Addiction Memoirs

Andrew Brobyn's relationship was in shambles before he took the terrible acid that sent him on an almost decade-long journey seeking redemption. His immediate plans following university were to liquidate his illicit assets, sell his client list, pack up shop, and retire to his parents' home in Toronto, while he figured out what to do with a bachelor's degree in philosophy and a quarter million in cash. As his drug use and bipolar disorder spiral, his situation gets stranger and stranger, taking him from his university campus to strip clubs, psych wards, and the slammer.

In January 2021, Freda Love Smith, acclaimed rock musician and author of Red Velvet Underground, watched as insurgents stormed the U.S. Capitol. It felt like the culmination of eight months of pandemic anxiety. She needed a drink, badly. But she suspected a midday whiskey wouldn’t cure what was really ailing her—nor would her nightly cannabis gummy, or her four daily cups of tea, or any of the other substances she relied on to get through each day. Thus began her experiment to remove one addictive behavior from her life each month to see if sobriety was really all it was cracked up to be.

Born in the Bronx, Guy Trebay was raised in an atmosphere of privilege on Long Island’s North Shore after his entrepreneurial father struck business gold with Hawaiian Surf, a wildly successful cologne company that capitalized on the optimism of the 1960s as marketed to “an adventurous new breed of men.’’ But behind the facade of material prosperity lay the emotional disarray of a household dominated by a charismatic, con artist father, a glamorous yet lost and careless mother, a family haunted by tragedy.

Award-winning author James Brown gained a cult following after chronicling his turbulent childhood and spiraling drug addiction in The Los Angeles Diaries. This River picks up where Brown left off in his first memoir, describing his tenuous relationship with sobriety, telling of agonizing relapses, and tracking his attempts to become a better father. This is the heartbreaking and at times uplifting tale of Brown's battles, peeking into his former life as an addict and detailing his subsequent ascent to sobriety and fight for redemption.

Nile Wilson has always been one of life's winners; a charismatic young man with an Olympic bronze medal in the Horizontal Bar at just 21 years old. But after a serious neck injury, forcing him to retire early and miss taking part in the Tokyo Olympics, Nile's world fell apart. Swamped with depression, anxiety and addictive behaviours, his mental health went over a cliff. Over the past few years, Nile has had to face down his demons and accept his new reality, and this is the book he wish he'd been given before it all began.

Truths from an Unreliable Witness is a fiercely honest and wryly funny memoir of melancholy, love, marriage, the loss of love and marriage, homelessness, of hotel rooms strewn with empty mini-bar bottles of vodka, of waking from a two-week coma, of putrid drug dens and using a jungle to confront yourself. It is about hitting rock bottom and then realising you are only halfway down. Ultimately, it's about hanging on to your last straw of sanity and finding laughter in the darkest of times. You may want to sit down for this....

A fixation on porn and orgasm, strings of failed relationships and serial hook-ups with strangers, inevitable blackouts to blunt the shame - these are not things we often hear women share publicly, and not with the candor, eloquence and introspection Erica Garza brings to Getting Off. Garza draws an evocative, studied portrait of the anxiety that fuels her obsessions as well as the exhilaration and hope she begins to feel when she suspects she might be free of them. And yet there is no false or prepackaged sense of redemption here.

If there’s one thing Leah McSweeney knows for sure, it’s that life never quite gives you what you expect. Her road to success as an entrepreneur and Real Housewives breakout star has been paved with unexpected chances, soul-crushing challenges, and, for too long, chaos.

Character Witness is a memoir about a son's relationship with his mother, chronicling her struggle with mental illness, addiction, and poverty while exploring how the son's troubles as a young man began to mirror hers.

For the first time, legendary singer and songwriter Aaron Neville tells his personal story of overcoming poverty, racism, addiction, and loss through faith, family, and music. Aaron Neville’s first #1 hit, “Tell It Like it Is,” was released in 1966. In the mid-70s he formed the Neville...

