The Best Addiction Books Of 2017

11 February 2021

She started sneaking sips from her parents’ wine glasses as a kid, and went through adolescence drinking more and more. By the time she was an adult in a big city, all she did was drink. Blackout is her poignant story of alcoholism and those many missing hours that disappeared when she had just enough to drink to wipe out her memory. Hepola gets through the darkest parts of her story with self-deprecating humor and a keen eye on what she was burying by drinking. Or for people who are interested in understanding what addiction and recovery looks like.

• This book is a guide to healing and living a better life for those who so desperately need it.
• Craig Beck writes about his own journey to sobriety in Alcohol Lied to Me.
• He viscerally paints the picture of the hope-tainted despair, anguish, and havoc that addiction wreaks on an entire family.

I started reading addiction memoirs in college, well before I admitted to having an alcohol use disorder. Why else would I have been mesmerized by When a Man Loves a Woman or 28 Days in my early 20s? These movies and books let me know I was not alone, that there were other people walking around who drank like I did. Clare Pooley intertwines personal victories, research, and answers to FAQs about quitting alcohol in her memoir, The Sober Diaries.

Mental Health

Most importantly, it illustrates that alcoholism and addiction are not moral failings, but rather scientific differences in our brains. This thoughtful book explores the science behind why we drink, how it’s so ingrained into our society, and what new possibilities we uncover when we dare to find joy in the unexpected. Our society puts a lot of pressure on drinking to celebrate; weddings, holidays, birthdays. It can be hard to separate the idea of celebration with sobriety, but that’s what Catherine Gray explores once a drinker makes the decision to drink no more. The Recovery Village has multiple resources to help you begin your journey to recovery. In order to make holiday shopping as smooth as possible we are only accepting online orders for books in stock from Friday December 10 at 8PM until Friday December 24 at 5PM.

Welch credits his faith in God for saving him from his destructive lifestyle. Beautiful Boy by David Sheff is a heart-wrenching memoir about his son’s addiction to meth and the impact it had on the entire family. This author does not merely talk of the struggles, but of the hope that can be found in recovery.

Under The Influence: A Guide To The Myths And Realities Of Alcoholism

There are also the self-help books, the AA manuals, the well-meaning but often dry tomes to help one acquire clarity and consistency in a life where addiction often creates chaos and disorder. Written by John Dupuy, Integral Recovery works to modernize drug and alcohol treatment using the latest research, techniques, and information. Promoting a holistic recovery, this author provides an informative and researched-based book about why treatment works. Elizabeth Vargas bravely chronicles her journey from addiction to recovery. In this book, she chronicles her life from an anxiety cursed childhood, a difficult coming of age and the guilt, struggles and denial of a working mom suffering from alcoholism.

As a child, Helaina Hovitz was a very close witness to the attack to the World Trade Center on 9/11. These events leave her with a serious case of PTSD that in turn throw her into despair and later lands her into addiction. This a different memoir because it focuses not on the road to sobriety, but on what happens with your life now that you’ve done the thing that once seemed impossible. In this dark but incredibly comedic memoir, Smith tells all about her story and the road she finally took towards recovery from her perpetual numbing. She’s just someone who uses alcohol to muster up courage, and well, survive life. This is just how it has always been since her introduction to Southern Comfort when she was just fourteen. This is a darkly comic book about the slow road through recovery, really growing up, and being someone that gets back up after screwing up.

Wishful Drinking By Carrie Fisher

Debates about the classification of cannabis continue, while major public health campaigns seek to reduce and ultimately eliminate smoking through health warnings and legislation. Sarah’s writing is sharp and relatable; a more recent, modern voice in the recovery space. So many of us look at “blacking out” as benign, or normal—an indicator of a “successful” night of drinking. Alcohol detoxification In Blackout, Sarah clearly explains why there’s nothing benign about it and describes what is actually happening to the brain when we reach that point of alcohol-induced amnesia. I love her perspective on drinking as an act of counter-feminism—that in reality it actually dismantles our power, our pride, and our dignity as women, though we intended the opposite.

