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. Karr arrived with a unique literary voice that combined rich Texan and burst of lyricism. And she had an almost miraculous ability to portray her broken family with wit and love, without ever flinching from pain.
What Makes a Successful Addiction Memoir?
Luckily, there’s a whole genre of books that prove you are not the only one who has battled addiction. In his follow-up to his first memoir, Tweak, which dealt with his journey into meth addiction, Sheff details his struggle to stay clean. In and out of rehab, he falls into relapse, engaging in toxic relationships and other self-destructive behaviors that threaten to undo the hard-won progress he’s made. At the age of 15, Cat Marnell began to unknowingly “murder her life” when she became hooked on the ADHD medication prescribed to her by her psychiatrist father.
Powerful Addiction Memoirs that Sober People Love
“It’s not just drinking, we can be addicted to fear, we can be addicted to drama… we can have emotional relationships when we don’t really want to,” she noted. “It’s about really addressing those things that are behind the addiction… The addiction is just the symptoms. And for me, drinking was just behind the symptoms of those things.” She checked herself into rehab 20 years ago and has been sober ever since.
the Recovering By Leslie Jamison
“The first day of my second sobriety, I crashed my friend’s car into a concrete wall,” she writes, as if to bang home how wild, mistake-filled, and exciting life without drinking can be. 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 transgression) to mention just a few.
She is a Christian, as am I, and I often battled in best memoirs about addiction my head with being a Christian and being an alcoholic. Eventually my faith brought me to my knees and I began my journey of sobriety after having a spiritual experience. Annie’s book is so important (and she’s a wonderful human to boot). She brilliantly weaves psychological, neurological, cultural, social and industry factors with her own journey.
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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. 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.
Woman of Substances: A Journey Into Drugs, Alcohol and Treatment
- 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.
- Now, in The Book of Boundaries, out November 2023, Urban, who has been in recovery for more than 20 years, shows how setting clear limits can help protect your time, energy, health, security, confidence, and freedom.
- When I stopped drinking alcohol, I was desperate to know the stories of other people who’d also taken this road less traveled.
The Recovering is a wide-ranging and frequently excellent book about addiction, but it is stymied when it attempts to be too zoomed-out. Addiction, with its cyclical copping, its single-minded want, is a monotonous thing. But the experiences of those addicted differ vastly, based on race, class, the substances in question, the time and place.