Sexual assault, addiction, and other traumatic experiences can leave both physical and emotional scars. For Jennifer Storm, these scars serve as a reminder - both of the darkness and suffering she once experienced, and of how far she has come. Blackout Girl is the heartbreaking, enlightening, and inspiring story of Jennifer's narrow escape from her own self-destructive instincts when all of the odds, and systems, were stacked against her.

As Melissa Bond raises her infant daughter and a special-needs one-year-old son, she suffers from unbearable insomnia, sleeping an hour or less each night. She loses her job as a journalist (a casualty of the 2008 recession), and her relationship with her husband grows distant. Her doctor casually prescribes benzodiazepines—a family of drugs that includes Xanax, Valium, Klonopin, Ativan—and increases her dosage regularly.

The long-awaited, full-force autobiography of American punk music hero, Bob Mould. Bob Mould stormed into America's punk rock scene in 1979, when clubs across the country were filling with kids dressed in black leather and torn denim, packing in to see bands like the Ramones, Black Flag, and the...

A Life of Recovery: Breaking the Chains of Addiction is a powerful and deeply personal memoir by Woody Giessmann, musician-turned-addiction specialist, who takes you on a raw, emotional journey from chaos and substance abuse to healing and hope. This inspirational story blends compelling autobiography with practical tools for families affected by addiction and untreated mental illness. From losing his brother to addiction and suicide, to his own spiral through alcohol and drugs while performing with a major rock band, Woody's story is brutally honest and painfully relatable.

In Coming Clean, Seth Haines writes a raw account of his first 90 days of sobriety, illuminating how to face the pain we’d rather avoid, and even more importantly, how an abiding God meets us in that pain. Seth shows us that true wholeness is found in facing our pain and anxieties with the tenacity and tenderness of Jesus, and only through Christ's passion can we truly come clean.

New York Times best-selling author, comedian, and actor Patton Oswalt shares his entertaining memoir about coming of age as a performer and writer in the late '90s while obsessively watching classic films at the legendary New Beverly Cinema in Los Angeles. Between 1995 and 1999, Patton Oswalt lived with an unshakeable addiction. It wasn't drugs, alcohol, or sex. It was film.

Ever promised ‘never again’ only to find yourself raising a glass the very next week? Have an ‘all or nothing’ approach to drinking? You are not alone. If you are stuck in the loop of failed moderation attempts but shudder at the thought of saying no to alcohol forever, then the 99% Sober approach is for you. Stop tying yourself in knots while Googling ‘Am I an alcoholic?’ or ‘Do I have a drink problem?’ Let this book show you how to flip this around and find out how much better your life can be with less alcohol in it.

Since he was a young boy, Joe Balzer dreamed of flying. He pursued his goal with passion and earned his pilot licenses, piling up hours of flight time with a wide variety of planes and jets with one overarching goal: to one day fly for a major airline. But Joe had a problem. He was an alcoholic and refused to admit to himself that he had a problem. His alcoholism caught up with him in March 1990, when Joe was arrested with two other pilots for flying a commercial airliner while under the influence of alcohol.

One phone call. That's all it took to change Stephanie Wittels Wachs's life forever.... Her younger brother Harris, a star in the comedy world known for his work on shows like Parks and Recreation, had died of a heroin overdose. How do you make sense of such a tragic end to a life of so much hilarious brilliance? In beautiful, unsentimental, and surprisingly funny prose, Stephanie Wittels Wachs alternates between her brother's struggle with addiction, which she learned about three days before her wedding, and the first year after his death, in all its emotional devastation.

The story of a young girl's entrapment in gambling addiction. The true advert for problem gambling and how it controlled her every movement, her every thought and almost took her life. How the guilt and shame that go hand-in-hand with addiction stopped her from reaching out for help for eight years as she didn't feel it was okay for a young female to be a problem gambler. How she believed it was a male dominated problem, and how eventually, she did find the tools that enabled her to become free of her addiction.