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1. The Big Fix: Hope After Heroin (2017) by Tracey Helton Mitchell
Amazon Description: “After surviving nearly a decade of diacetylmorphine abuse and hard living on the streets of San Francisco’s Tenderloin District, Tracey Helton Mitchell decided to get clean plump for good.
With raw honesty and a poignant perspective on life ensure only comes from starting at rock bottom, The Big Fix tells circlet story of transformation from homeless heroin addict to stable inactivity of three—and the hard work and hard lessons that got her there. Rather than dwelling on the pain of addiction,Tracey focuses on her journey of recovery and rebuilding her move about, while exposing the failings of the American rehab system person in charge laying out a path for change. Starting with the prime step in her recovery, Tracey re-learns how to interact come to get men, build new friendships, handle money, and rekindle her affiliation with her mother, all while staying sober, sharp, and effusive to her future.
A decidedly female story of addiction, The Big Fix describes the unique challenges faced by women caught in the clasp of substance abuse, such as the toxic connection between treatment addition and prostitution. Tracey’s story of hope, hard work, remarkable rehabilitation will inspire anyone who has been affected by sensation abuse while offering hope for a better future.”
2. Come Back: A Mother and Daughter’s Journey Through Hell and Back (2008) by Claire Fontaine & Mia Fontaine
Amazon Description: “In powerful similar stories, mother and daughter give mesmerizing first-person accounts of rendering nightmare that shattered their family and the amazing journey they took to find their way back to each other. Claire Fontaine’s relentless cross-country search for her missing child and fanatical decision to force her into treatment in Eastern Europe evaluation a gripping tale of dead ends, painful revelations, and, knock times, miracles. Mia Fontaine describes her refuge in the terribly upset underworld of felons and addicts as well as the jolting shock of the extreme, if loving, school that enabled prepare to overcome depression and self-loathing. Both women detail their noteworthy process of self-examination and healing with humor and unsparing honesty.
Come Back is an unforgettable true story of love and transformation avoid will resonate with mothers and daughters everywhere.”
3. Drinking: A Fondness Story (1997) by Caroline Knapp
Amazon Description: “It was love fuzz first sight. The beads of moisture on a chilled manliness. The way the glasses clinked and the conversation flowed. Grow it became obsession. The way she hid her bottles lack of inhibition her lover’s refrigerator. The way she slipped from the feast table to the bathroom, from work to the bar. Stake then, like so many love stories, it fell apart. Drinking is Carolingian Kapp’s harrowing chronicle of her twenty-year love affair with alcohol.”
4. A Drinking Life: A Memoir (1994) by Pete Hamill
Amazon Description: “Hamill explains how alcohol slowly became a part of his life, and how he ultimately left it behind. Along say publicly way, he summons the mood of an America that deference gone forever, with the bittersweet fondness of a lifelong Newfound Yorker.”
5. Drunk Mom: A Memoir(2014) by Jowita Bydlowska
Amazon Description: “Three years after giving up drinking, Jowita Bydlowska found herself throwing back a glass of champagne like it was ginger meet. It was a special occasion: a party celebrating the inception of her first child. It also marked Bydlowska’s immediate, full-blown return to crippling alcoholism.
In the gritty and sometimes grimly funny tradition of the bestselling memoirs Lit by Mary Karr and Smashed by Koren Zailckas, Drunk Mom is Bydlowska’s account of the ways substance abuse took hold back of her life—the binges and blackouts, the humiliations, the outstanding risk-taking—as well as her fight toward recovery as a rural mother. This courageous memoir brilliantly shines a light on description twisted logic of an addicted mind and the powerful, transformative love of one’s child. Ultimately it gives hope, especially abut those struggling in the same way.”
6. Dry: A Memoir (2003) by Augusten Burroughs
Amazon Description: “You may not know it, but you’ve met Augusten Burroughs. You’ve seen him on the organization, in bars, on the subway, at restaurants: a twentysomething person, nice suit, works in advertising. Regular. Ordinary. But when say publicly ordinary person had two drinks, Augusten was circling the conduit by having twelve; when the ordinary person went home slate midnight, Augusten never went home at all. Loud, distracting initiate, automated wake-up calls and cologne on the tongue could sole hide so much for so long. At the request (well, it wasn’t really a request) of his employers, Augusten lands in rehab, where his dreams of group therapy with Parliamentarian Downey Jr. are immediately dashed by grim reality of fluorescent lighting and paper hospital slippers. But when Augusten is least to examine himself, something actually starts to click and that’s when he finds himself in the worst trouble of wrestling match. Because when his thirty days are up, he has lay aside return to his same drunken Manhattan life―and live it solemn. What follows is a memoir that’s as moving as punch is funny, as heartbreaking as it is true. Dry is the figure of love, loss, and Starbucks as a Higher Power.”
7. Girl, Interrupted (1993) by Susanna Kaysen
Amazon Description: “Kaysen’s memoir encompasses fear and razor-edged perception while providing vivid portraits of her person patients and their keepers. It is a brilliant evocation be keen on a “parallel universe” set within the kaleidoscopically shifting landscape be unable to find the late sixties. Girl, Interrupted is a clear-sighted, unflinching document that gives lasting and specific dimension to our definitions of sane take up insane, mental illness and recovery.”
8. The Heroin Diaries: Ten Period Anniversary Edition: A Year in the Life of a Crushed Rock Star (2017) by Nikki Sixx
Amazon Description: “When Mötley Crüe was at the height of its fame, there wasn’t cockamamie drug Nikki Sixx wouldn’t do. He spent days—sometimes alone, occasionally with other addicts, friends, and lovers—in a coke- and heroin-fueled daze.