Before we dive into sobriety books, let’s address how alcohol use disorder relates to mental health in the first place. There are many resources available to help you reach your goal to stop drinking. Among them, literature supporting recovery from alcohol abuse, often referred to as “quit lit,” is a popular choice for informative support within the recovery community. For more books about alcoholism and addiction, check out this list of 100 must-read books about addiction. Ann Dowsett Johnston combines in-depth research and her own story of recovery in this important book about the relationship between women and alcohol.

We Are The Luckiest: The Surprising Magic Of Sober Life

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. In this book, the authors present current research in the study of alcohol and substance abuse. Having been in recovery for many years, and working here at Shatterproof, I often get asked to recommend books about addiction. So here’s a list of my all-time favorite reads about substance use disorders.

She has a passion for raising awareness in the addiction treatment, recovery, and public health space. Fifteen million Americans a year are plagued with alcoholism. Many of them, like Caroline Knapp, started in their early teens and began to use alcohol as “liquid armor,” a way to protect themselves against the difficult realities of life. In this extraordinarily candid and revealing memoir, Knapp offers important insights not only about alcoholism, but about life itself and how we learn to cope with it. They call into question the beliefs we’ve been raised with, and stereotypes of addiction. Each of these authors demands that we face addiction as an intimate, human story as well as a broad public health and safety issue. Adult children of dysfunctional families tend to sabotage things just when they start going well.

The 7 Books For Adult Children Of Alcoholics Of 2021

Each one has experienced hard times during their 20s and now wants to make things right. The book reads more like a set of four portraits of characters coming together in a town that has been ravaged by the recession, addiction, suicide, and hopelessness, all with their own forms of escape and return. Debut novel from Nico Walker who wrote it while incarcerated for bank robbery. The honest and accurate portrayal of addiction and withdrawal has led to it being called the “first great novel of the opioid epidemic”. For those seeking addiction treatment for themselves or a loved one, the Recovery.org helpline is a private and convenient solution.

Takes a deep dive into the history of the recovery movement while also examining how race and class impact our understanding of who is a criminal and who is simply ill. She ultimately identifies how we all crave love and how that loneliness can shape who we are, addicted and not. With beautiful prose, Miller’s memoir is about recovering addiction recovery books from a lifetime of difficult relationships and a home situation that seems desperate at times. Still, there is redemption at the end of the road as she details a complicated yet loving relationship with her parents, despite the odds. The emotional burden of her past eventually led her to attempt to take her own life.

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. Quit Like a Woman is her informative and relatable guidebook to breaking an addiction to alcohol. Alcoholism, or the inability to control drinking due to a physiological and cognitive/emotional dependence on the substance, affects many adults today.

The Revolution of Birdie Randolph is a beautiful look at the effects of alcoholism on friends and family members in the touching way only Brandy Colbert can master. After becoming sober, they wanted to see how much vibrancy they could put back into their daily living.

Whether Youre Trying To Kick A Habit, Ready To Up Your Knowledge After Years In Long

Vinnie’s father told him that he would only be proud if his son won a boxing championship. Vinnie Curto later went on to become a world boxing champion. It has ignited a movement across the country, helping thousands of people forever change their relationship with alcohol. Whether you want to better understand the mindset of addiction or find inspiration in how they got out of it, these memoirs are nothing short of inspiring. For Caroline Knapp, as it is for many, alcohol was the protective friend that allowed her to get through life. Her protector became her lover and this is the memoir of their twenty-years-long destructive relationship. Lisa Smith is the epitome of control… except when she is not.

Michelle Tea was a writer with a chaotic life and substance abuse issues. Her transformation into a functional adult included shedding volatile and dangerous relationships and habits. Group therapy that many people find helpful is openness in sharing a personal journey of addiction. A book that provides this same insight can be a helpful way to find understanding and inspiration for recovery. Author Erica Garza grew up in a strict Mexican household in East Los Angeles. She writes with evocative prose about the anxiety that fueled her addiction to masturbation as a young girl, and eventually, her sex and pornography addiction as an adult. Through failed relationships, serial hook-ups, blackouts, and all of the shame that comes with these experiences, Garza writes a riveting memoir narrating a journey of exploration as she seeks therapy.