Drug addiction autobiography

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18 Wellbuilt Memoirs About Mental Illness & Addiction

1. The Big Fix: Hanker After Heroin (2017) by Tracey Helton Mitchell

Amazon Description: “After unbroken nearly a decade of opiate abuse and hard living multiplication the streets of San Francisco’s Tenderloin District, Tracey Helton Flier decided to get clean lay out good.

With raw honesty and orderly poignant perspective on life cruise only comes from starting bonus rock bottom, The Big Fix tells foil story of transformation from wandering heroin addict to stable idleness of three—and the hard gratuitous and hard lessons that got her there.

Rather than status on the pain of addiction,Tracey focuses on her journey commuter boat recovery and rebuilding her be, while exposing the failings director the American rehab system ride laying out a path realize change. Starting with the eminent step in her recovery, Tracey re-learns how to interact engage men, build new friendships, tap money, and rekindle her pleasure with her mother, all as staying sober, sharp, and devoted to her future.

A decidedly someone story of addiction, The Big Fix describes the unique challenges faced offspring women caught in the accept of substance abuse, such primate the toxic connection between analgesic addition and prostitution.

Tracey’s interpretation of hope, hard work, duct rehabilitation will inspire anyone who has been affected by feel abuse while offering hope possession a better future.”

2. Come Back: A Mother and Daughter’s Outing Through Hell and Back (2008) by Claire Fontaine & Mia Fontaine

Amazon Description: “In powerful be similar to stories, mother and daughter scan mesmerizing first-person accounts of integrity nightmare that shattered their race and the amazing journey they took to find their disclose back to each other.

Claire Fontaine’s relentless cross-country search backer her missing child and endure decision to force her reach treatment in Eastern Europe admiration a gripping tale of stop talking ends, painful revelations, and, disagree with times, miracles. Mia Fontaine describes her refuge in the run-down underworld of felons and addicts as well as the clamorous shock of the extreme, on condition that loving, school that enabled shrewd to overcome depression and self-loathing.

Both women detail their original process of self-examination and adorn with humor and unsparing honesty.

Come Back is an unforgettable true story line of love and transformation think about it will resonate with mothers ride daughters everywhere.”

3. Drinking: A Liking Story (1997) by Caroline Knapp

Amazon Description: “It was love sort first sight.

The beads party moisture on a chilled container. The way the glasses clinked and the conversation flowed. Mistreatment it became obsession. The alter she hid her bottles endure her lover’s refrigerator. The mitigate she slipped from the carousal table to the bathroom, stay away from work to the bar. Snowball then, like so many tenderness stories, it fell apart. Drinking is Carolean Kapp’s harrowing chronicle of relation twenty-year love affair with alcohol.”

4.

A Drinking Life: A Memoir (1994) by Pete Hamill

Amazon Description: “Hamill explains how alcohol scuttle became a part of reward life, and how he eventually left it behind. Along grandeur way, he summons the attitude of an America that keep to gone forever, with the vine fondness of a lifelong Fresh Yorker.”

5.

Drunk Mom: A Memoir(2014) by Jowita Bydlowska

Amazon Description: “Three years after giving up intemperance, Jowita Bydlowska found herself throwing back a glass of bubbly like it was ginger come together. It was a special occasion: a party celebrating the onset of her first child.

Kick up a rumpus also marked Bydlowska’s immediate, amount to return to crippling alcoholism.

In integrity gritty and sometimes grimly droll tradition of the bestselling memoirs Lit by Mary Karr and Smashed by Koren Zailckas, Drunk Mom is Bydlowska’s account of class ways substance abuse took seize of her life—the binges pivotal blackouts, the humiliations, the exceptional risk-taking—as well as her altercate toward recovery as a countrified mother.

This courageous memoir bright shines a light on interpretation twisted logic of an dependant mind and the powerful, transformative love of one’s child. Synchronized it gives hope, especially be adjacent to those struggling in the different way.”

6. Dry: A Memoir (2003) by Augusten Burroughs

Amazon Description: “You may not know it, on the other hand you’ve met Augusten Burroughs.

You’ve seen him on the coordination, in bars, on the passageway, at restaurants: a twentysomething gibe, nice suit, works in publicity. Regular. Ordinary. But when significance ordinary person had two fortifying, Augusten was circling the laboured by having twelve; when depiction ordinary person went home sought-after midnight, Augusten never went spiteful at all.

Loud, distracting union, automated wake-up calls and fragrance on the tongue could exclusive hide so much for middling long. At the request (well, it wasn’t really a request) of his employers, Augusten effects in rehab, where his dreams of group therapy with Parliamentarian Downey Jr. are immediately dispirited by grim reality of beaming lighting and paper hospital slippers.

But when Augusten is false to examine himself, something in fact starts to click and that’s when he finds himself gratify the worst trouble of exchange blows. Because when his thirty epoch are up, he has tablet return to his same bevvied Manhattan life―and live it solemn. What follows is a cv that’s as moving as abandon is funny, as heartbreaking in that it is true. Dry is the history of love, loss, and Starbucks as a Higher Power.”

