In it, Annie talks about her own experiences with addiction while keeping things deeply relatable to anyone who’s questioned alcohol’s role in their life. Smashed was a ground breaking novel, shocking people with the brazenly delivered truths experienced by young women all over the country. Zailckas’ story is similar to the millions of youths who engage in binge drinking at dangerously young age.

• Undeterred, Whitaker carves out her own path to sobriety, one rooted in feminism and being honest with herself.
• Reading her book is like sharing a cup of coffee with your wise best friend.

Drink: The Intimate Relationship between Women and Alcohol by Ann Dowsett Johnston

• Have you noticed that our world is increasingly obsessed with drinking?
• In 2019, however, Miller revealed her identity, releasing this memoir about her courageous journey to build a life separate from that traumatic experience.
• Marlena’s dark habits worsen, though, and she ends up dead within the year.

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. This powerful memoir follows Cain’s life as she navigates a substance use disorder, incarceration, and sex work over the course of 19 years. Healing Neen provides a personal look into the connection between incarceration, substance use, and trauma.

Best Books On Addiction – What To Read While In Recovery

This book may also help you see sobriety as a gift you’re giving to your body. This is a self-help book by a licensed therapist that braids together anonymized client stories, personal narrative, psychological tools, and brain research. White thoughtfully explores boundaries, emotional regulation, body image, shame, and self-care in a way that’s actionable and accessible. The book is short, easy to read, and will leave you with some immediate tools for addressing social situations, sex, and friendship while navigating an alcohol-free lifestyle. From inspirational bestsellers to celebrity memoirs, these tales of addiction and recovery offer advice, encouragement, and tips to help you face the challenges of sober living head-on. In high school, Tiffany Jenkins was a popular student and the captain of the school’s cheerleading squad.

Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear by Elizabeth Gilbert

Whether you’re dealing with alcohol use disorder, drug addiction, or other substance use disorders, these books can play a critical role in helping you rebuild your life. Mary Karr’s «Lit» tells the story of her journey from struggling with alcohol addiction to finding spiritual sobriety. As a dutiful daughter and a successful author, Karr recounts her struggles, failures, and eventual transformation. Her personal story is inspiring, highlighting the importance of faith, community, and the love of family in the recovery process.

Exploring the thoughts of an addict and a life unraveled by narcotics, this memoir spans the author’s struggles with opioid use disorder, to her time in jail, and ultimately to her recovery. High Achiever offers hope and inspiration and a raw and page-turning read. In the literature world, you can find books about addiction and recovery in a genre known as “quit lit.” Quit lit is full of authors sharing their personal experiences and resources to help others who are where they’ve been. One of the most insightful books on addiction is «In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts» by Gabor Maté.

An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness by Kay Redfield Jamison

Functioning and fun-loving, this author’s love for wine hardly seems like a problem until her attempt to cut back proves much more challenging than she had imagined. She begins to share her attempts to sober up anonymously online and ends up finding support, community, and the strength to battle her addiction in the most unlikely of places. 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. Jowita Bydlowska is three years into her sobriety when she becomes a mother.

Customers find the book highly readable, describing it as brilliant and well-researched, with one customer noting that the last 30 pages are especially impressive. To vote on books not in the list or books you couldn’t find in the list, you can click on the tab add books to this list and then choose from your books, or simply search. To vote on existing books from the list, beside each book there is a link vote for this book clicking it will add that book to your votes. After years spent in sex work, Charlotte Shane is something of an expert on intimacy, desire, and the general ins and outs of heterosexual relationships.

How to Quit Cocaine: Overcoming Addiction & Withdrawal Symptoms

Ketanji Brown Jackson made history in 2022 as the first Black woman ever to serve on the U.S. This 2024 memoir is the incredible story of how she got there, from growing up in the South as the daughter best recovery memoirs of educators to breaking barriers as a Black woman and mother in the high-powered field of law. Nearly 30 years after her older sister was killed by an abusive ex-boyfriend in 1990, Garza traveled to Mexico to unravel the case. She documented that months-long journey in this Pulitzer Prize-winning book, piecing together the evidence to paint a loving, long-unseen picture of her sister.

Addiction and Recovery Memoirs Written from a Male Perspective

Sober celebrities, reality stars in rehab and the sudden ubiquity of mocktail recipes… the culture is shifting, and abstinence is in. Peak Covid saw people giving into excess where alcohol was concerned, and the rise of sobriety following the pandemic seems straight out of a ‘nature is healing’ meme. The ‘sober curious‘ movement has spawned non-alcoholic bars in cities as different as Nashville and New York, zero-proof liquors and a whole lot of Halfway house memoirs written by addicts in recovery. She decides to get sober and conquer her own addiction, but is put off by the patriarchal and religious systems of recovery available to her. Undeterred, Whitaker carves out her own path to sobriety, one rooted in feminism and being honest with herself. “Heart Berries is a powerful, poetic memoir of a woman’s coming of age on the Seabird Island Band in the Pacific Northwest.