Ted Adamson also talks about his journey from county jail to state prison and the raw truth of what happened to him when he was a junkie. This is one of the best books about addiction recovery that offers hope for people who are struggling to find the light best alcoholic memoirs at the end of the tunnel. Loving someone who suffers from addiction is one of the hardest things a human being can go through. The situations and emotions a person experiences while a loved one struggles with drugs or alcohol can be completely overwhelming.

Courage to Change

If you want even more books, we’ve got 16 books about the unglamorous parts of addiction here. Cynnie vows she’ll never be an alcoholic–-she’s sees the damage alcohol can cause in her mother every day. The stress of being the real adult of the house gets to be tough, though and Cynnie has an idea about what might numb the pain. Journalist and recovery addict Salavitz marries journalism and memoir in this exploration of how and why addiction develops–-and how we should think about treating it. The strength of addiction’s grasp is illustrated through the lives of four main characters, each struggling with it in their own way.

Recovery Retreats for the Stars: Where Celebs Go to Rehab

Richard (Richie) Farrell is the author and voice behind a wonderful and difficult story of heroin addiction and recovery. This memoir tells you the true story of how low a man can get in life and how hard he needs to fight to escape the ugliness of hard drug addiction, desperation, violence and lies. In his book “Believable Hope”, Michael Cartwright shares the five (5) essential elements you need to beat any addiction. If you are struggling with a drug or alcohol problem, suffering from prolonged depression or weight gain, this book offers the methodology of five (5) core elements that have helped tens of thousands of people over the years. Although she makes faltering progress in building a simulacrum of grown-up life, her relationship with alcohol—“I had an appetite for drink, a taste for it, a talent”—steadily overtakes everything. By the end of her drinking she is reduced to crouching on a stairwell outside her apartment, glugging whisky with her one-year-old son and failing marriage inside.

Diary of an Alcoholic Housewife by Brenda Wilhelmson

And she had an almost miraculous ability to portray her broken family with wit and love, without ever flinching from pain. 2000’s Cherry picked up the story by showing Karr as an adolescent, already dabbling with drugs and profoundly lacking any sense of belonging. But Ditlevsen’s single conventional moment also, I think, underlines her originality.

Best Books About Alcohol Recovery

“Women and Problem Gambling” covers several aspects of the problem, starting from the role of the gambling industry, the role of society, as well as the relationships of women with themselves and with others. The goal is to give an answer to the frequently asked question about “Who is to blame? This book can provide valuable insight to families, friends, therapists, healthcare professionals, and to women problem-gamblers. Jerry Stahl was a writer with significant and successful screenwriting credits — Dr. Caligari, Twin Peaks, Moonlighting, and more. 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.

• Finding real and fictional characters in books about recovery that you can relate to is even better.
• But even more than how it captures the bleakness of alcoholism, what I most value in this book is how she narrates her recovery with such brutal honesty.
• The Sober Lush by Jardine Libaire and Amanda Eyre WardMust I retire all my old indulgences?
• Learn more about alcohol abuse, drug addiction and the recovery process.
• This book serves as a beacon to anyone who’s looking to change their relationship with alcohol.
• She does not recover in any straightforward way from worry, obsession, or attempts to control her brother or – obviously – the narrative, but she makes her way towards a kind of serenity.

Browse rehabs by state

Dr. Maté shares the powerful insight that substance use is, in many cases, a survival mechanism. When something awful happens to us, our way to cope is to turn off and even turn against ourselves, as a method of resilience. The book discusses drug policies, substance use treatment, and the root causes of substance use. More than anything, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts provides a voice of kind generosity and understanding to anyone who is looking to learn more for themselves or a loved one. Of course, books and audiobooks are just one component in your recovery toolkit.

• This is an inspirational book with a 12-step process on how to completely stop addiction and recover fully from it.
• This is one of the best reads for families of addicts, but also for anyone else who is wondering what addiction compulsion is and how recovery takes place.
• In fact, if you have a book in mind that people should read, send it to us!
• Writers approach historical fiction from many different angles, explains the novelist Paul Carlucci—whose new, evocative novel is set in colonial-era Canada.
• So, hell is freezing over with this bi-partisan bill that is in a Congress that many times is too divided.
• For some people, he argues, addiction eases the pain of trauma by replicating the effects of feel-good brain chemicals that the more fortunate of us experienced during a loving childhood.

• Erica Layne has used her experience to try to explain to people to concentrate on what is really important to them.
• She surely felt the reader (and perhaps the author) had endured too much pain in the preceding story to be sent away without solace.
• Resistant to 12-step recovery, Frey finds rehab intensely challenging, yet he persists.