Her story is a beautiful reminder of how safety and support can lead the way to incredible healing. In her debut book, Ms. Goik initially presents the dubious image of the “functional alcoholic.” On the surface she has a job, friends, and a privileged background. Yet as her story progresses, we see her unravel into a round-the-clock drinker who ends up broke, homeless and hospitalized for an alcohol-induced coma.

The Unexpected Joy of Being Sober: Discovering a Happy, Healthy, Wealthy Alcohol-Free Life by Catherine Gray

Best-selling memoirist Mary Karr longs for the family and stability that eluded her in childhood. When she marries and becomes a mother, she finds that with so much to lose, she Alcoholics Anonymous still cannot control her drive to drink. A car accident, the slow and painful unraveling of her marriage, a stay in a mental hospital and an eventual spiritual awakening finally free Karr from the substance that nearly took her life.

Louise Foxcroft on The History of Medicine and Addiction

Unwilling to call himself an alcoholic, he tries everything to curb his drinking without success. Determined best alcoholic memoirs to get clean, Beck develops a unique approach to sobriety that changes the trajectory of his life. Part memoir and part how-to, many former drinkers credit Alcohol Lied to Me with helping them to finally beat the bottle.

• In it, Annie talks about her own experiences with addiction while keeping things deeply relatable to anyone who’s questioned alcohol’s role in their life.
• Instead she presents herself as a kind of Godly schmuck, chronically slow on the spiritual uptake.
• She made a huge impact on me and is someone I will always be grateful to.
• Which is sort of what happened in some respect, but not in the way I expected.

by Caroline Knapp

Enjoy strange, diverting work from The Commuter on Mondays, absorbing fiction from Recommended Reading on Wednesdays, and a roundup of our best work of the week on Fridays. Just a moment while we sign you in to your Goodreads account. The information on this website is not intended to be a substitute for, or to be relied upon as, medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of a physician or qualified health provider with questions https://caiacreative.com/2023/05/26/the-conflict-avoidant-two-distinct-types/ regarding a medical condition.

Drunk–ish by Stefanie Wilder-Taylor

Funny, informative, and authentic, Poole has a welcoming light-hearted voice on the very serious topic of substance use. This book serves as a beacon to anyone who’s looking to change their relationship with alcohol. If I have any faith now, it’s in literature’s ability to help us redeem even life’s darkest realities by bringing them into the light.

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. But many readers —like the one I was during my time in rehab in 2015—also come to it seeking something often considered antithetical to art. I mean help, whether in the form of identification, solace or instruction.

It’s brutally honest, and her story reads like so many others – some who didn’t make it to recovery. She further educates the reader with research and a better understanding of the psychology and physiology that drive female addiction with humor and exceptional insight. After finishing A Happier Hour, the bar was set high for future reads (no pun intended). It got me thinking the one thing I never wanted to be true… maybe it is the alcohol that’s making me so miserable? Blackout by Sarah Hepola is a brutally honest quit lit memoir of living through blackout after blackout—something that many who’ve struggled with heavy alcohol use can relate to.

And for the first time ever, I started writing, because all those feelings I pushed down wanted a voice. All that childhood trauma needed more than AA and talk therapy to heal. So I gifted those feelings with written words, as did the writers I mention in my list.