Recovery Memoirs

Often misdiagnosed and misunderstood, traumatic brain injury (TBI) may be a life-altering event that can produce a wide range of symptoms affecting physical as well as psychological health. Now, a physician shares her personal journey with TBI after suffering a life-changing accident. In this touching and informative book, Dr. Chrisanne Gordon chronicles her struggles - the high points as well as the lows - as she is challenged to make sense of what happened and realizes that her medical training did not prepare her for these struggles.

From Indigenous chef Nephi Craig, a searing personal and cultural reckoning about the power of food to heal intergenerational wounds When Nephi Craig enrolled in the culinary program at Scottsdale Community College, it was out of necessity after a felony arrest led to a judge’s ultimatum: work...

The Gilded Razor is the true story of a double life. By the age of seventeen, Sam Lansky was an all-star student with Ivy League aspirations in his final year at an elite New York City prep school. But a nasty addiction to prescription pills spiraled rapidly out of control, compounded by a string of reckless affairs with older men, leaving his bright future in jeopardy. After a terrifying overdose, he tried to straighten out.

Domenica Ruta grew up in a working-class, unforgiving Italian town north of Boston where in the seventeenth century women were hanged as witches. Her mother, Kathi, a notorious figure in this hardscrabble place, was a drug addict and sometime dealer whose life swung between welfare and riches, whose highbrow taste was at odds with her base appetites.

From Hell to Hope: A Memoir of Addiction and Mental Illness takes you on a visceral journey with Kate, from the confusion of her teenage years to the fragile beauty of motherhood. Witness her battle with addiction and bipolar disorder, the desperate lows that threatened to consume her, and the flickering moments of hope that fueled her fight.

Jamila Rizvi and Rosie Waterland have each suffered significant, debilitating brain injury - one through rare disease and the medical interventions that followed, the other through deep childhood trauma. In this brave and honest book, Jamila and Rosie share their parallel stories of becoming and being sick, alongside the experience and advice of those who've been there before. They reveal that their 'broken brains' have more in common than they initially realised, proving how mental and physical health are inextricably entwined.

In this honest, yet humorous account of her year of not getting sh*tfaced, Pamela examines her long relationship with alcohol. She is shocked to realize just how much of a crutch alcohol has been for her. There is always a bottle of wine or prosecco around to help her manage the many demands of life as a freelancer and a parent.

Four psychiatric wards. Three rehabs. Two jail cells. And a suicide attempt. Hannah was told she would not make it to 25 with the way she was living. She had struggled with mental illness her entire life, but at 22,her demons came to a head at the grips of severe substance abuse, life-changing trauma, and two major deaths in her life. Hannah’s struggles land her places no one ever hopes to grace; jail and psych wards lead her to the brink of death. Running out of options, she’s left with two choices: live or die.

"Congratulations on the resurrection of your life", a colleague wrote to Emily Rapp Black when she announced the birth of her second child. The line made Rapp Black pause. Her first child, a boy named Ronan, had died from Tay-Sachs disease before he turned three years old, an experience she wrote about in her second book, The Still Point of the Turning World. Since that time, her life had changed utterly.

As a young Latina and Native American lawyer and former wife of California’s attorney general and treasurer, Nadia Davis has long been subjected to public scrutiny. In this powerful homage to finding one’s worth in the face of mental health struggles, addiction, and public shaming, Davis shares her remarkable story. She reveals the depths of the darkness she went through, while gracefully offering transformational healing and an end to the choking grasp of shame.

After Bill had accumulated significant sobriety a celebratory dinner was held in New York City at which Bill gave an AA talk. (Bill drank for 17 years and staying sober for an 17 years was a notable milestone not only to him but to Lois as well.) Bill talks about the role that Ebby played in getting Bill interested in sobriety and the role of Doctor Silkworth in helping him stay sober.

This memoir chronicles the escapades of aspiring actor and writer Charlie Gray, his downward spiral into a vodka bottle, and his profound realizations about life, family, friends, booze, trauma, and relapse as a now-recovering alcoholic.

In the nineties, Ryan Dusick and his friends Adam Levine and Jesse Carmichael dreamed about making it big . . . and against all odds, they did. This inside story recounts Maroon 5's founding and their road to becoming Grammy-winning megastars, told through the eyes of former drummer Ryan Dusick. He takes listeners behind the scenes of the band's meteoric rise to success—and the grueling demands that came with it—as well as his personal struggles with anxiety and addiction after his departure from the band.

Born to an abusive mother and a drug-dealer father, Ginelle Testa is not exactly set up for success—and her early years are just as troubled as one might expect. By the end of her thirteenth year, she’s started experimenting with alcohol and drugs, has fallen prey to anorexia, and has been sexually assaulted. And that’s only the beginning of her spiral down into addiction and disordered eating.

At the start of this remarkable story of recovery, healing, and redemption, Ginger Gaffney answers a call to help retrain the troubled horses at an alternative prison ranch in New Mexico, a facility run entirely by the prisoners. The horses are scavenging through the dumpsters, kicking and running down the residents when they bring the trash out after meals. One horse is severely injured. The horses and residents arrive at the ranch broken in one way or many: the horses are defensive and terrified, while the residents, some battling addictions, are emotionally and physically shattered.

At the age of 15, Kelle Groom found that alcohol allowed her to connect with people and explore intimacy in ways she'd never been able to experience before. She began drinking before class, often blacked out at bars, and fell into destructive relationships. At 19, already an out-of-control alcoholic, she was pregnant. Accepting the heartbreaking fact that she was incapable of taking care of her son herself, she gave him up for adoption to her aunt and uncle. When he was nine months old, the boy was diagnosed with leukemia....

In his late teens Tom Macher rebelled against a world that seemed stacked against him. Raised in a broken family and estranged from an absentee father suffering with AIDS, Macher turned to alcohol to escape the painful loneliness of his reality. In quick succession, he is kicked out of school, and then his mother's house, sent to a boys' home in Montana, and later, a halfway house in a truck-stop town of Louisiana. It was there that Macher encounters a community of young men struggling to survive.

Abandoned by his mother at birth, Kevin was enveloped in a labyrinth of adoption, addiction, and child sexual abuse. By age 20, a shell of the boy he once was, Kevin succumbed completely to a suicidal lifestyle of drug dealing and prostitution. At 45, after many years of recovery, Kevin began a painful journey to uncover his origins, and the hopeful search for his mother. Dear Stephen Michael’s Mother chronicles the unfolding of these two stories.

Blood On The Ceiling: The Awesome Calamities of Addiction and the Miracle of Recovery is a riveting, no-punches-held, inside look at Nelson Trout's excursion into the dark, lonely, and scary world of drug and alcohol abuse and addiction. Blood On The Ceiling is a once-in-a-lifetime audiobook which explores, in brutal detail, the kind of hellish existence that often accompanies life in the fast lane of drugs, partying and the eventual isolation that comes with this terrible addiction.

Cradled in the Arms of Compassion is at once a narrative of psychological transformation and a spiritual autobiography that details the survivor’s journey. Rogers shows how he found recovery through a combination of reflective retreats, therapy, creative expression, and an extraordinary application of imaginative meditation that spiritual seekers and practitioners will find utterly fascinating.