11 Gripping Books About Alcoholism and Recovery

Have you ever read a book that perfectly blended memoir with cultural history, literary criticism, and reportage? That’s what you will get with Leslie Jamison’s The Recovering. The book re-examines the stories that we tell about addiction from the perspective of Jamison’s own struggles, and also includes her ongoing conversation with literary and artistic geniuses such as David Foster Wallace and Billie Holiday. This memoir tells of her painful descent from depression into drug addiction and, eventually, how she broke free. Despite its dark beginning, this is ultimately a hopeful book that inspires readers to root for her throughout. Wurtzel sadly passed away at the age of 52 in January of 2020.

Lit by Mary Karr

• “The Book of Sheen” begins on the evening of his birth, when an umbilical cord wrapped around his neck threatened his life.
• Well, of course I tried my best to steal from them whatever I could.

The road to Oz begins in his parents’ Chinese restaurant in Silicon Valley, and it was paved with humor, humility, and heartening advice from someone who observes life through a crisp lens. Jenny Heijun Wills was born in Korea, but was adopted by a Canadian family and raised in a small town. When she was in her early 20s, she decided to travel back to Korea to meet her extended birth family and other young people who were adopted from Korea and raised abroad. Shares Wills’s journey and also explores the impact of being raised by a family of a different ethnicity and culture.

Horror Stories by Liz Phair (

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. This book tells an incredible story of not only recovery, best memoirs about alcoholism but also how it connects to race and sexual identity. A captivating story of a highly accomplished well-known professional in the spotlight who was brave enough to share her story.

The 9 Most Moving Memoirs About Addiction

• When she marries and becomes a mother, she finds that with so much to lose, she still cannot control her drive to drink.
• Her beloved habit of overdrinking and staying until bars closed, however, meant that her nights and the following mornings were also all about her regular blackouts.
• It explores how society’s perception and targeted marketing campaigns keeps groups of people down while simultaneously putting money into “Big Alcohol’s” pockets.
• When David Gillmor disappeared more than 10 years ago, his truck and cowboy hat were found at the edge of the Yukon River.

We can survive and even thrive despite the traumas we have endured. The third in a memoir trilogy that includes the critically acclaimed The Liars’ Club and Cherry, Lit introduces Mary Karr as a full grown woman, poet, wife, and mother struggling with alcoholism. In her musical, no-nonsense style, she shows us how this disease, passed down from her own gun-toting, charming, erratic artist mother, almost wrecked her own life, following her on a quest for the stability she didn’t know as a kid.

The ones who can make it to the other side of addiction gain an enriched, rare perspective on life that they never could’ve had otherwise. Matt Rowland Hill was born in 1984 in Pontypridd, South Wales, and grew up in Wales and England. His writing has appeared in The Guardian, The Independent, New Statesman, the Telegraph and other outlets. Creating healthy boundaries is one of the most useful practices we can put into place in early sobriety. But what does that mean, exactly, and how do you go about establishing boundaries?

With its insightful exploration of the potential of literature to change lives, Lit Up is a must-read for anyone passionate about the power of books to inspire and shape the drug addiction treatment next generation. In the literature world, you can find books about addiction and recovery in a genre known as “quit lit.” Quit lit is full of authors sharing their personal experiences and resources to help others who are where they’ve been. 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.

Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear by Elizabeth Gilbert

Sometimes, a slow realization of enough being enough is all it takes to start your recovery. From the Enlightenment onwards, Russian authors have produced a vast and influential literary canon, including historic epics, absurdist classics, and tortured reflections on the human condition. Russia’s political turmoil also led to the writing of many moving memoirs and political works that sought to find solutions in spite of censorship and, for some authors, exile. Whereas my progress was from religion to addiction, Mary Karr’s was the other way around.

The Unexpected Joy of Being Sober

Nedra Glover Tawwab combines wisdom, research, and practical tools to help you change your life by building sustainable boundaries that actually work for you. Reading We are the Luckiest by Laura McKowen can quite possibly save your life. For anyone hiding in the shadows of shame, this book is a guiding light. But the ending (spoiler alert), is ultimately triumphant. For every parent riddled with guilt, for anyone waking up in the shame cave (again), for every person who has had a messy struggle forward towards redemption… this book is for you.

Their trip ends up not only being an exploration of their family history, but also their own relationship as they grapple with Joe’s declining health. Moments of Glad Grace is a memoir that chronicles this pivotal moment in both their lives. Jesse Thistle is a Métis-Cree academic specializing in Indigenous homelessness, addiction and inter-generational trauma. For Thistle, these issues are more than just subjects on the page. After a difficult childhood, Thistle spent much of his early adulthood struggling with addiction while living on the streets of Toronto.