Memoir Addiction Recovery

A startlingly frank memoir, Quitter documents one woman's struggles with alcoholism and recovery, with essential new insights into addiction and treatment.

Beloved former ABC 20/20 anchor Elizabeth Vargas reveals her alcohol addiction and anxiety disorder in a shockingly honest and emotional memoir. From the moment she uttered the brave and honest words, "I am an alcoholic," to interviewer George Stephanopoulos, Elizabeth Vargas began writing her story, as her experiences were still raw. Now, in Between Breaths, Vargas discusses her accounts of growing up with anxiety—which began suddenly at the age of six when her father served in Vietnam.

On paper, Sarah Levy’s life was on track. She was 28, living in New York City, working a great job, and socializing every weekend. But Sarah had a secret: her relationship with alcohol was becoming toxic. And only she could save herself. Drinking Games explores the role alcohol has in our formative years, and what it means to opt out of a culture completely enmeshed in drinking. It’s an examination of what our short-term choices about alcohol do to our long-term selves and how they challenge our ability to be vulnerable enough to discover what we really want in life.

When Abraham Verghese, a physician whose marriage is unraveling, relocates to El Paso, Texas, he hopes to make a fresh start as a staff member at the county hospital. There he meets David Smith, a medical student recovering from drug addiction, and the two men begin a tennis ritual that allows them to shed their inhibitions and find security in the sport they love and with each other. This friendship between doctor and intern grows increasingly rich and complex, more intimate than two men usually allow.

Lisa Smith was a bright young lawyer at a prestigious law firm in New York City when alcoholism and drug addiction took over her life. What was once a way she escaped her insecurity and negativity as a teenager became a means of coping with the anxiety and stress of an impossible workload. Girl Walks Out of a Bar explores Smith's formative years, her decade of alcohol and drug abuse, divorce, and her road to recovery.

What could possibly be “lucky” about addiction? Absolutely nothing, thought Laura McKowen when drinking brought her to her knees. As she puts it, she “kicked and screamed . . . wishing for something - anything - else” to be her issue. The people who got to drink normally, she thought, were so damn lucky. But in the midst of early sobriety, when no longer able to anesthetize her pain and anxiety, she realized that she was actually the lucky one. Lucky to feel her feelings, live honestly, really be with her daughter, change her legacy.

The first story Selma Blair Beitner ever heard about herself is that she was a mean, mean baby. With her mouth pulled in a perpetual snarl and a head so furry it had to be rubbed to make way for her forehead, Selma spent years living up to her terrible reputation: biting her sisters, lying spontaneously, getting drunk from Passover wine at the age of seven, and behaving dramatically so that she would be the center of attention. In a memoir that is as wildly funny as it is emotionally shattering, Blair tells the captivating story of growing up and finding her truth.

Sentenced to 65 years in a Texas prison, Damon West once had it all. He came from a great family, in a home full of God, love, support, and opportunities to reach any goal. A natural born leader, an athlete with good looks and charm, he appeared to be the all-American kid pursuing his dreams. Underneath this facade, however, was an addict in the early stages of disease. After suffering childhood sexual abuse by a babysitter at the age of nine, Damon began putting chemicals into his body to alter the way he felt.

Helen Knott, a highly accomplished Indigenous woman, seems to have it all. But in her memoir, she offers a different perspective. In My Own Moccasins is an unflinching account of addiction, intergenerational trauma, and the wounds brought on by sexual violence. It is also the story of sisterhood, the power of ceremony, the love of family, and the possibility of redemption.

When Liz Fraser's partner fell into a catastrophic vortex of depression and alcoholism, Liz found herself in a relentless hailstorm of lies, loneliness and fear, looking after their young child on her own, heartbroken, mentally shattered and with no idea what was happening or what to do. As she and her family moved between Cambridge, Venice and Oxford, she kept the often shocking truth entirely to herself for a long time, trying in vain to help her partner find a path to sobriety, until she herself finally broke from the trauma and started to speak out.

