The 11 Best Addiction and Sobriety Books

Julie Buntin’s Marlena is a stunning look at alcoholism, addiction, and bad decisions, and how they haunt us forever. She wasn’t self-medicating and was able to truly feel her feelings and live honestly. We Are the Luckiest is a life-changing memoir about recovery—without any sugarcoating. She started sneaking sips from her parents’ wine glasses as a kid, and went through adolescence drinking more and more.

Understanding that addiction is a biological disease, rather than a moral one, is the first step into successfully treating it, Dr. Harold C. Urschel, III, MD argues. By allowing patients to be treated with behavioral programs alongside the latest science in brain functions, more doctors, and patients, may find success in helping alcoholics live healthier, addiction-free lives. Alcoholism, like addiction, is about brain science, not personal character. This book explores the scientific backgrounds of potential medications for alcoholism and the gap in alcoholism treatment between complete abstinence and careful moderation. If you are struggling with your drinking, a trained therapist can help you find treatment. If you’re living with an alcoholic, you may also benefit from the support of a therapist or couples counselor. The best parts of AA, at least for me, were the colorful anecdotes and lovely people. Mishka Shubaly’s forthright Audible Original, Cold Turkey functions as a hybrid memoir and how-to manual, teeming with messy details and hard-won wisdom.

Quit Like a Woman: The Radical Choice to Not Drink in a Culture Obsessed With Alcohol by Holly Whitaker

She has a passion for raising awareness in the addiction treatment, recovery, and public health space. 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. Harris Wittels didn’t fit the stereotype of what a junkie looks like. He was a successful comedian, actor, producer, and writer for Sarah Silverman and on shows like Parks and Recreation and Master of None. Even with all his talent and jobs coming his way, he was not able to get clean and stay clean, eventually dying from an overdose in 2015 at age 29. Everything is Horrible and Wonderful is written by Harris’s sister, Stephanie, about his tragic death and the aftermath of losing her younger brother who was her best friend and also an addict. For those asking why we’re seeing so much more compassion for the opioid epidemic than we did during the crack epidemic, Dr. Hart is your man. A neuroscientist who made it out of a bad Miami neighborhood ponders in this memoir why he didn’t end up headed down a different path.

Medical News Today includes apps that are reputable and well-received, with a range of price points and features. Any of these conditions suggests it would make sense to stop drinking. SMART Recovery offers more than a dozen handbooks and manuals for participants, volunteers and specialized audiences – featuring the 3rd edition of the SMART Recovery Handbook. If you buy through links on this page, we may earn a small commission. I admittedly have this book by Ann Dowsett Johnson in my library and started it back in 2016 but have since forgotten it. There’s also the dark comic relief offered throughout which I am a big sucker for.

Blackout: Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget by Sarah Hepola

Weaving together poems, historical documents, and photos, this is an essential book about, among many other things, alcoholism and survival. Ann Dowsett Johnston combines in-depth research and her own story of recovery in this important book about the relationship between women and alcohol. Drink brings to light the increase in DUIs, “drunkorexia” , and other health problems among young women in the United States. More than a journey through addiction and recovery from it, this is a tale about how trauma shapes us, and how we can only free ourselves from its hold by facing it. It’s a testament best sober books to how one moment, completely out of our control, can drastically change our lives. More than a journey through addiction and recovery though, this is a tale about how trauma shapes us and how we can only free ourselves by facing it. This is the book for you if you’re looking for masterful prose and an important message. More than just a tale of addiction to recovery, this is Karr’s story about the necessity of faith and love along the journey. You may have heard about Hunter Biden before and maybe even know that he published a memoir about his struggles with drug and alcohol addiction.

This is a memoir by Augusten Burroughs of Running With Scissors fame. We can’t recommend this book strongly enough, especially if you have tried and failed to stop using drink or drugs in the past. You can perhaps get a clearer indication of some of the thought processes typically shared by heavy drinkers. You might gain a stronger insight into why your loved one is behaving as they best sober books are. If you thought regular opioids were bad, fentanyl is ten times worse. This lethal synthetic opioid is much more potent than heroin and it’s now wreaking havoc where OxyContin off. If you’re finding it hard to work through these steps, semi-anonymous authors give you practical tips on harnessing these steps, improving your character, and forging forward with long-term recovery.

