Memoir Addiction Recovery

From Honor Roll to Heroin: One Teen’s Descent and Determined Comeback Jude Hassan had everything a kid could ask for—loving parents, a safe home, and a future full of promise. At fourteen, his family moved from the city to a quiet, affluent suburb outside St. Louis. Suddenly the new kid, Jude struggled to fit in—but he kept his grades up, stayed busy with sports, and did everything right. Until one night changed everything. What started with curiosity and a hit of marijuana at a party spiraled into a fast-moving descent through prescription pills, deceit, addiction—and ultimately, ...

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.

When Susan Stellin asked Graham MacIndoe to shoot her author photo for an upcoming travel book, she barely knew him except for a few weekends with mutual friends at a summer house in Montauk. He was a gregarious, divorced Scotsman who had recently gotten sober; she was an independent New Yorker who decided to take a chance on a rough-around-the-edges guy. But their relationship was soon tested when Susan discovered that Graham still had a drug habit he was hiding.

The incidence of addiction has become a major concern for many countries of the world. Youths and adults alike are being destroyed every day by this demon creeping quietly into their lives while we look on having practically nothing to do. I have observed that the solution to this global challenge is not in medical sciences or psychology. The solution is in the name of Jesus. Why do we have many people who made resolutions every year to quit drinking, drugs and other social vices but still find themselves in it after few days? The fact is that they are being held by a power stronger than ...

Grit Over Shame is the raw, inspiring true story of David A. Douglas — a man who rose from the chaos of addiction, incarceration, and personal wreckage to build a life of purpose, recovery, and service. From a turbulent childhood in Tacoma to a spiral into methamphetamine use in the 1990s, David’s journey is one of deep lows, powerful turning points, and the long road back.

From earliest experimentation to habitual excess to full-blown abuse, 24-year-old Koren Zailckas leads us through her experience of a terrifying trend among young girls, exploring how binge drinking becomes routine, how it becomes "the usual". With the stylistic freshness of a poet and the dramatic gifts of a novelist, Zailckas describes her first sip at 14, alcohol poisoning at 16, blacked-out sexual experience at 19, and total disorientation after waking up in an unfamiliar New York City apartment at 22.

As a WWE wrestler with millions of fans, Shawn Michaels had adulation and all the attention he could ask for, but he found himself longing for something more. When he became a committed Christian at the height of his career, Shawn learned what it's like to be a man of faith in a secular arena. Wrestling for My Life documents Shawn's journey to finding a new way of life - one that's marked by faith, family, and forgiveness.

In this deeply moving and lyrical memoir, Hoppe shares an intimate, courageous account of what it means to truly interrupt cycles of harm. For fans of The Recovering by Leslie Jamison, Somebody’s Daughter by Ashley C. Ford, and Heavy by Kiese Laymon. During the first year of quarantine, drug overdoses spiked, the highest ever recorded. And Hoppe’s cousin was one of them. “I never learned the true history of substance use disorder in my family,” Hoppe writes. “People just disappeared.” At the time of her cousin’s death, she’d been in recovery for nearly four years, but she hadn’t told anyone.

With dark humor, and in crystalline prose, Clune's account of life inside the heroin underground is like no other. Whisking us between the halves of his precarious double life-between the streets of Baltimore and the college classroom, where Clune is a graduate student teaching literature-we spiral along with him as he approaches rock bottom: from nodding off in a row house with a one-armed junkie and a murderous religious freak to having his life threatened in a Chicago jail while facing a felony possession charge.

Lynn grew up the carefree daughter of a Miami undercover narcotics agent—until her dad snuck out of the house in the dark of night without a glance back. She never knew what happened to her father until she was in high school, and he was in prison for drug smuggling. By then, Lynn had developed a dangerous drug and alcohol habit of her own. It was the perfect setup for her to latch onto the only connection to her dad that remained when he was paroled from prison—cocaine.

