9 Best Quit Lit Books and Sobriety Memoirs to Inspire Your Recovery

30 Jul 9 Best Quit Lit Books and Sobriety Memoirs to Inspire Your Recovery

I tried to be as brutally unsparing of my faults as both https://ecosoberhouse.com/ those writers. I’d like to think Jerry Stahl’s Permanent Midnight influenced me, too, particularly by encouraging me to try and be harrowing and funny at once. She’s focusing on her schoolwork and is on track to finish high school at the top of her class. But then she falls for Booker, and her aunt Charlene—who has been in and out of treatment for alcoholism for decades—moves into the apartment above her family’s hair salon. 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. Hepola spends hungover mornings piecing together the missing hours of the nights before and frequently wakes up with unrecognizable men in unfamiliar places.

Good Drinks: For Those Who Aren’t Drinking, for Whatever Reason by Julia Bainbridge

This is more than a cookbook – it’s a captivating read and a gorgeous coffee table book to peruse over and over again. Straightforward and to the point, Carr helps you examine the reasons you drink in the first place in The Easy Way to Control Alcohol. This book is a great place to start if you’ve been feeling sober curious. Punch Me Up to the Gods is a beautifully written series of personal essays that describe Brian Broome’s experience growing up Black and queer in Ohio, and the effect early substance use had on his upbringing. Ditlevsen’s trilogy, by contrast, plunges us into the perspective of a succession of her former selves. When she’s a child, we’re presented with the world as a child might see it.

Addicted: Notes from the Belly of the Beast

And the portrait of heroin addiction it depicts is a painful reality for many people. Memoirs Aren’t Fairytales tells the story of Nicole, a 19-year-old girl who leaves college life in Maine behind to start over in Boston with her best friend, Eric. Nicole and Eric think they are running away to freedom, but what they discover instead are the shackles of heroin addiction. Marni Mann’s novel sounds as real, raw, and honest as an actual memoir, and listeners describe Arden Hammersmith’s narration as “superb.” While This Naked Mind shows that you have the tools to reprogram your mind and live a life free from alcohol, Cold Turkey offers practical steps to get you through the first month of recovery. Like Annie Grace, Mishka Shubaly uses his own messy history with alcoholism and recovery to show just how difficult the road to recovery can be.

Lilly Dancyger’s Book Is a Love Letter to Her Women Friends

When she’s hooked on Demetrol, we perceive events through the distorted viewpoint of an addict. This is the kind of myopic or unreliable narrator we encounter frequently in novels – conspicuously naïve or self-delusive, and unchaperoned by a consolingly wise authorial presence—but almost never in memoir. Told in the present tense (another rarity in autobiography), the result is a stunningly immersive and intimate story.

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. How do you craft an ending that makes narrative sense but which feels complex and inconclusive in the way life so often is? Many addiction memoirs evince a desire to repay the reader for all the dark places the story has taken them with a thumpingly joyous ending. For Sober living house these reasons, in many addiction memoirs the end is the weakest part.

Life-Changing Addiction Memoirs You Should Read

• Ditlevsen’s failure of nerve, causing her to wrap up three volumes of the most trenchant and unillusioned autobiography ever written with a feeble daydream, is easily explained.
• How do you craft an ending that makes narrative sense but which feels complex and inconclusive in the way life so often is?
• All these books might have been published as memoir in a less stigmatising age.
• Your doctor can provide guidance on the best way to quit an addictive substance safely.
• The book is short, easy to read, and will leave you with some immediate tools for addressing social situations, sex, and friendship while navigating an alcohol-free lifestyle.

In conclusion, this collection brings together both scientific explanations and personal stories to help you grasp the complexity of addiction and the possibilities for recovery. Furthermore, by candidly sharing his story, Clapton takes readers on a journey from darkness to recovery, offering insight into the challenges and triumphs that shaped one of rock’s greatest icons. Straightforward and to the point, Carr helps you examine the reasons you drink in the first place in The Easy Way to Control Alcohol. For example, he explains why stating alcohol is poison and repeating the tagline “Never Question the Decision” can help you change your unconscious thoughts about alcohol, and shift your mindset. This book is a great place to start if you’ve been feeling sober curious. Punch Me Up to the Gods is a beautifully written series of personal essays that describe Brian Broome’s experience growing up Black and queer in Ohio, and the effect early substance use had on his upbringing.

YOUR INBOX IS LIT

I recently came to terms with my own problematic relationship with alcohol, and my one solace has been in books. I’ve dug into memoir after memoir, tiptoed into the hard science books, and enjoyed the fiction from afar. The following are a smattering best books for addiction recovery of the books about alcoholism I’ve found meaningful. Beck is a loving husband, father, and respected business owner who drinks two bottles of wine a night. Unwilling to call himself an alcoholic, he tries everything to curb his drinking without success. Determined to get clean, Beck develops a unique approach to sobriety that changes the trajectory of his life.

It would be really easy to simply gloss over the pivotal, seeping role of alcoholism in this book, being as it is, a truly gripping murder story. And yet, the psychological terror of the book is informed by the dual psychosis of its main characters, one of whom is a young man, an alcoholic who seems intent on destroying his organs as quickly as possible. Bruno’s complete lack of contact with reality makes his alcoholism seemingly beside the point, but as the story progresses, I find my sympathies shifting as Bruno becomes more and more helplessly imprisoned by his disease. Highsmith manages to humanely portray a murdering, rich, hapless drunk so that near the end, one inevitably feels more complicated and ravaged by both Highsmith and Bruno’s trickery. Often, when we think of books about addiction and specifically alcoholism (in my case), we think of important, tell-all works of nonfiction. Memoirs like Sarah Hepola’s Blackout, Augusten Burroughs’ Dry, and Drunk Mom by Jowita Bydlowska are recent, searing examples of first person accounts of being drunk and then, eventually, being sober.