Recovery Memoirs

When David LaChapelle begins attending Carleton University everything seems to be going in the right direction. But he begins experiencing unexplainable changes in his thought processes which eventually devolves into a full-blown psychotic state. He tries to get help but is turned down, told by the admitting physician that he is fine and not in need of psychiatric care. Not until his family steps in and takes him to the hospital does he come close to receiving any treatment. While there, however, he meets Angela, a fellow patient he will later learn is also suffering from schizophrenia. For...

The long-awaited autobiography from Phil Collins, one of the best-selling music artists of all time. This is the roller-coaster journey from his beginnings as a child actor to his domination of the charts as both a solo artist and part of Genesis. His success is astounding, his music has global reach, and his story is legendary.

At the start of this remarkable story of recovery, healing, and redemption, Ginger Gaffney answers a call to help retrain the troubled horses at an alternative prison ranch in New Mexico, a facility run entirely by the prisoners. The horses are scavenging through the dumpsters, kicking and running down the residents when they bring the trash out after meals. One horse is severely injured. The horses and residents arrive at the ranch broken in one way or many: the horses are defensive and terrified, while the residents, some battling addictions, are emotionally and physically shattered.

As Melissa Bond raises her infant daughter and a special-needs one-year-old son, she suffers from unbearable insomnia, sleeping an hour or less each night. She loses her job as a journalist (a casualty of the 2008 recession), and her relationship with her husband grows distant. Her doctor casually prescribes benzodiazepines—a family of drugs that includes Xanax, Valium, Klonopin, Ativan—and increases her dosage regularly.

In this captivating memoir, one woman's journey unfolds - from the darkest depths of teenage abuse and addiction to the heights of personal and professional success. Her brave and vivid narrative, skillfully blending laughter and tears, reveals the enduring beauty that can emerge from life's darkest moments. Marked by scars and illuminated by triumphs, this is a gripping listen for anyone who has faced adversity, dared to hope, and believes in the boundless power of redemption.

Sometimes, we know shockingly little about the people we think we know best. Inspector Gil Hill, head of Detroit Homicide Division, was the first to explain my husband's twisted behavior to me. Hill bluntly disclosed that Al had led a double life for the previous 18 months in a red-light district in the inner city using the alias "Dr. Miller". He had frequently been seen in the company of a burly pimp and young prostitute and had been supporting their salacious lifestyle.

She looked like the responsible one. Inside, she was silently falling apart. Some girls get to be children. Others are handed emotional responsibilities before they even know what peace feels like. If you grew up keeping the adults okay, swallowing your needs to avoid chaos, or being praised for “maturity” that was really just survival—you were never alone. And it was never your fault. This book is for the daughters who became emotional caregivers long before they were ready. With soft, piercing honesty, She Raised Herself in a House Full of Adults explores the wounds left by ...

In Shock is a riveting first-hand account from a young critical care physician, who in the passage of a moment is transfigured into a dying patient. This transposition, coincidentally timed at the end of her medical training, instantly lays bare the vast chasm between the conventional practice of medicine and the stark reality of the prostrate patient.

At the age of 30, Amy Liptrot finds herself washed up back home on Orkney. Standing unstable on the island, she tries to come to terms with the addiction that has swallowed the last decade of her life. As she spends her mornings swimming in the bracingly cold sea, her days tracking Orkney's wildlife, and her nights searching the sky for the Merry Dancers, Amy discovers how the wild can restore life and renew hope.

5/5 Stars Readers' Favorite Review Winner 2013 eFestival of Words Best Non-Fiction (General) Winner 2014 Kindle Book Award Non-Fiction Finalist 2013 eBook Cover Design Award Gold Star Winner 2013 San Francisco Book Festival Honorable Mention 2013 Global eBook Award Women Studies Non-Fiction Gold Medal Winner Not easy subjects -- childhood sexual abuse, love, loss, date rape, grief -- but real ones, told in pieces (thus the title). Broken Pieces is a work of non-fiction. Poetry, prose, and essays to let you into one woman's life -- a searingly raw examination of topics most people avoid. ...

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.

