Recovery Memoirs

With heart-racing urgency and unflinching honesty, Jenkins takes you inside the grips of addiction and the desperate decisions it breeds. She is a born storyteller who lived an incredible story, from blackmail by an ex-boyfriend to a soul-shattering deal with a drug dealer, and her telling brims with suspense and unexpected wit. But the true surprise is her path to recovery. Tiffany breaks through the stigma and silence to offer hope and inspiration to anyone battling the disease - whether it’s a loved one or themselves.

Perhaps the most unconventional and literally breathtaking father-son story you'll ever read, My Friend Leonard pulls you immediately and deeply into a relationship as unusual as it is inspiring. The father figure is Leonard, the high-living, recovering coke addict, "West Coast Director of a large Italian-American finance firm" (read: mobster) who helped to keep James Frey clean in A Million Little Pieces.

When Peter Canning started work as a paramedic on the streets of Hartford, Connecticut, 25 years ago, he believed drug users were victims only of their own character flaws. Although he took care of them, he did not care for them. But as the overdoses escalated, Canning began asking his patients how they had gotten started on their perilous journeys. And while no two tales were the same, their heartrending similarities changed Canning's view and moved him to educate himself about the science of addiction.

A startlingly frank memoir, Quitter documents one woman's struggles with alcoholism and recovery, with essential new insights into addiction and treatment.

"This book will blow your mind! The amount of research and insight puts it in a class of its own. Couldn’t put it down. So authentic and raw, loved it!" - Amazon reviewer I'm writing these books because I'm tired of watching my friends die. Everything that we have done in America to deal with the opioid epidemic has made us drastically worse, and people don't seem to realize it. Irresponsible, profit-mongering pharmaceutical companies created millions of addicts like me. By becoming acquainted with the power and peace that a pocketful of oxy can bring an anxious teenager, readers will ...

They say the first taste of addiction often comes disguised as relief, and for Kevin Murray, that disguise was an innocent-looking white pill. Pills and Me: My Spiral into Addiction is an unflinchingly raw and personal account of a young man’s descent into opioid addiction—a journey from curiosity to survival in a world ravaged by a seemingly harmless but relentless beast. As Kevin tells it, his addiction didn’t begin with a reckless choice. It began with exhaustion, loneliness, and a desire to feel anything other than the crushing weight of his circumstances. From his first Percocet ...

Best known for his hysterically funny and often scathing restaurant reviews for the London Sunday Times, journalist Adrian Gill writes about his near-fatal alcoholism in this extraordinary lucid memoir. By his early 20s, at London's prestigious Saint Martin's art school, Gill was entrenched in his addiction. He writes from the handful of memories that remain, of drunken conquests with anonymous women, of waking to morbid hallucinations, of emptying jacket pockets that "were like tiny crime scenes".

Beginning innocently enough in his 20s, Neal Pollack discovers that pot makes everything - food, music, sex - better. Getting married, having a kid, and enjoying professional success didn't tamp down Pollack's addiction. As cannabis grew stronger and more widely available, Pollack's dependence was shadowed by the expansion and acceptance of the marijuana Big Business. Sober after joining a 12-step program, Neal outed himself publicly as a marijuana addict in a 2018 New York Times op-ed piece.

Kate, born to abusive, drug addicted parents, identifies an inner God voice when she is very young. This voice, and the support of her grandmother, helps her overcome her circumstances instead of falling victim to them. However, as she grows up she finds that the apple doesn't fall too far from the tree, and she discovers that she is an addict herself. Deciding not to go down the path her parents went, she rises above her circumstances again and chooses the path of recovery.

Marc Lewis's relationship with drugs began in a New England boarding school where, as a bullied and homesick fifteen-year-old, he made brief escapes from reality by way of cough medicine, alcohol, and marijuana. In Berkeley, California, in its hippie heyday, he found methamphetamine and LSD and heroin. He sniffed nitrous oxide in Malaysia and frequented Calcutta's opium dens. Ultimately, though, his journey took him where it takes most addicts: into a life of addiction, desperation, deception, and crime.

