They also describe the story as entertaining, wise, and illuminating. 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. Like Hepola, I loved the excitement of the whole bar scene, and quite often, drank until I blacked out. Trying to blackout things from my childhood that caused me so much anxiety and pain.
Quit Like a Woman: The Radical Choice to Not Drink in a Culture Obsessed With Alcohol by Holly Whitaker
Early recovery has the quality of vigorous exercise, as though each repetition of a painful moment… serves to build up emotional muscle. Before you go, click here to see all the best celebrity memoirs you can read right now. Tate and Cousin Sal recap NFL Week 11, including some coaching changes, Chris Boswell’s kicking performance, and more.
- Although previous literary history had portrayed a number of addicts, only a very small number could be found outside fiction—although some well known examples were only fictional in a nominal sense.
- Over the last few years, I’ve developed a keen interest in addiction memoirs.
- But despite that success, Stahl’s heroin habit began to consume him, derailing his career and destroying his health until one final, intense crisis inspired him to get clean.
- So many of us look at “blacking out” as benign, or normal—an indicator of a “successful” night of drinking.
- Trying to blackout things from my childhood that caused me so much anxiety and pain.
“Quit Like a Woman: The Radical Choice to Not Drink in a Culture Obsessed with Alcohol”
In other kinds, as in novels, endings are artifices of form, and the trick is not to let this feel true for the reader. 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. Life doesn’t provide moments of satisfying narrative resolution.
- Admitting you have a problem — not to mention actually getting sober — is no small feat.
- Karr arrived with a unique literary voice that combined rich Texan and burst of lyricism.
- 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 used to work in fashion/beauty/celebrity PR, and I related to her lifestyle before she got sober.
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- And James Frey’s 2003 A Million Little Pieces achieved huge success (commercially, if not artistically) without straying far from the form’s conventions—except, as it later turned out, a longstanding convention that nonfiction shouldn’t be fiction.
- There’s the firecracker-bright memory of the first time using, often recounted in crackling prose.
The Rewired Life
My addiction always took me to new lows, and cost me many jobs over the years. SELF does not provide medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. 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. Admitting you have a problem — not to mention actually getting sober — is no small feat. There’s no award for “Most Sobriety Memoirs Read,” so read them for yourself — let their wisdom be its own award (I can feel your eye rolls. I’m sorry.).
“Drinking: A Love Story” by Caroline Knapp
Although the first two volumes aren’t overtly about Karr’s addiction, they show its makings in her traumatic home life and a lost adolescence. Meanwhile successful writing always surprises and challenges us, perhaps by defying the conventions of the form to which it belongs or simply by refreshing them in some way. Only a handful of the addiction memoirs of recent decades are also, in my view, singular works of art. For me the essential works are Permanent Midnight (1995) by Jerry Stahl , The Los Angeles Diaries (2003) by James Brown, The Outrun (2015) by Amy Liptrot, Lit (2019) by Mary Karr and Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man (2010) by Bill Clegg. The pivot from addiction to sobriety also led her down the path of wellness and the founding of her company, WelleCo, in 2014.
The best addiction & recovery memoirs I wish had been available when I first got sober
Ward and Libaire show you how to get intoxicated, but with life instead of alcohol. In his first novel, Burroughs gives a vivid, semi-autobiographical account of heroin addiction in the early 1950s. The acclaimed author of Prozac Nation goes from depression to addiction with this equally devastating personal account. Wurtzel reveals how drugs fueled her post-breakout period, describing with unbearable best memoirs about addiction specificity how her doctor’s prescription of Ritalin, intended to help her function, only brought her down.