Some new habits and practices have had to be built from the ground up. Whether you want to better understand the mindset of addiction or find inspiration in how they got out of it, these memoirs are nothing short of inspiring. Mary Karr is known for her wit and charming style, and in these pages, she discusses pretty much all her life struggles, not only those with alcohol. She decides to try anyway and becomes the subject of her very own three-month sobriety experiment. Ultimately, this journey of self-discovery shows her that a little change is sometimes necessary to get what you truly want in life. It’s a beautifully told story about how alcohol seduced her at fourteen and secretly subjugated her through her university years and most of her award-winning career. Beneath her perfect life and incredible success hides a girl who thought she had cheated her way out of her anxiety and stress via alcohol, only to find that she has surrendered to the powers of this magical liquid.

Are Books Really Helpful to Stop Drinking?

For these millions of people and the many more who love them, the throes of addiction and everything it brings with it are very real. Based on Fisher’s hugely successful one-woman show, Wishful Drinking is the story of growing up in Hollywood royalty, battling addiction, and dealing with manic depression. Her first memoir is an inside look at her famous parents’ marriage and her own tumultuous love affairs (including her on-again, off-again relationship with Paul Simon). Most notably, it’s a brutally honest — and hilarious — reflection on the late writer’s path to sobriety. For more books about alcoholism and addiction, check out this list of 100 must-read books about addiction. What happens when an ambitious young woman is keeping a secret of addiction? High-profile writer Cat Marnell answers the question in the gripping memoir of her life as she battles bulimia on top of an addiction to alcohol and prescription drugs. If you’ve ever looked around the room and wondered why there is alcohol everywhere, then this is the book for you. From drinks at baby showers to work events, brunch and book clubs, graduations and funerals, alcohol’s ubiquity is a given and the only time that people get uncomfortable is when someone doesn’t drink. In this powerful book, founder of Tempest and The Temper, Holly Whitaker embarks on a personal journey into her own sobriety and along the way discovers the insidious role that alcohol plays in our society.

Burroughs’ story will break your heart, but if you’re familiar with his other work, that might not surprise you. I found myself in disbelief that his life took some of the turns it did while at the same time rooting for him. His dysfunction has the weird quality of being both uniquely his own and universal. After accepting that you have character defects preventing you from staying sober, you ask your higher power to remove these defects. In Dopesick, Macy brings to life unemployed chancers using opioids to blot out the boredom and wealthy youngsters trading illicit pills for kicks.

Without treatment, it can impair your life and your ability to function. A trained therapist or psychologist can help find the right treatment plan for you or a loved one with consideration and compassion. Find a therapist in a directory is a good place to start when choosing a therapist. For some, this means medication prescribed by a trained medical professional. If you’re looking into other options for your alcoholism, the Sinclair Method, the process of retraining your brain to not crave alcohol, may be a solution for you. This thoughtful book explores the science behind why we drink, how it’s so ingrained into our society, and what new possibilities we uncover when we dare to find joy in the unexpected. Our society puts a lot of pressure on drinking to celebrate; weddings, holidays, birthdays. It can be hard to separate the idea of celebration with sobriety, but that’s what Catherine Gray explores once a drinker makes the decision to drink no more. Grace would know – she was a high-functioning alcoholic who drank heavily every night while working as the president of a multinational company.

You can learn more about how we ensure our content is accurate and current by reading our editorial policy. People should contact a doctor if they are considering treatment for AUD or if drinking alcohol negatively affects their lives. Although not specifically designed for addiction, Coach.me allows people to set a goal and helps them work toward achieving their objectives. After choosing a goal, the Coach.me community can help keep people motivated — a person can even hire one of the app’s coaches. Below are some apps a person may consider to help stop drinking alcohol. Courtney Todd is the digital marketing coordinator at Workit Health.