At the age of 24, Jordan Barnes woke up next to a lifeless body, rifled through his dead friends’ pockets for any remaining heroin, and went right back to using. Strung out and homeless during the supposed best years of his life, there was no clear way out of the opioid crisis ravaging the streets of Portland, Oregon. But though Jordan had long accepted his fate, his parents still held out hope and would do everything in their power to get him the help he so desperately needed.

While his wife and two-year-old daughter watched TV in the living room, David Poses was in the kitchen, measuring the distance from his index finger to his armpit. He needed to be sure he could pull the trigger with a shotgun barrel in his mouth. Twenty-six inches. Thirty-two years old. More than a decade in a double life fueled by depression and heroin.

“The Devil Inside Me” is a gripping memoir by Joshua T. Berglan that offers an unflinching look into a life marked by addiction, betrayal, and the relentless quest for redemption. Berglan’s candid narrative reveals the depths of his struggles, including multiple incarcerations, bankruptcies, overdoses, and battles with HIV and homelessness. This powerful account delves into the consequences of living a double life and defying one’s true purpose. Berglan’s story serves as a testament to the resilience of the human spirit and the transformative power of vulnerability and honesty. ...

When he was two years old, Hunter Biden was badly injured in a car accident that killed his mother and baby sister. In 2015, he suffered the devastating loss of his beloved big brother, Beau, who died of brain cancer at the age of 46. These hardships were compounded by the collapse of his marriage and a years-long battle with drug and alcohol addiction.

Ready to ditch the bottle and embrace a life that doesn't require a constant buzz? Dive into "Uncorked: A No-BS Guide from Boozy Mess to Sober Success," your hilarious roadmap to sobriety. April Adams spills the tea on her messy journey from hot mess to sober queen, serving up a cocktail of brutal honesty and side-splitting humor. This ain't your grandma's self-help book. "Uncorked" is packed with real talk, f-bombs, and practical advice for dodging temptation, surviving sober socials, and building a kick-ass life without liquid courage. From "Oh shit, I drunk-texted my ex" to "Holy crap, I...

A best seller in its native Canada, Drunk Mom is a gripping, brutally honest memoir of motherhood in the shadow of alcoholism. Three years after giving up drinking, Jowita Bydlowska found herself throwing back a glass of champagne like it was ginger ale. It was a special occasion: a party celebrating the birth of her first child. It also marked Bydlowska's immediate, full-blown return to crippling alcoholism.

Pennies from Heaven for Kevin is a remarkable story of a man whose life spiraled out of control after the death of his two-year-old son, Kyle. Blaming himself and ridden with pain and guilt, Kevin went on a downward path spending a total of seven years locked up in nineteen different jails and prisons, along with numerous rehabilitation centers over twenty years for alcohol and drug addiction. At one treatment facility, Kevin found a penny on his nightstand. The year of the penny was the year Kyle was born. Money was not allowed at the facility and, in that moment, the spirit of Kyle filled...

Piecing Together the Mind of an Addict Drug abuse and addiction don't start with a drug. They don't begin with that first use, or first high; and they certainly don't manifest in the ensuing darkness of drug dependence and depression. Addiction and alcoholism, true addiction and alcoholism, begin well before we ever indulge. It is the mind before matter, a unique clockwork of chemicals and wirings, of thoughts and feelings that bring us to truth: We, the drug addict, are not like the others Mental illness can be seen the world over, in numerous forms and numerous ways. For some of us, the ...

On a summer night in 1984, 19-year-old UC Berkeley sophomore Karen Thomas leaves her uniformed patrol job at the University of California Police Department and walks home alone in darkness. At the threshold of her apartment a man assaults her at knife point. After a soul chilling struggle she manages to escape and call 911. Police catch her assailant, she identifies him, and he is arrested. Fast forward 2014, 30 years after her assault. Why does the body remember what the mind tries so desperately to forget?

Now 60 - with years of sobriety under his belt - and the father of three sons, James Brown writes about finding a new path in life, making peace with the family whose ghosts have haunted him, and helping the next generation of addicts overcome their disease. Opening with the tragic tale of an elderly couple consumed by opioid addiction and moving through the horrors of a Las Vegas massacre to the loss of a beloved sponsor, these essays draw on Brown's personal journey of recovery to illustrate how an individual life, in all its messiness and charm, can offer a blueprint for healing.