I strongly recommend reading this book if you believe you are in a codependent relationship. The book discusses one justification for drinking alcohol in each chapter. That reasoning is then refuted with common sense and medical data. Dupuy uses stories and examples from his life as well as other addicts to explain many aspects of recovery, including treatment plans, assessments, and approaches to relapse prevention. I have not listed books describing the lives of rock stars or movie stars. Some of the books on this list are instructional, and others are informational. Are currently struggling with drug or alcohol addiction, you are not alone. Cupcake Brown was 11 when she was orphaned and placed into foster care. She grew up with a tragic journey, running away and becoming exposed to alcohol, drugs, and sex at a young age, and leaning on those vices to get by.
Members worldwide both to get and stay sober “one day at a time”…. Frank, funny, and always judgment-free, Sober Curiousis a bold guide to choosing to live hangover-free, from Ruby Warrington, one of the leading voices of the new sobriety movement…. Wolynn is a trauma specialist and director of the The Family Constellation Institute best alcohol addiction books in San Francisco. If you’re looking to uncover more of your trauma , then you may want to give this a read. If the religion-focused themes of Alcoholics Anonymous don’t resonate with you, you’ll likely appreciate Holly Whitaker’s refreshingly female-focused take on sobriety as well as the “insidious” nature of the alcohol industry.
Must read if you drink alcohol!
Below is a list of books to enrich your recovery experience by helping you understand your relationship with alcohol. Some are newer, while others have stood the test of time and continue to provide value. As you will discover, one of the themes across these books is the surprising joy found in sober lifestyles. In the end, sobriety is often described as a privilege rather than a chore. Ann Dowsett Johnston brilliantly weaves her own story of recovery with in-depth research on the alarming rise of risky drinking among women. The marketing strategies employed to sell booze to women are as alarming as the skyrocketing number of women who qualify as having alcohol use disorders.
- I first read this book in high school, and revisited it after I quit drinking.
- One of the problems we see with addiction is that some of the suggested solutions by way of consequences and accountability is different than almost every other disease.
- It made me realize the pain I would have brought to my parents if they had lost me.
- In this piece of quit lit, the reader is challenged to quit drinking alcohol for 30 days to re-evaluate their assumptions about alcohol.
- Some critics have called out James Frey for fabricating some of the narrative of “A Million Little Pieces” to have it read more like a novel.
He comes from the book publishing world and, again, was someone who was successful and smart, but in active addiction. He lost trust of people around him and in his field, but through sobriety he has been able to regain that trust and help many people along the way. I very much related to her always feeling “less than” in normal life, and only becoming confident and alive once she poured alcohol down her throat. With incredible wit and skill, Sacha Scobie manages to tell you both what alcohol used to mean for her and how her sober life is going now. She relied on alcohol, so now that this is no longer an option she has to re-evaluate everything in her life, which leads to some great and very witty observations on her newfound life. That bottle of merlot was all Kerry Cohen could think about as she got through her day. She did all she had to do but always with this reward on top of her mind. This book is a positive tale where she narrates the year in which she went from a cancer diagnosis to her happiest and best self ever. In this journey, she became sober, beat cancer, and finally built a richer life than she could have possibly imagined.
What are the Benefits of Books to Understand and Treat Alcoholism?
A person of extraordinary intellect, Heather King is a lawyer and writer/commentator for NPR — as well as a recovering alcoholic who spent years descending from functional alcoholism to barely functioning at all. From graduating cum laude from law school despite her excessive drinking to languishing in dive bars, King presents a clear-eyed look at her past and Sober Home what brought her out of the haze of addiction. At the age of 15, Cat Marnell began to unknowingly “murder her life” when she became hooked on the ADHD medication prescribed to her by her psychiatrist father. When we aren’t posting here, we build programs to help people quit drinking. When we aren’t posting here, we build programs to help people quit drinking.
Following the same trend as other similar memoirs, King’s suffering is explained over the course of her life in a very relatable way, and that is one reason why readers who suffer with addiction might find solace in her story. King was an attorney who developed alcoholism, and then found recovery through spirituality, chiefly Catholicism, to which she converted. King herself refers to “Parched” as, “the dark years” of her life, which should give some indication as to just how severe her experiences with alcohol were. This book is very relatable to intervention professionals who have difficulty helping parents focus on themselves and not their child’s substance use problem. As with almost every family we encounter during the intervention process, they are confused and at odds. Many parents are headed for divorce and sleeping in separate beds due to letting their children divide them. I believe this book does a great job of helping the parents of children using drugs or alcohol understand that it is not OK not to light themselves on fire to keep their children warm. Addict in the Family by Beverly Conyers is a book to help comfort family members by assisting them in understanding that they did not cause the addiction, nor could they have done anything to prevent it. Whether or not we fully agree with that concept, it still proves to be a great read. We encourage families of addicts to read it and compare it to other books that have different theories and beliefs.
But, growing up with an alcoholic mother, my most common mode of escape as a child was in fiction. Before I was old enough to simply walk out of the house and literally escape, I hid inside my room and read entire afternoons away, happily lost. I loved it because I felt like it dealt with the subject of depression and self-harm in a really relatable and compassionate way. I also liked how it relayed that music can be healing no matter what genre the music may be.
This lyrical, dark, biting novel is about one of those friendships, between Tyler and Laura, roommates and codependent hot messes. They wonder throughout whether they’re overdoing it … and order another round anyway. When the cycle of druggy nights and hardcore hangovers starts getting to Laura, their bond must be reevaluated. The cost of survival … Oprah Winfrey as Sethe in the 1998 film version of Beloved. At around 100 pages, this is the shortest book that I will have to re-read because of Jung’s deep, aphoristic style. Jung was concerned about the ease with which individuals slip into groupthink instead of forming their own authentic identities. In fact, I just returned from a trip overseas in which the bartender and I bonded over free non-alcoholic cocktails and had a delightful hour-long conversation about kratom.