Michael Hogan, as a poet and educator, has been gifted with friendships of fellow writers throughout most of his life. Three of these were Nobel laureates, still others household names: Seamus Heaney, W.S. Merwin, Charles Bukowski, Marge Piercy, Naomi Shihad Nye and Ray Bradbury, among a dozen others . What is surprising is what he manages to do with such experiences in this book. Through a series of narrations centered on wide-ranging episodes with other poets, the author distills a unique kind of ars poetica, one that is tied less to a traditional memoir, than to the impression these men ...

Growing up the good girl in an Irish American family full of drinkers and terrible sleepers, Kathleen Frazier was 12 when her seemingly innocent sleepwalking turned dangerous. Over the next few years, she was a popular A+ student by day, the star of her high school musical. At night she both longed for and dreaded sleep. Frazier moved to Manhattan in the 1980s, hoping for a life in the theater but getting a run of sleepwalking performances instead.

At seven, Brandon was a skateboard prodigy. By the time he was fourteen, he was living the dream. Discovered by skate legends Bucky Lasek and Tony Hawk. Touring the US with the elite Powell-Peralta team. Signing autographs and appearing in films and magazines. Brandon had it all. Then he got hooked on heroin. Soon he was living a down-and-out life in a garage, begging for change, and hustling to score his next fix. He stole from his family and friends. He pushed the fantasy that everything was okay, that he was going to rehab, getting help, and getting better. But it was all a lie.

After years of hiding her addiction from everyone—stockpiling pills in her Louboutins and elaborately scheduling her withdrawals between PTA meetings, baby showers, and tennis matches—Laura Cathcart Robbins is running out of places to hide. She has learned the hard way that even her high-profile marriage and Hollywood lifestyle can’t protect her from the pain she’s keeping bottled up inside. Facing divorce, the possibility of a custody battle, and the insistent voice of internalized racism that nags at her as a Black woman in a white world, Laura wonders just how much more she can take.

"Finalist for the prestigious 2016ERIC HOFFER AWARD for Independent Authors & Publishers"He is respected in his community. He is a man of faith. He never had a DUI, spent a night in jail, lost a job due to his drinking, and he was never admitted to a rehab facility. He had never been told by friend or foe that he was an alcoholic; and he never purposely hurt anyone while drinking...or so he thought.This is the memoir of a college-educated business person who made significant income and owned many material "things." It has both humorous and tragic elements describing the author's journey ...

Beloved former ABC 20/20 anchor Elizabeth Vargas reveals her alcohol addiction and anxiety disorder in a shockingly honest and emotional memoir. From the moment she uttered the brave and honest words, "I am an alcoholic," to interviewer George Stephanopoulos, Elizabeth Vargas began writing her story, as her experiences were still raw. Now, in Between Breaths, Vargas discusses her accounts of growing up with anxiety—which began suddenly at the age of six when her father served in Vietnam.

A True Short Story of Healing, Grief, and the Dog Who Helped Me Find Peace This is a true story—short, but deeply personal. For over fifty years, the author lived with the quiet, enduring weight of trauma. From the hidden scars of war to the heartbreaking loss of beloved companions, grief became a constant presence. Then came Maya—a small dog with a powerful gift: the ability to sense pain, to sit with sorrow, and to offer something no human ever could… unconditional love without expectation. This is not a war memoir. This is a story about what comes after—about surviving when ...

Lisa Smith was a bright young lawyer at a prestigious law firm in New York City when alcoholism and drug addiction took over her life. What was once a way she escaped her insecurity and negativity as a teenager became a means of coping with the anxiety and stress of an impossible workload. Girl Walks Out of a Bar explores Smith's formative years, her decade of alcohol and drug abuse, divorce, and her road to recovery.

Mike Majlak was a 17-year-old from a loving middle-class family in Milford, Connecticut, when he got caught up in the opioid epidemic that swept the nation. For close to a decade thereafter, his life was a wasteland of darkness and despair. While his peers were graduating from college, buying homes, getting married, having kids, and leading normal lives, Mike was snorting Oxycontin, climbing out of cars at gunpoint, and burying his childhood friends.