30 Powerful Womens Recovery Memoirs to Inspire Your Own Journey

This novel is about four former high school classmates who return to a small fictional town in southeast Ohio, called New Canaan, one night in 2013. 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. This recovery story captures the anguish and doubt that accompany the choice to quit drinking. In those stories, the decision to get better often arrives like a bolt of lightning, but this is rarely the case. My own recovery from codependency and alcoholism, which I write about in my memoir Good Morning, Destroyer of Men’s Souls, has felt elusive, circuitous, and sometimes rather boring. Since I don’t love the word “journey”, I prefer to think of it as a kind of endurance art, the term performance artists give to work that requires long periods of hardship, solitude or pain.

In a culture transfixed by the lives of the rich and famous, celebrity memoirs that address the topics of alcohol and substance abuse head-on offer a chance for bibliotherapy readers to see that addiction truly knows no boundaries. In many cases having been driven to addiction at least in part by the difficulties of navigating their celebrity, the authors of these works have turned their fame into a vehicle to increase awareness about substance abuse issues. For the bibliotherapy reader, a celebrity memoir offers the opportunity to hear the story of someone instantly recognizable, and therefore relatable. Memoirs about the impact of addiction and recovery on family relationships, and of family relationships on addiction and recovery, these works look at how individual families coped with the toll of substance abuse. Just as the effects of addiction are never limited to the person suffering from it, the use of bibliotherapy need not be limited either. These books offer a great entry point for the family and friends of those suffering from addiction to learn more about the disease and about the part they can play in helping to combat it. What makes a book a must-read for anyone who has been affected by addiction? A story that is relatable and helps the reader to feel less alone. A story that is inspirational and helps foster a sense of hope. If you read enough addiction memoirs, the genre’s particular narrative cadence become easy to spot.

I’m Black and I’m Sober: The Timeless Story Of A Woman’s Journey Back To Sanity by Chaney Allen

In this haunting, sometimes hallucinatory memoir, Machado inventively recounts the tale of her abusive relationship with a volatile aspiring writer, who viciously warns her not to write about the relationship, among other things. The book serves as a powerful corrective to the fallacy that queer relationships are by nature egalitarian. And the reader roots for Machado fiercely as she finds her way out. Hen we hear the word “recovery”, especially alongside “literature”, we tend to think of books on alcoholism or drug addiction.

Marni Mann’s novel sounds as real, raw, and honest as an actual memoir, and listeners describe Arden Hammersmith’s narration as «superb.» Memoirs are nonfiction biographies written from personal knowledge. Sobriety memoirs are personal accounts of an individual’s experiences with addiction, rehab, and recovery. Whether you’re in addiction recovery or know someone who is, reading the personal accounts of others who have been through a similar experience can make the recovery process easier to understand. Below we’ve listed addiction recovery memoirs that offer a fresh and relatable perspective on recovery. Rather than dwelling on the pain of addiction,Tracey focuses on her journey of recovery and rebuilding her life, while exposing the failings of the American rehab system and laying out a path for change. Starting with the first step in her recovery, Tracey re-learns how to interact with men, build new friendships, handle money, and rekindle her relationship with her mother, all while staying sober, sharp, and dedicated to her future.

Addiction Memoir Books

If you are struggling with addiction, depression, anxiety, or need help with any other mental substance abuse or health-related issues, be sure to reach out to a professional. Your doctor can provide guidance on the best way to quit an addictive substance safely. The Sober Home final audiobook on this list is another powerful work of fiction. Only he has no recollection of how he got there—and he’s not sure he wants to remember either. Accomplished actor MacLeod Andrews narrates Benjamin Alire Sáenz’s powerful, beautifully written novel.

Together, we’re getting free from alcohol and saying yes to a bigger life. I am on a journey that is better than I could have ever imagined. The strength of the women that came before me, that are beside me, and those that are there now teach me how to live “. This is an excellent treatment facility and all women down in Delray Beach, FL.

‘Scent of a Woman’ With Bill Simmons and Chris Ryan

Jowita Bydlowska could not have expected things to go this way. She had already beat alcohol in the past, but there was nothing wrong with celebrating the birth of her child with some champagne, right? That celebration threw her once again into the depths of alcoholism. In this book, she narrates the year in which best memoirs about addiction she went from a cancer diagnosis to her happiest and best self. Her journey covers sobriety, beating cancer, and building a richer life than she’d ever imagined. In this dark but incredibly comedic memoir, Smith tells all about her story and the road she finally took to recover from her perpetual numbing.

Books diverging from the genre’s hallmarks are already easy to find. Sarah Hepola’s Blackout, while adhering to many narrative beats, also includes lengthy reporting about the science of blackouts. She also writes at length about social and emotional repercussions of losing memory. When women are in a blackout, things are done to them,” one expert tells her. The late New York Times media critic David Carr wrote best memoirs about addiction another notable “addiction memoir that’s not a normal addiction memoir” with 2008’s Night of the Gun, in which he investigated his own descent into cocaine addiction. In it, he confronts the fuzzy parameters of truth as it pertains to memoir by acknowledging his supreme unreliability as a narrator and reporting his own story out by interviewing over 60 people who dealt with him during his darkest days.

Explore a future without alcohol.

Therefore, people in recovery who read this book may want to discuss their reactions with their therapist. The Recovering, when it operates as a memoir, is equally lucent; the reader is ferried into the perils of addiction by a nimble, stylish narrator. Jamison, 34, is the author of a novel and a well-received collection of essays . It largely succeeds in moving away from an overly academic tone, thanks mostly to personal narration; as Jamison recounts her decision to move to Nicaragua in her early 20s, she lays out what she hoped to gain from the travel. “I craved luminosity—the glimmering constellation points of a life told as anecdotes,” she writes. Rausing, the editor of Granta and heiress to a Swedish beverage-packaging fortune, writes beautifully of the idyllic seaside summers of her 1970s childhood and the heavy bonds of family.

A first-hand account of one man’s struggle with homelessness and alcoholism, this diary records a world full of physical degradation and despair that is not without unpredictable moments of striking beauty. Donohue’s experiences are brutal, but his perceptions are poetic. This account of an intelligent and sensitive man in the grip of alcoholism and homelessness challenges our perceptions of those on the margins of American contemporary life. And if you’re not the one who’s addicted but have a loved one suffering from it, any of these books could help give you a better insight into their reality.