This powerful memoir follows Cain’s life as she navigates a substance use disorder, incarceration, and sex work over the course of 19 years. Healing Neen provides a personal look into the connection between incarceration, substance use, and trauma. Her story is a beautiful reminder of how safety and support can lead the way to incredible healing.
One of the things I admire most about Febos is her generosity, the palpable love with which she writes about herself, her gentle self-awareness. Here is a beloved daughter from a supportive home, a talented student. With measured curiosity, she challenges the notion that a woman like that can’t abandon herself and others, that she can’t be a sex worker, that she can’t be an addict, that any of best alcoholic memoirs these is guaranteed to beget the other. I really liked this book because it focuses a lot on her spiritual crisis and how it related to her alcoholism. She is a Christian, as am I, and I often battled in 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.
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Dependency is startlingly unlike any other memoir about addiction—that I know of, at least. Next you’ve chosen to recommend Tove Ditlevsen’s Dependency, the third book in her Copenhagen Trilogy. It was first published in Danish in the 1970s, but has only recently been translated into English by Tiina Nunnally and Michael Favela Goldman.
- But seriously, I hope at least one of these memoirs speaks to you.
- The battle at the front is not won by despair; rather, it is won through sober living, building trust, and hard work.
- The various accidental similarities between these books began, before long, to harden into a blueprint, which countless books have faithfully reproduced.
- The ‘sober curious‘ movement has spawned non-alcoholic bars in cities as different as Nashville and New York, zero-proof liquors and a whole lot of memoirs written by addicts in recovery.
Letter From Minnesota: Finding Community (and a Little Joy) in the Club
If you struggle with anything related to body image, you won’t regret this read. This book may also help you see sobriety as a gift you’re giving to your body. This is a self-help book by a licensed therapist that braids together anonymized client stories, personal narrative, psychological tools, and brain research. White thoughtfully explores boundaries, emotional regulation, body image, shame, and self-care in a way that’s actionable and accessible. 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. After finishing A Happier Hour, the bar was set high for future reads (no pun intended).
Healing Neen: One Woman’s Path to Salvation from Trauma and Addiction by Tonier Cain
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. 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. This is no joyful, linear skip towards sobriety and redemption.
Early sobriety forces, like giving birth, a quick and complete break with a former life in order to make way for a new, sometimes ambiguously desired one. The book ends on a hopeful bottom, where Don is clear-eyed and ready to give not drinking (and writing) another chance. It is the new day that every drunk faces each time they quit again. Today, some of my favorite works of fiction are those which manage to portray the complex multitudes of ways in which alcoholism affects people—not just the addicts themselves, but their friends, family, and co-workers. It is easy to use addiction as a crutch, a way to build plot or signal “here’s a bad dude,” but it is much harder to accurately and humanely depict the life-warping pain of struggling with alcoholism. The books which do it best, in my opinion, are often not consciously “about” addiction at all, but show its effects lingering in the corners of every page.
It’s a memoir of her addiction to alcohol, and her subsequent recovery, and her conversion to Catholicism. From her excessive drinking and smoking to disordered eating and falling for the wrong men, Caroline Knapp is seemingly attracted to anything and everything that isn’t good for her. She drinks to cope with life’s difficulties, like the death of her parents, but it’s only after twenty years of dependency that she sees how the “cure” to her stress and anxiety is the real problem. Hepola spends hungover mornings piecing together the missing hours of the nights before and frequently wakes up with unrecognizable men in unfamiliar places. She eventually realizes a life of forgotten times and missing memories is no life at all, and she sets out to find her identity outside of drinking.
Sober Celebrities: 4 Hollywood Stars Who Overcame Addiction
It was every bit as gruelling and heartbreaking as the truth required it to be. And I can’t think of a better compliment to a writer of addiction memoir – or, indeed, any writer – than that. In his memoir, the front-man of Bono presents a mosaic of songs, stories and survival as he builds a bridge from fame toward insight.
But though our world-views are in some ways profoundly different, few books have enriched me as a reader and a person more than hers. 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. Tiffany Jenkins spins a tale of her own life like a person who has shed the mask finally. At the outset, her life seemed perfect, cheerleader, soon-to-be wife of a policeman, and smiling in every picture. Gradually, however, came the medication, deceit, and the gradual destruction that led to prison.
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They quickly became friends, bonding over their shared desire for an exciting, outside-the-lines life. But they struggled with how to have that life without alcohol. Most of their friends spent their weekends living the “rose all day” lifestyle, and every first date wanted to meet at a bar.
I’ve dug into memoir after memoir, tiptoed into alcoholism treatment the hard science books, and enjoyed the fiction from afar. The following are a smattering of the books about alcoholism I’ve found meaningful. Reading these books about alcoholism (memoirs, nonfiction, and fiction) and recommending them to you is part of my personal therapy. A high-achieving professional, Christie Tate couldn’t figure out why her seemingly perfect life brought her nothing but misery. While she’s initially reluctant, Tate soon discovers that Dr. Rosen’s nakedly honest approach to communal psychotherapy is exactly what she needs for her own personal growth.
Alcohol Recovery Coaching Transformed My Life
Occasionally reminiscent of Sylvia Plath, Karr’s writing style https://www.superkleen.in/15-early-warning-signs-and-symptoms-of-dementia/ is simultaneously unsentimental and moving. Clegg had a thriving life as a literary agent when he walked away from his seemingly-fulfilling world for a two-month crack binge. Having just been released from rehab nine months earlier, his relapse cost him his home, money, career and almost his life. Capturing the drama, tension, paranoia and short-term bliss of drug addiction, his book explores how the patterns of addiction can be traced to the past.