In Recovery, Russell Brand shares an amusing yet valuable story of addiction and the path to sobriety. As a wildly famous celebrity, he struggled with more than just alcohol. But it’s easy to resonate with his emotions surrounding addiction, no matter your vice. This Naked Mind by Annie Grace https://ecosoberhouse.com/article/does-alcohol-dehydrate-you/ is one of the most loved sobriety books ever written. 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. Below are seven different addiction memoirs that have been inspirational to readers.
Check out our picks for the best addiction and recovery memoirs. Maybe you’ve been leaning on alcohol too much to try to cope with the COVID-19 pandemic. Maybe you enjoyed a successful Dry January, so you’re questioning alcohol’s role in your life.
All in all, this is an excellent quit lit story for those interested in an eye-opening perspective on alcohol’s role in our society today. Self-help books are yet another device that can support your efforts. Granted, books certainly can’t replace treatment and professional guidance. But they can provide fresh perspectives and inspiration—and reinforce that you’re not alone. “It began in Los Angeles in 1993, when Jaime Lowe was just sixteen.
Having just been released from rehab nine months earlier, his relapse cost him his home, money, career and almost his life. Capturing the drama, tension, paranoia and short-term bliss of drug addiction, his book explores how the patterns of addiction can be traced to the past. But seriously, I hope at least one of these memoirs speaks to you. Beyond the camaraderie of knowing you’re not alone, these books offer practical guidance about the road to sobriety (or your road to changing your relationship with drugs and alcohol).
Well known actor Johnston has written “a surprisingly raw and triumphant memoir that is outrageous, moving, sweet, tragic, and heartbreakingly honest. GUTS is a true triumph—a memoir that manages to be as frank and revealing as Augusten Burroughs, yet as hilarious and witty as David Sedaris” (publisher blurb). “This raw, darkly comic series of astonishing vignettes is Emily Colas’ achingly honest chronicle of her twisted journey through the obsessive-compulsive disorder that came to dominate her world. By the time she faced the fact that she was best alcoholic memoirs really ‘losing it,’ Colas had become a slave to her own ‘hobbies’ — from the daily hair cutting to incessant inspections of her children’s clothing for bloodstains. Because there’s no single definition of crazy, there’s no single experience that embodies it, and the word itself means different things—wild? King is a writer, lawyer and NPR contributor whose memoir chronicles her decades-long downward spiral into alcoholism, from her small New England hometown to seedy restaurants where she waitressed and cockroach-ridden lofts where she lived.
Clegg, a successful and intelligent individual, recounts his descent into addiction, the loss of trust among his loved ones, and his eventual path to sobriety. His story serves as a testament to the resilience of the human spirit and the possibility of redemption and transformation through recovery. To navigate the lifelong process of recovery, individuals can turn to various resources, including books that offer guidance, support, and inspiration.
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. The books which do it best, in my opinion, are often not consciously “about” addiction at all, but show its effects lingering in the corners of every page. I am, probably, by way of my history, more attuned to picking up on it than others.
Shook One chronicles his journey to beat those fears and shows a path that you too can take to overcome the anxieties that may be holding you back. “At seventeen Lori Schiller was the perfect child-the only daughter of an affluent, close-knit family. Six years later she made her first suicide attempt, then wandered the streets of New York City dressed in ragged clothes, tormenting voices crying out in her mind. Lori Schiller had entered the horrifying world of full-blown schizophrenia.