Recovery Memoirs

A brutally honest confessional that reckons with the darkest parts of the male psyche and provides a framework for men to heal themselves and their relationships. When Sean Hotchkiss watched his father spiral after his second divorce and jump off a thirty-six-story bridge, the cause of his...

'A lot of people love us, a lot of people hate us, and that will probably never change. But they do know who we are.' When Adam Spivey first became obsessed with training his dog Sammie, he never would have guessed he would one day be at the helm of the world's leading online dog training...

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.

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.

Unshamed is a raw, intimate, and courageous memoir about a woman who refused to let shame write the ending of her story. Michelle takes listeners deep into the realities of addiction, the heartbreak of loss, and the long, uneven road toward recovery—raw and unfiltered--told with pure honesty and a fierce commitment to truth. But this is not just her story. It is a tapestry woven with the lives of family, friends, counselors, and fellow travelers who walked beside her in moments of darkness and breakthrough.

Part recovery journal, part travel log, Recovery Road Trip follows one woman's solo road trip through America after her alcoholic father’s death. Through chance encounters, she creates inspiration for those seeking to overcome addiction and find their path. Meg thought giving up alcohol would lead her to a life of comfort, wisdom, and happiness. Years later, she still hasn’t gotten there. What is it that she’s missing? When her father—a raging alcoholic himself—dies, Meg, an only child, has to fly to California from her home in New Zealand to clean up the mess that was his life.

This "utterly spectacular" book weighs the impact modern medical technology has had on the author's life against the social and environmental costs inevitably incurred by the mining that makes such innovation possible (Rachel Louise Snyder, author of No Visible Bruises). What if a lifesaving...

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....

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.

A gripping tale of a rogue cop's journey through the dark world of police corruption, revealing shocking truths about brutality, addiction, and redemption. Experience the chaos of life on the edge and the struggle to reclaim humanity amidst the madness.

In this moving, tender memoir of losing a beloved spouse, the longtime editor of Texas Monthly, newly widowed, returns alone to a city whose enchantment he's only ever shared with his wife, in search of solace, memories, and the courage to find a way forward. At the age of sixty-six, after...

As chronicled in his hit memoir Straight Pepper Diet, one fateful summer night, Joseph Naus, a young LA lawyer, went out to have just a couple of drinks. He awoke the next morning handcuffed to a hospital bed and charged with attempted murder. And then it got worse. The Palsgraf Revelation begins where Straight Pepper Diet left off. Joseph survived the initial blast of the nuclear bomb he dropped on his own life, but if he wants to become more than a shocking cautionary tale, he must now learn to live with the devastating fallout.

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.

In a deeply personal and moving book, the beloved NPR radio host speaks out about the long drawn-out death (from Parkinson’s) of her husband of fifty-four years, and of her struggle to reconstruct her life without him. With John gone, Diane was indeed “on her own,” coping with the...

In 2018, 34 people were shot at a high school in Parkland, Florida. Jaime Guttenberg, a 14-year-old, was the second to last victim. That she and so many of her fellow students were struck down in cold blood galvanized many to action, including Jaime's father, Fred, who has become an activist dedicated to passing common-sense gun-safety legislation. This book is not about gun safety or Parkland. Instead, it tells the story of Fred Guttenberg's journey since Jaime's death and how he has been able to get through the worst of times thanks to the kindness and compassion of others.

When her six-year-old daughter found her collapsed on the kitchen floor, Rachel had no idea how much her life was about to change. A brain scan revealed a dark shadowy mass, a huge abnormal growth of tissue that, whilst benign, was still growing and would surely kill her. It was too big to operate on. It needed to be "managed", and Rachel had, at best, two years to live. Refusing to accept the bleak prognosis, Rachel was determined to stay alive.

Carol E. Miller was 16 when the private plane piloted by her father crashed, pinning her in the wreckage, critically injuring her parents, and killing her 12-year-old sister. Compounding this traumatic event, her father told her he wished she had died instead of her sister. For the next 20 years, she labored under feelings of guilt and a lack of self-worth. When another in a long line of personal crises landed her in therapy with an EMDR (eye movement desensitization and reprocessing) practitioner, she began at last to investigate the crippling effects of the plane crash.

When Deb Brandon discovered that cavernous angiomas - tangles of malformed blood vessels in her brain - were behind the terrifying symptoms she'd been experiencing, she underwent one brain surgery. And then another. And then another. And that was just the beginning. The book also includes an introduction by Connie Lee, founder and president of the Angioma Alliance. Unlike other memoirs that focus on injury crisis and acute recovery, But My Brain Had Other Ideas follows Brandon’s story all the way through to long-term recovery, revealing without sugarcoating or sentimentality Brandon’s struggles - and ultimate triumph.

Told through 52 heartfelt letters, The Road I Never Meant to Take is a brave and compassionate memoir about one woman’s unexpected descent into addiction—and the gritty, beautiful journey back. Through the voice of “L,” a fictionalized character based on lived experience, author and therapist Alanna Bell explores the emotional wreckage, the neurological science, and the spiritual reckoning behind substance use disorder.