Recovery Memoirs

“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. ...

As a mother, Cheryl E. Musick would have done anything for her daughter. But when a devastating addiction wreaks havoc on her family, she realizes that sometimes a mother’s love simply isn’t enough. In The Day the Musick Died, Cheryl shares the story of her bubbly, talented daughter Misty and the drug addiction that eventually took her life. As Cheryl writes in her introduction, she hoped one day to write a book with Misty about triumphing over addiction. Tragically, that book will never exist. Instead, Cheryl pours her love for her daughter into this memoir and lets you see Misty the ...

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.

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.

What could possibly be “lucky” about addiction? Absolutely nothing, thought Laura McKowen when drinking brought her to her knees. As she puts it, she “kicked and screamed . . . wishing for something - anything - else” to be her issue. The people who got to drink normally, she thought, were so damn lucky. But in the midst of early sobriety, when no longer able to anesthetize her pain and anxiety, she realized that she was actually the lucky one. Lucky to feel her feelings, live honestly, really be with her daughter, change her legacy.

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 ...

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.

A memoir of unblinking honesty and poignant, laugh-out-loud humor, Blackout is the story of a woman stumbling into a new kind of adventure - the sober life she never wanted. For Sarah Hepola, alcohol was "the gasoline of all adventure". She spent her evenings at cocktail parties and dark bars where she proudly stayed till last call. But there was a price. Publicly, she covered her shame with self-deprecating jokes, and her career flourished, but as the blackouts accumulated, she could no longer avoid a sinking truth.

Victoria Vanstone grew up in 1980s England in a happy home full of laughter, booze and a disturbing amount of fancy-dress parties. From her youthful days downing cheap wine at the local park to dodging disastrous relationships, her reliable mate alcohol was never far from reach. Eventually, Victoria found herself with a husband and a child on the way. After sobering up for her first pregnancy, becoming a boring, bottom-wiping, cleaning machine meant she soon returned to her binge-drinking ways, and had to grapple anew with the habits and beliefs that had gone unchecked since childhood.

With its deeply personal and seamless blend of memoir, cultural history, literary criticism, and reportage, The Recovering turns our understanding of the traditional addiction narrative on its head, demonstrating that the story of recovery can be every bit as electrifying as the train wreck itself. Leslie Jamison deftly excavates the stories we tell about addiction - both her own and others' - and examines what we want these stories to do and what happens when they fail us. All the while, she offers a fascinating look at the larger history of the recovery movement and at the complicated bearing that race and class have on our understanding of who is criminal and who is ill.

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.

In this fascinating narrative, therapist Catherine Gildiner presents five of what she calls her most heroic and memorable patients. Among them: A successful, first-generation Chinese immigrant musician suffering sexual dysfunction; a young woman whose father abandoned her at age nine with her younger siblings in an isolated cottage in the depth of winter; and a glamorous workaholic whose narcissistic, negligent mother greeted her each morning of her childhood with "Good morning, Monster". Each patient presents a mystery, one that will only be unpacked over years.

Retired wreckhead Catherine Gray, author of surprise best seller The Unexpected Joy of Being Sober, is now in her ninth sober year and has learnt a damn sight more. This hotly anticipated sequel enlists the help of experts and case studies, turning a curious, playful gaze onto provocative questions. Is alcohol a parenting aid? Why are booze and cocaine such a horse and carriage? Once an addict, always an addict? How do you feel safe—from alcohol, others and yourself—in sobriety?

After his father died on 9/11 in the World Trade Center, nine-year-old Matthew John Bocchi began an obsessive quest to find out exactly how he died. He researched video tapes, pictures, blogs, anything that could potentially answer the question looming in his mind: Was his father one of the jumpers? In the first memoir told by a child of 9/11, Matt intimately delves into the psychological and emotional torment that ensued after his father's death.

What do you do when your world ends? At 28 years old, Krista Schlyer sold almost everything she owned and packed the rest of it in a station wagon bound for the American wild. Her two best friends joined her - one a grumpy, grieving introvert, the other a feisty dog - and together they sought out every national park, historic site, forest, and wilderness they could get to before their money ran out or their minds gave in.

"A great spiritual autobiography, a worthy companion to books like The Seven Storey Mountain and the Autobiography of a Yogi. The book is so vividly and poetically written that I felt as if I was reading a kind of spiritual ‘On the Road.’ It sits well with Kenneth Rose's scholarly work on mysticism, as it contains so many beautiful descriptions of his own mystical experiences. I hope that the book gains the wide readership it deserves." Steve Taylor PhD. author of The Leap and The Calm Center." . . . will resonate with readers who are interested in and struggle with the search for ...

I take the reader with me on my journey, as I pack all my belongings and finally leave my abusive home aged twenty-one. But although I am away from my controlled home environment, I cannot escape my bad memories. I am still living the terrible nightmares of my violent abusive childhood, which are embedded deep in the recesses of my mind. The horrors of my past affect my daily struggles to fit into society. Unable to cope with a normal life outside my dysfunctional family home, I drift from place to place trying to find sanctuary from my past but end up down a path of self-destruction, and ...

When Abraham Verghese, a physician whose marriage is unraveling, relocates to El Paso, Texas, he hopes to make a fresh start as a staff member at the county hospital. There he meets David Smith, a medical student recovering from drug addiction, and the two men begin a tennis ritual that allows them to shed their inhibitions and find security in the sport they love and with each other. This friendship between doctor and intern grows increasingly rich and complex, more intimate than two men usually allow.

Brooke Siem was among the first generation of minors to be prescribed antidepressants. Initially diagnosed and treated in the wake of her father’s sudden death, this psychiatric intervention sent a message that something was pathologically wrong with her and that the only “fix” was medication. As a teenager, she stepped into the hazy world of antidepressants just at the time when she was forming the foundation of her identity. For the following fifteen years, every situation she faced was seen through the lens of brokenness.

After twenty-four years of daily drinking, Ed Wyrick hit his bottom and tossed out his last bottle of vodka. As a high school counselor in a rural county in the middle of the Bible belt, he feared for his job if he revealed his addiction, so he tried detoxing on his own. When he gave up and surrendered to a treatment center, doctors said he was lucky to have survived. Three months later, he quit smoking cigarettes. Eighteen months after that, he’d lost seventy pounds and was running five miles a day. More than twelve years have passed, and he remains free of alcohol, cigarettes, fat, and ...