Mary Karr’s memoir, set in Boston , chronicles her path toward sobriety with crackling honesty and wry humor as she effectively connects her family dynamics as a child living in a chaotic home to her adult state of perpetual chaos. As a mother, I relate to her story so deeply—our children were the same young age when we stopped drinking. She’s an iconic, witty literary voice, an engrossing storyteller, and this book too is a great study in memoir. Throughout the course of the narrative, David realizes that her party lifestyle is not conducive to a healthy life, which is a realization that many addicts do come to. The challenge is overcoming the addiction, and moving past the substance dependency. “Party Girl” resolves with David coming to such a realization, and for that reason her story can be very relatable for people who are battling addiction. Published in 2016, “Understanding Alcoholism as a Brain Disease”, by Linda Burlinson, is the second book in a four part series titled, “A Prescription for Alcoholics – Medications for Alcoholism”. For this reason, the book seeks to explain alcoholism and how it affects people through a purely scientific perspective, rather than in the personal way in which a memoir might do the same, and without the spiritual component. Such a personable narrator can help to draw a reader in and can make for a truly relatable story. For this reason, many readers have found “Girl Walks Out of a Bar” to be incredibly helpful in causing them to see the dangerous and destructive patterns in their own lives, whether or not their addiction is alcoholism or another vice.

• “Why You Drink and How to Stop” seeks to help individuals decipher how drinking became a toxic habit and then, swiftly, what methods can be employed to take control over the drinking habit and be rid of it.
• She has a passion for raising awareness in the addiction treatment, recovery, and public health space.
• Decades later, Cat reminisces about those days with Marlena and learns to forgive herself and move on from those days.
• People should contact a doctor if they are considering treatment for AUD or if drinking alcohol negatively affects their lives.
• Plus up-to-date info on upcoming courses, events, podcast interviews that Laura is hosting or attending.

This can be a convenient alternative to a hard copy, although many people do find that reading a physical copy of a book creates a stronger connection than through a screen. The dashboard clearly shows how many years, months, days, and hours people have been sober every time they open the app. I Am Sober is a motivational companion app that tracks a person’s sobriety. It lets people track the hours, minutes, and Sober Home seconds they have been sober and the total number of days without alcohol. Nomo tracks how long a person has been sober in terms of years, months, weeks, days, hours, and minutes. Each time a person reaches a recovery milestone, the app issues a chip to celebrate the achievement and keep people motivated. A person who wishes to moderate their alcohol intake or quit drinking altogether may decide to use apps.

This is just how it has always been since her introduction to Southern Comfort when she was fourteen. He also addresses his experience of feeling out of place in the music industry as a rapper who also practices a Christian faith, feeling excluded at red carpet events due to discussing his faith in his lyrics. Wolynn is a trauma specialist and director of the The Family Constellation Institute in San Francisco. If you’re looking to uncover more of your trauma , then you may want to give this a read.

I’m going to share with you my personal favorites that helped me get to 2.5 years of sobriety and a life I actually look forward to living each day. Author Michael Dash, entrepreneur and recovering addict, draws many parallels between his life pursuing business success and his obsession with gambling that caused him to bottom out. Dash also developed a drug addiction before he cleaned up and embarked on the road to recovery. If you want to learn about the various phases of addiction and recovery, as well as uncovering some powerful strategies for staying sober, order a copy of this book today. In college, my friends and I joked that it’s not alcoholism until you graduate. Then I told myself it was because I was a journalist working the night shift. Are currently struggling with drug or alcohol addiction, you are not alone.

Considered darkly comical by many critics, Smith’s story is made very relatable by her candid narrative voice and realism. Taking place in New York, Smith details exactly what she underwent, and how horrible her life became, before she was able to find sobriety and change her life. “The Big Book”, written by William Griffith Wilson, the co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous (more commonly referred to as Bill W.) is also known as “The Story of How More Than One Hundred Men Have Recovered from Alcoholism”. Completed in 1939, “The Big Book” is considered a predecessor to the twelve-step process, as it details the foundational elements of the tradition of recovery and sobriety utilized by Alcoholics Anonymous.

The surgeon general defines remission as 2 years after stopping alcohol consumption. A person can customize their experience by manually configuring their sober start date, habit, and notification times. People can also use it as a drinks diary and a calculator to determine blood alcohol content. The app estimates blood alcohol content based on the drinks people log. The app gives people access to 366 daily meditations that may help a person focus on the 12-step system from support groups such as Alcoholics Anonymous. Terry achieved long-term sobriety at one time, and she helped many women. It made me realize the pain I would have brought to my parents if they had lost me.