10 Best Alcoholism Books to Help Anyone Overcome Addiction

She went on to drink her way through four years at an Ivy League college and an award-winning career as an editor and columnist. Having said that, I did—while reading Ditlevsen’s Dependency—occasionally need to put the book down and take a few deep breaths. 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. She started sneaking sips from her parents’ wine glasses as a kid, and went through adolescence drinking more and more.

Best Books About Alcohol Recovery

During his days as a young Manhattanite working in advertising, he tried everything to hide his constant drinking, including spraying cologne on his tongue. It’s understandable to feel alone and like no one can relate to your addiction. Luckily, there’s a whole genre of books that prove you are not the only one who has battled Drug rehabilitation addiction. Drunk Mom by Jowita BydlowskaThis author’s writing style is so unusual, I wasn’t sure what to make of it at first, only to discover that it perfectly suited the genre.

• By the end of her drinking she is reduced to crouching on a stairwell outside her apartment, glugging whisky with her one-year-old son and failing marriage inside.
• This book includes personal stories that let me know how others have overcome the same roadblocks as myself.
• When 15-year-old Cat moves to a new town in rural Michigan, she’s ecstatic to find a friend in Marlena, a beautiful, pill-popping neighbor.
• 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.
• The Sober Diaries is one of the best books in the quit lit category.

Listen

From memoirs to fiction, these titles offer raw and honest portrayals of addiction, recovery, and the human experience. Get ready to be moved and inspired by these powerful narratives that shed light on the complexities of alcoholism. Although she makes faltering progress in building a simulacrum of grown-up life, her relationship with alcohol—“I had an appetite for drink, a taste for it, a talent”—steadily overtakes everything. By the end of her drinking she is reduced to crouching on a stairwell outside her apartment, glugging whisky with her one-year-old son and failing marriage inside.

We Are the Luckiest: The Surprising Magic of a Sober Life by Laura McKowen

Although I think they can all be considered addiction memoirs, and share a familial resemblance with other examples of that form, none of them feel remotely imprisoned by its conventions. And yet—even though each of these books goes its own way, never hesitating to flout a trope or trample a norm to serve its story—they don’t go in terror of the conventions either. 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.

• Check out our picks for the best addiction and recovery memoirs.
• From memoirs to fiction, these titles offer raw and honest portrayals of addiction, recovery, and the human experience.
• This is a must-read for anyone seeking a compelling and honest portrayal of the journey towards recovery from alcoholism.
• Excessive drinking has numerous impacts on your body and mind, ranging from mild to severe.
• I learned a lot from Clegg—or I hope I did—about how to convey the terrifying experience of a runaway binge.

Reading this book was the beginning of a new perspective for me. It got me thinking the one thing I never wanted to be true… maybe it is the alcohol that’s making me so miserable? Prolific, brilliant memoirist Mary Karr shines a light on the dark years she spent descending into alcoholism and drug use as a young writer, wife, and mother. As her marriage dissolved and she struggled to find a reason to stay clean, Karr turned to Catholicism as a light at the end of the tunnel.

Knapp writes elegantly about her 20+ years of ‘high-functioning drinking’. Winning career accolades by day and drinking at night, Knapp brings you to the netherworld of alcohol use disorder. This powerful memoir follows Cain’s life as she navigates a substance use disorder, incarceration, and sex work over the course of 19 years.

• The author, a journalist, immerses himself in the English classes of three diverse high schools, observing the transformative power of reading as students engage with classics such as The Great Gatsby and Heart of Darkness.
• I tried to be as brutally unsparing of my faults as both those writers.
• When I stopped drinking alcohol, I was desperate to know the stories of other people who’d also taken this road less traveled.

Despite being published less than a year ago, Jamison’s memoir is a gritty and honest must-read. Have you noticed that our world is increasingly obsessed with drinking? Work best alcoholic memoirs events, brunch, baby showers, book club, hair salons—the list of where to find booze is endless. Holly Whitaker, in her own path to recovery, discovered the insidious ways the alcohol industry targets women and the patriarchal methods of recovery. Ever the feminist, she found that women and other oppressed people don’t need the tenets of Alcoholics Anonymous, but a deeper understanding of their own identities.

It then brings the reader along on the sundry adventures she takes under the influence, interspersed with the challenges she faces when she quits, ultimately, on her quest to reinvent herself and find out who she really is. Annie’s book is so important (and she’s a wonderful human to boot). She brilliantly weaves psychological, neurological, cultural, social and industry factors with her own journey. Without scare tactics, pain, or rules, she offers a strategy to give you freedom from alcohol.

Finding North: A Journey from Addict to Advocate

• Any information published on this website or by this brand is not intended as a substitute for medical advice, and you should not take any action before consulting with a healthcare professional.
• Creating healthy boundaries is one of the most useful practices we can put into place in early sobriety.
• It got me thinking the one thing I never wanted to be true… maybe it is the alcohol that’s making me so miserable?
• This is a self-help book by a licensed therapist that braids together anonymized client stories, personal narrative, psychological tools, and brain research.
• I am the author of six crime fiction books, three of which involve retired detective turned PI Frank Marr.
• Elizabeth Vargas takes off her perfectly poised reporter mask and shows you the authentic person behind the anchor desk.
• In his follow-up to his first memoir, Tweak, which dealt with his journey into meth addiction, Sheff details his struggle to stay clean.

Next you’ve chosen to recommend Tove Ditlevsen’s Dependency, the third book in her Copenhagen Trilogy. It was first published in Danish in the 1970s, but has only recently been translated into English by Tiina Nunnally and Michael Favela Goldman. I’ll mention some more in relation to the books I’ve chosen, but these are, I think, the four most fundamental ones. An alternate future for the Romanovs from Jennifer Laam, author of The Secret Daughter Of The Tsar. This book further expanded my growing understanding of the spiritual soul choices that guide all incarnations.