Through roles in cherished films such as Mrs. Doubtfire, Jumanji, Aladdin and Hook, he became the genial face of family comedy. His childlike enthusiasm was infectious, sweeping viewers away. Allied to his lightning-quick improvisation and ability to riff lewdly off any cue thrown at him, Robin was that rare thing - a true comic genius who appealed to adults and children equally. He could also play it straight, and empathetic depth came to him naturally.

When Kerry Cohen reached her early 40s, she realized she had a drinking problem - just enough to blur the edges of her life that had become a monotony of working, carpooling the kids to school, and everyday distractions. What she also realized was that she wasn't the only one. Lush is a gripping memoir that examines Kerry's struggles with alcohol, a struggle that a rising number of middle-aged women are facing. Wonderfully poignant and relatable, Lush follows Kerry as she attempts to rediscover the awe in her life, leaving mistakes, regrets, and the bottle behind her.

Fifteen million Americans a year are plagued with alcoholism. Five million of them are women. Many of them, like Caroline Knapp, started in their early teens and began to use alcohol as "liquid armor", a way to protect themselves against the difficult realities of life. In this extraordinarily candid and revealing memoir, Knapp offers important insights not only about alcoholism, but about life itself and how we learn to cope with it.

When he was two years old, Hunter Biden was badly injured in a car accident that killed his mother and baby sister. In 2015, he suffered the devastating loss of his beloved big brother, Beau, who died of brain cancer at the age of 46. These hardships were compounded by the collapse of his marriage and a years-long battle with drug and alcohol addiction.

A memoir of unblinking honesty and poignant, laugh-out-loud humor, Blackout is the story of a woman stumbling into a new kind of adventure - the sober life she never wanted. For Sarah Hepola, alcohol was "the gasoline of all adventure". She spent her evenings at cocktail parties and dark bars where she proudly stayed till last call. But there was a price. Publicly, she covered her shame with self-deprecating jokes, and her career flourished, but as the blackouts accumulated, she could no longer avoid a sinking truth.

Sixteen years ago Vin Baker was an NBA All-Star, an Olympic Gold medalist, and a multimillionaire. While he excelled on the court, Vin harbored a dark secret: a dependency on drugs and alcohol that began after the clean-cut preacher's son turned pro. Eventually becoming a full-blown yet functional alcoholic, Vin convinced himself he played better under the influence - until his addiction cost him his basketball career, his fortune, and his health. But Vin's story isn't a tragic fall from grace. It is a joyous tale of salvation.

From earliest experimentation to habitual excess to full-blown abuse, 24-year-old Koren Zailckas leads us through her experience of a terrifying trend among young girls, exploring how binge drinking becomes routine, how it becomes "the usual". With the stylistic freshness of a poet and the dramatic gifts of a novelist, Zailckas describes her first sip at 14, alcohol poisoning at 16, blacked-out sexual experience at 19, and total disorientation after waking up in an unfamiliar New York City apartment at 22.

Bryony Gordon is a respected journalist, a number one best-selling author and an award-winning mental health campaigner. She is also an alcoholic. In Glorious Rock Bottom Bryony opens up about a toxic 20-year relationship with alcohol and drugs and explains exactly why hitting rock bottom - for her, a traumatic event and the abrupt realisation that she was putting herself in danger, time and again - saved her life.

The goal is 90. Just 90 clean and sober days to loosen the hold of the addiction that caused Bill Clegg to lose everything. With 73 days in rehab behind him he returns to New York and attends two or three meetings each day. It is in these refuges that he befriends essential allies including the seemingly unshakably sober Asa and Polly, who struggles daily with her own cycle of recovery and relapse. At first, the support is not enough: Clegg relapses for the first time with only three days left.

With its deeply personal and seamless blend of memoir, cultural history, literary criticism, and reportage, The Recovering turns our understanding of the traditional addiction narrative on its head, demonstrating that the story of recovery can be every bit as electrifying as the train wreck itself. Leslie Jamison deftly excavates the stories we tell about addiction - both her own and others' - and examines what we want these stories to do and what happens when they fail us. All the while, she offers a fascinating look at the larger history of the recovery movement and at the complicated bearing that race and class have on our understanding of who is criminal and who is ill.