

The 10 Best Addiction Memoirs

Divorce, abandonment, foreclosure and a mass shooting… Mishka Shubaly had plenty of reasons to wallow in drink and drugs, and he does so with wild abandon in I Swear I’ll Make It Up to You. 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. It’s an inspiring and, at times, unbelievable tale told with unflinching honesty and a heavy dose of self-deprecation.

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There’s no award for “Most Sobriety Memoirs Read,” so read them for yourself — let their wisdom be its own award (I can feel your eye rolls. I’m sorry.). Shortly after accepting she had a problem with alcohol, she thought a lot about how some people are lucky enough to be able to drink normally without it controlling their life. It’s understandable to feel alone and like no one can relate to your addiction.

“This Naked Mind: Control Alcohol, Find Freedom, Discover Happiness & Change Your Life”

2000’s Cherry picked up the story by showing Karr as an adolescent, already dabbling with drugs and profoundly lacking any sense of belonging. The second major problem for anyone writing an addiction memoir—and it’s often connected to the first—is how to conclude it. Only in rare cases—as when the subject of a biography dies—is the answer simple. 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.

Part memoir and part how-to, many former drinkers credit Alcohol Lied to Me with helping them to finally beat the bottle. Only a handful of the addiction memoirs of recent decades are also, in my view, singular works of art. I could not put this book down (literally), talk about gut-wrenching honesty and not holding anything back.

• Meanwhile solidarity and communion are often touchstones among recovering addicts.
• By sharing inspiring, true success stories, these books offer hope and motivate individuals to take positive steps forward in their own journey.
• Sober celebrities, reality stars in rehab and the sudden ubiquity of mocktail recipes… the culture is shifting, and abstinence is in.
• Check out our picks for the best addiction and recovery memoirs.
• I used to work in fashion/beauty/celebrity PR, and I related to her lifestyle before she got sober.
• It is the heartbreaking and astute account of Sheff’s experience of his son, Nic’s, addiction and eventual recovery.

Another memoir by a woman who excelled professionally, as she hid her alcohol and coke addictions from herself and others, until it got so bad she couldn’t hide it anymore. Like Hepola, I loved the excitement of the whole bar scene, and quite often, drank until I blacked out. Trying to blackout things from my childhood that caused me so much anxiety and pain.

Drinking: A Love Story

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. It was the first memoir I read about alcohol abuse and the title and subtitle were the things that immediately grabbed my attention. For 25 years, I was in love with the way drinking made me feel (or better yet, not feel), so I knew I would like this book. And even though, at the time, Knapp’s credentials were way out of my league, I related to so much of her story.

Grieving is hard, but you’re not alone.

These books cover everything from addiction recovery workbooks to deeply moving addiction memoirs that showcase inspiring true success stories. 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 best alcoholic memoirs read than with how they’re written. The pleasures we expect from the form range from the edifying (empathy, inspiration) to the unseemly (voyeurism, vicarious transgression) to mention just a few.