The goal is 90. Just 90 clean and sober days to loosen the hold of the addiction that caused Bill Clegg to lose everything. With 73 days in rehab behind him he returns to New York and attends two or three meetings each day. It is in these refuges that he befriends essential allies including the seemingly unshakably sober Asa and Polly, who struggles daily with her own cycle of recovery and relapse. At first, the support is not enough: Clegg relapses for the first time with only three days left.

Patrick J. Kennedy, the former congressman and youngest child of Senator Ted Kennedy, details his personal and political battle with mental illness and addiction, exploring mental health care's history in the country alongside his and every family's private struggles. A Common Struggle weaves together Kennedy's private and professional narratives, echoing Kennedy's philosophy that for him, the personal is political and the political personal.

Plagued by the suicides of both his siblings, heir to alcohol and drug abuse, divorce and economic ruin, James Brown lived a life clouded by addiction, broken promises and despair. In The Los Angeles Diaries, he reveals his struggle for survival, mining his past to present the inspiring story of his redemption. Beautifully written and limned with dark humor, these 12 deeply confessional, interconnected chapters address personal failure, heartbreak, the trials of writing for Hollywood, and the life-shattering events that finally convinced Brown that he must "change or die".

In 1996, Scott was nineteen and lost in adulthood with an endless job and no future ambitions. Teenage Degenerate is his story about drug addiction, music and growing up. Over the course of ten months, he quickly descends into the dark and dangerous world of crystal methamphetamine. Scott experiments with crystal meth in a dark, deserted parking lot in the suburbs of Denver, Colorado and soon after his crew of misfits will do almost anything for their next high.

Endless ice. Thin air. The threat of dropping into nothingness thousands of feet below. This is the climb Silvia Vasquez-Lavado braves in her pulse-raising memoir. A Latina hero in the elite macho tech world of Silicon Valley, privately, she was hanging by a thread. Deep in the throes of alcoholism, hiding her sexuality from her family, and repressing the abuse she’d suffered as a child, she started climbing. She then took her biggest pain as a survivor to the biggest mountain: Everest.

The founder of Recovery Management Agency—the world’s first agency devoted to helping addicts heal their addictions by reawakening their souls—uses her knowledge of depth psychology and her personal experience as a recovering addict to help you reconnect with soul, find meaning and live your purpose.

This deeply personal memoir, cowritten by singer-songwriter, renowned mental health advocate, and recent Order of Canada recipient Séan McCann and wife Andrea Aragon, leaves no stone unturned. Detailing in powerful and lyrical prose a Newfoundland childhood indoctrinated in strict Catholic faith, the creation of the wildly successful Great Big Sea, and the battle with alcoholism that nearly cost them everything, McCann and Aragon offer listeners a story of reaching international fame and finding rock bottom.

When Kerry Cohen reached her early 40s, she realized she had a drinking problem - just enough to blur the edges of her life that had become a monotony of working, carpooling the kids to school, and everyday distractions. What she also realized was that she wasn't the only one. Lush is a gripping memoir that examines Kerry's struggles with alcohol, a struggle that a rising number of middle-aged women are facing. Wonderfully poignant and relatable, Lush follows Kerry as she attempts to rediscover the awe in her life, leaving mistakes, regrets, and the bottle behind her.

Sober Stick Figure is a memoir from stand-up comedian Amber Tozer, chronicling her life as an alcoholic - starting with her first drink at the age of seven - and her eventual recovery. Amber writes about the crazy and harsh truths of being raised by alcoholics, becoming one herself, stagnating in denial for years, and finally getting sober.

When Kristi stopped drinking, she started noticing things. Like when you give up a debilitating habit, it leaves a space, one that can’t easily be filled by mocktails or ice cream or sex or crafting. And when you cancel Rosé Season for yourself, you’re left with just summer, and that’s when you notice that the women around you are tanked - that alcohol is the oil in the motors that keeps them purring when they could be making other kinds of noise. In her sharp, incisive debut essay collection, Coulter reveals a portrait of a life in transition.