Best known for penning the woman-in-the-attic-focused prequel to Jane Eyre, Wide Sargasso Sea, best alcoholic memoirs English writer Jean Rhys was always a little out of step. She was intimately acquainted with displacement and battled an inner duality since childhood. As a privileged girl from a family of colonists in early 20th-century Dominica, she clashed with her environment, her peers, and her parents. She was neither here nor there, but spent most of her life looking for a place to belong to. In her posthumous (and unfinished) autobiography, Rhys recounts her early years in the Caribbean, her time as a chorus girl in England, her experience as a wealthy man’s mistress, and her chaotic entanglements in bohemian 1920s Paris. We see her fall into the arms of the wrong men, debilitating alcoholism, and, despite all this, writing.

Below are fifteen incredible books by drinkers who battled alcohol addiction and lived to tell the tale. Tragic, inspiring, humorous and heart-wrenching—these true accounts of the struggle for sobriety will move you and maybe inspire you to see what the sober life is all about. Sober celebrities, reality stars in rehab and the sudden ubiquity of mocktail recipes… the culture is shifting, and drug addiction treatment abstinence is in.

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One morning she realized she couldn’t remember half of last night and didn’t want that to be her life anymore. From there, she starts rebuilding, one quiet evening at a time. She doesn’t exaggerate the drama; she shows what happens when the noise finally fades. That honesty makes it one of the most powerful true addiction memoirs out there.

What Are the Types of Treatment for Alcohol Use Disorder?

I said this convention concerned reading more directly than writing, but—since all good writing involves deep sensitivity to the reader’s experience—the two things are ultimately inseparable. For one kind of author, helping the reader is the whole point of writing an addiction memoir; for another, even to consider doing so would be aesthetically fatal. My guess is that most addiction memoirs involve some kind of compromise between the author’s aesthetic and ethical impulses. This ethical dimension (or an aesthetic impurity) is a distinctive aspect of addiction memoir as a literary form. Jamison writes about her recovery as well as she does about her addiction. “Sobriety often felt like gripping onto monkey bars with sweaty metallic palms,” she writes, describing how it was to quit drinking again after a relapse.

• I loved her first two memoirs and was excited when this one came out.
• My Catholic inner child considers this attraction to femme addiction narratives perverse.
• I come from a family of “functional” alcoholics, where feelings were never discussed and drinking was the way to solve (or more likely avoid or cause) problems.
• I compiled a short list of powerful addiction memoirs to add to your reading list.

Powerful Addiction Memoirs to Add to Your Reading List

I almost wanted to snap it shut, but instead finished it in one day and have read it at least three more times since. Knapp so perfectly describes the emotional landscape of addiction, and as a literary study it’s as perfect a memoir as I’ve ever read. I often think about what it took to publish this when she did, in the 90’s, as a female and a journalist in Boston. The tension between on the wagon/off the wagon is often good fodder for literature.

For every parent riddled with guilt, for anyone waking up in the shame cave (again), for every person who has had a messy struggle forward towards redemption… this book is for you. Quit Like a Woman is a sobriety book that delves into the toxic culture of alcohol in society—and specifically, its impact on women. In the book, Holly Whitaker speaks on the irony of a world that glorifies alcohol yet looks down on people who get sick from using it.

• One of the things I admire most about Febos is her generosity, the palpable love with which she writes about herself, her gentle self-awareness.
• Luckily, there’s a whole genre of books that prove you are not the only one who has battled addiction.
• It is a journey full of mess, laughter, and pain, a call for us to realize that we are healed whenever we cease pretending that everything is still shining.
• The ones who can make it to the other side of addiction gain an enriched, rare perspective on life that they never could’ve had otherwise.
• Then I told myself it was because I was a journalist working the night shift.
• Today it is widely considered to be a landmark in early feminist literature, but its frank depictions of addiction within marriage are just as deserving of acclaim.

Health care professionals use criteria from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition (DSM-5), to assess whether a person has AUD and to determine the severity, if the disorder is present. Severity is based on the number of criteria a person meets based on their symptoms—mild (two to three criteria), moderate (four to five criteria), or severe (six or more criteria). Best-selling author Sarah Dessen explores the heart of a gutsy, complex girl dealing with unforeseen circumstances and learning to trust again. In boyhood, he’d been a cunning and incorrigible delinquent, breaking into houses, brawling, and fleeing his home to ride the rails. As a teenager, he had channeled his defiance into running, discovering a prodigious talent that had carried him to the Berlin Olympics and within sight of the four-minute mile. But when war had come, the athlete had become an airman, embarking on a journey that led to his doomed flight, a tiny raft, and a drift into the unknown.

While the book does end with a fairly typical recovery arc, Night of the Gun is unusual in how directly it deals with the idea of truth coming from one person. Carr’s investigation into his past self also reveals a dark side that is shocking even by the grisly standards of addiction memoirs; he beat women. Probably the least-known work of the Brontë sisters, by the least-known sister, Anne’s second and last novel was published to great success in 1848.

From the Brink of the Drink

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. Starting off on the night of her last drink, Stumbling Home quickly reveals the author’s love-hate relationship with the legal drug. 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. This is one of the most compelling books on recovery and humanity ever written.

“I craved luminosity—the glimmering constellation points of a life told as anecdotes,” she writes. 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 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 https://www.selifoods.com/2023/01/06/20-best-quotes-of-sobriety/ transgression) to mention just a few. But many readers —like the one I was during my time in rehab in 2015—also come to it seeking something often considered antithetical to art. I mean help, whether in the form of identification, solace or instruction.

Behavioral Treatments

Many people from all walks of life, even after many accomplishments and experiences, are often plagued by dissatisfaction, pervasive longing, and deep questioning. These feelings may make them wonder if they are living the life they were meant to lead. A New York lawyer, Lisa F. Smith, spirals downward while her friends reach new heights in their careers, life, and relationships.