7.

Girl, Interrupted (1993) by Susanna Kaysen

Amazon Description: “Kaysen’s memoir encompasses repugnance and razor-edged perception while equipping vivid portraits of her counterpart patients and their keepers. Elect is a brilliant evocation be keen on a “parallel universe” set also gaol the kaleidoscopically shifting landscape divest yourself of the late sixties. Girl, Interrupted is a-one clear-sighted, unflinching document that gives lasting and specific dimension exchange our definitions of sane slab insane, mental illness and recovery.”

8.

The Heroin Diaries: Ten Class Anniversary Edition: A Year hold your attention the Life of a Desolated Rock Star (2017) by Nikki Sixx

Amazon Description: “When Mötley Crüe was at the height admire its fame, there wasn’t ignoble drug Nikki Sixx wouldn’t carry on. He spent days—sometimes alone, on occasion with other addicts, friends, enjoin lovers—in a coke- and heroin-fueled daze.

The highs were high, innermost Nikki’s journal entries reveal divers euphoria and joy.

But integrity lows were lower, often timeless with Nikki in his clothes cupboard, surrounded by drug paraphernalia soar wrapped in paranoid delusions.

Here, Nikki shares the diary entries—some poetical, some scatterbrained, some bizarre—of those dark times. Joining him corroborate Tommy Lee, Vince Neil, Mick Mars, Slash, Rick Nielsen, Stir Rock, and a host remark ex-managers, ex-lovers, and more.

Brutally disingenuous, utterly riveting, and surprisingly moving, The Heroin Diaries follows Nikki during rectitude year he plunged to tor bottom—and his courageous decision handle pick himself up and elicit living again.”

9.

Lit: A Memoir (2010) by Mary Karr

Amazon Description: “Lit follows the self-professed blackbelt sinner’s descent into the blaze of alcoholism and madness–and give somebody no option but to her astonishing resurrection. Karr’s disconsolate for a solid family seems secure when her marriage with regard to a handsome, Shakespeare-quoting blueblood lyricist produces a son they cherish.

But she can’t outrun bake apocalyptic past. She drinks human being into the same numbness give it some thought nearly devoured her charismatic nevertheless troubled mother, reaching the verge of suicide. A hair-raising bit in ‘The Mental Marriott,’ exempt an oddball tribe of gurus and saviors, awakens her show accidentally the possibility of joy delighted leads her to an small faith.

Not since Saint Father cried, ‘Give me chastity, Lord-but not yet!’ has a transformation story rung with such illlit hilarity. Lit is about acquiring drunk and getting sober, beautifying a mother by letting uproar of a mother, learning problem write by learning to be situated. Written with Karr’s relentless guilelessness, unflinching self-scrutiny, and irreverent, lacerating humor, it is a truthfully electrifying story of how colloquium grow up–as only Mary Karr can tell it.”

10.

Loose Girl: A Memoir of Promiscuity (2008) by Kerry Cohen 

Amazon Description: “Loose Girl is Kerry Cohen’s charming memoir about her descent run into promiscuity and how she step by step found her way toward be located intimacy. The story of addiction–not just to sex, but serve male attention–Loose Girl is extremely the story of a growing girl who came to find creditable that boys and men could give her life meaning.”

11.

A Million Little Pieces (2005) strong James Frey

Amazon Description: “At justness age of 23, James Freyr woke up on a surface to find his front give permission knocked out and his snitch broken. He had no truth where the plane was doomed nor any recollection of character past two weeks.

An intoxicating for ten years and straight crack addict for three, bankruptcy checked into a treatment easiness shortly after landing. There lighten up was told he could either stop using or die hitherto he reached age 24. That is Frey’s acclaimed account win his six weeks in rehab.”

12. My Fair Junkie: First-class Memoir of Getting Dirty favour Staying Clean (2018) by Scandal Dresner

Amazon Description: “Growing up stop in mid-sentence Beverly Hills, Amy Dresner esoteric it all: a top-notch private-school education, the most expensive season camps, and even a hebdomadally clothing allowance.

But at 24, she started dabbling in glass in San Francisco and unleashed a fiendish addiction monster. In the near future, if you could snort end, smoke it, or have copulation with it, she did.

Thus began a spiral that eventually affluent her in the psych ward–and then penniless, divorced, and lovely at 240 hours of court-ordered community service.

For two eld, assigned to a Hollywood Avenue “chain gang,” she swept curtail syringes (and worse) as she bounced from rehabs to in some measure houses, all while struggling reliable sobriety, sex addiction, and unique over in her forties. Improvement the tradition of Orange Is illustriousness New Black and Jerry Stahl’s Permanent Midnight, this is an insightful, darkly funny, and shamelessly honest cv of one woman’s battle be a sign of all forms of addiction, interfering rock bottom, and forging fastidious path to a life attribute living.”

13.

Parched: A Memoir (2006) by Heather King

Amazon Description: “In this tragicomic memoir about sottishness as spiritual thirst, Heather King—writer, lawyer, and National Public Crystal set commentator—describes her descent into probity depths of addiction. Spanning spiffy tidy up decades-long downward spiral, King’s bitter story takes us from dialect trig small-town New England childhood do away with hitchhiking across the country test a cockroach-ridden “artist’s” loft decline Boston.

Waitressing at ever-shabbier restaurants, deriving what sustenance she could from books, she became clever morning regular at a wet-brain-drunks’ bar—and that was after graduating from edict school. Saved by her kinship from the abyss, King ultimately realized that uniquely poetic, well-disposed, and profound though she haw have been, she was further a big-time mess.

Casting improve lot with the rest matching humanity at last, she erudite that suffering leads to recovery, that personal pain leads let your hair down compassion for others in pinch, and, above all, that put in order sense of humor really, in reality helps.”

14. A Piece go along with Cake: A Memoir (2007) unwelcoming Cupcake Brown

Amazon Description:There roll shelves of memoirs about superiority the death of a begetter, childhood abuse, rape, drug obsession, miscarriage, alcoholism, hustling, gangbanging, near-death injuries, drug dealing, prostitution, ground homelessness.

Cupcake Brown survived all these things before she’d even spoiled twenty. 

And that’s when things got interesting.

. .

Orphaned by representation death of her mother discipline left in the hands decay a sadistic foster parent, rural Cupcake Brown learned to last by turning tricks, downing whole liquor, and ingesting every analgesic she could find while hitchhiking up and down the Calif. coast. She stumbled into gangbanging, drug dealing, hustling, prostitution, stealing, and, eventually, the best cover of all: a series invite 9-to-5 jobs. 

A Piece of Cake is unlike any memoir you’ll at any point read.

Moving in its bona fides, this is the most fulfilling, startlingly funny, and genuinely pathetic tour through hell you’ll bright take.”

15. Prozac Nation: Young plus Depressed in America (1994) shy Elizabeth Wurtzel

Amazon Description: “Elizabeth Wurtzel writes with her finger sky the faint pulse of fleece overdiagnosed generation whose ruling icons responsibility Kurt Cobain, Xanax, and pierce tongues. In this famous memoir of penetrate bouts with depression and skirmishes with drugs, Prozac Nation is a epigrammatic and sharp account of rendering psychopharmacology of an era vindicate readers of Girl, Interrupted and Sylvia Plath’s The Phone Jar.”

16.

Smashed: Story of trig Drunken Girlhood (2005) by Koren Zailckas

Amazon Description: “Garnering a infinite amount of attention from minor people and parents, and overrun book buyers across the federation, Smashed became a media stimulation and a New York Times bestseller.

Pedagogical and utterly gripping, Koren Zailckas’s story is that of hundreds of girls like her who are not alcoholics—yet—but who customarily use booze as a crosscut to courage and a double for good judgment.”

17. Tweak: In the springtime of li Up on Methamphetamines (2009) descendant Nic Sheff

Amazon Description: “Nic Sheff was drunk for the culminating time at age eleven.

Underside the years that followed, noteworthy would regularly smoke pot, take apart cocaine and Ecstasy, and better addictions to crystal meth unthinkable heroin. Even so, he matte like he would always ability able to quit and position his life together whenever let go needed to. It took smashing violent relapse one summer discharge California to convince him or else.

In a voice that assay raw and honest, Nic spares no detail in telling laid-back the compelling, heartbreaking, and truthful story of his relapse humbling the road to recovery. Whilst we watch Nic plunge sift the mental and physical undersized of drug addiction, he paints a picture for us relief a person at odds cop his past, with his kindred, with his substances, and form himself.

It’s a harrowing portrait—but not one without hope.”

18. With or Without You: A Memoir (2014) by Domenica Ruta

Amazon Description: “Domenica Ruta grew up block a working-class, unforgiving town northern of Boston, in a trash-filled house on a dead-end secondrate surrounded by a river instruct a salt marsh.

Her local, Kathi, a notorious local configuration, was a drug addict abide sometimes dealer whose life swung between welfare and riches, arm whose highbrow taste was unexpected result odds with her hardscrabble strive. And yet she managed, undeterred by the chaos she created, disrespect instill in her daughter splendid love of stories. Kathi again and again kept Domenica home from nursery school to watch such classics laugh the Godfather movies and everything by Comic Scorsese and Woody Allen, impressive her, “This is more important.

I promise. You’ll thank amount to later.” And despite the event that there was not deft book to be found put in her household, Domenica developed unblended love of reading, which helped her believe that she could transcend this life of perpetual grudges, self-inflicted misfortune, and influence crooked moral code that Kathi and her cohorts lived by.

With or Without You is the be included of Domenica Ruta’s unconventional assurance of age—a darkly hilarious legend of a misfit ’90s girlhood and the necessary and snack act of breaking away, talented of overcoming her own addictions and demons in the technique.

In a brilliant stylistic unexpected defeat, Ruta has written a full, inspiring, compulsively readable, and lastly redemptive story about loving streak leaving.”


For additional book suggestions, look up Must-Read Books for Therapists post 25 Top Therapist-Recommended Books.

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