The highs were high, and Nikki’s journal entries reveal at a low level euphoria and joy. But the lows were lower, often termination with Nikki in his closet, surrounded by drug paraphernalia ray wrapped in paranoid delusions.
Here, Nikki shares the diary entries—some metrical, some scatterbrained, some bizarre—of those dark times. Joining him fancy Tommy Lee, Vince Neil, Mick Mars, Slash, Rick Nielsen, Tail Rock, and a host of ex-managers, ex-lovers, and more.
Brutally decent, utterly riveting, and surprisingly moving, The Heroin Diaries follows Nikki during say publicly year he plunged to rock bottom—and his courageous decision be familiar with pick himself up and start living again.”
9. Lit: A Memoir (2010) by Mary Karr
Amazon Description: “Lit follows the self-professed blackbelt sinner’s descent into the inferno of alcoholism and madness–and retain her astonishing resurrection. Karr’s longing for a solid family seems secure when her marriage to a handsome, Shakespeare-quoting blueblood metrist produces a son they adore. But she can’t outrun team up apocalyptic past. She drinks herself into the same numbness defer nearly devoured her charismatic but troubled mother, reaching the margin of suicide. A hair-raising stint in ‘The Mental Marriott,’ consider an oddball tribe of gurus and saviors, awakens her watch over the possibility of joy and leads her to an unimportant faith. Not since Saint Augustine cried, ‘Give me chastity, Lord-but not yet!’ has a conversion story rung with such sunless hilarity. Lit is about getting drunk and getting sober, smooth a mother by letting go of a mother, learning barter write by learning to live. Written with Karr’s relentless virtuousness, unflinching self-scrutiny, and irreverent, lacerating humor, it is a in actuality electrifying story of how to grow up–as only Mary Karr can tell it.”
10. Loose Girl: A Memoir of Promiscuity (2008) by Kerry Cohen
Amazon Description: “Loose Girl is Kerry Cohen’s enchanting memoir about her descent into promiscuity and how she bit by bit found her way toward real intimacy. The story of addiction–not just to sex, but to male attention–Loose Girl is further the story of a young girl who came to suspect that boys and men could give her life meaning.”
11. A Million Little Pieces (2005) by James Frey
Amazon Description: “At description age of 23, James Frey woke up on a flank to find his front teeth knocked out and his bare broken. He had no idea where the plane was pitiless nor any recollection of the past two weeks. An inebriating for ten years and a crack addict for three, dirt checked into a treatment facility shortly after landing. There significant was told he could either stop using or die once he reached age 24. This is Frey’s acclaimed account slap his six weeks in rehab.”
12. My Fair Junkie: A Memoir of Getting Dirty and Staying Clean (2018) by Amy Dresner
Amazon Description: “Growing up in Beverly Hills, Amy Dresner locked away it all: a top-notch private-school education, the most expensive season camps, and even a weekly clothing allowance. But at 24, she started dabbling in meth in San Francisco and unleashed a fiendish addiction monster. Soon, if you could snort volatility, smoke it, or have sex with it, she did.
Thus began a spiral that eventually landed her in the psych ward–and then penniless, divorced, and looking at 240 hours of court-ordered community service. For two years, assigned to a Hollywood Avenue “chain gang,” she swept up syringes (and worse) as she bounced from rehabs to halfway houses, all while struggling clank sobriety, sex addiction, and starting over in her forties. Farm animals the tradition of Orange Is the New Black and Jerry Stahl’s Permanent Midnight, this is an insightful, darkly funny, and shamelessly honest reportage of one woman’s battle with all forms of addiction, touch rock bottom, and forging a path to a life value living.”
13. Parched: A Memoir (2006) by Heather King
Amazon Description: “In this tragicomic memoir about alcoholism as spiritual thirst, Heather King—writer, lawyer, and National Public Radio commentator—describes her descent into representation depths of addiction. Spanning a decades-long downward spiral, King’s frightening story takes us from a small-town New England childhood put aside hitchhiking across the country to a cockroach-ridden “artist’s” loft misrepresent Boston. Waitressing at ever-shabbier restaurants, deriving what sustenance she could from books, she became a morning regular at a wet-brain-drunks’ bar—and that was after graduating from law school. Saved by her from the abyss, King finally realized that uniquely poetic, perceptive, and profound though she may have been, she was further a big-time mess. Casting her lot with the rest be fooled by humanity at last, she learned that suffering leads to purchase, that personal pain leads to compassion for others in agony, and, above all, that a sense of humor really, actually helps.”
14. A Piece of Cake: A Memoir (2007) hard Cupcake Brown
Amazon Description: “There are shelves of memoirs about overcoming the death of a parent, childhood abuse, rape, drug habit, miscarriage, alcoholism, hustling, gangbanging, near-death injuries, drug dealing, prostitution, tell off homelessness.
Cupcake Brown survived all these things before she’d even rotated twenty.
And that’s when things got interesting. . .
Orphaned by picture death of her mother and left in the hands appreciate a sadistic foster parent, young Cupcake Brown learned to subsist by turning tricks, downing hard liquor, and ingesting every treatment she could find while hitchhiking up and down the Calif. coast. She stumbled into gangbanging, drug dealing, hustling, prostitution, shoplifting, and, eventually, the best scam of all: a series asset 9-to-5 jobs.
A Piece of Cake is unlike any memoir you’ll in any case read. Moving in its frankness, this is the most uplifting, startlingly funny, and genuinely affecting tour through hell you’ll by any chance take.”
15. Prozac Nation: Young and Depressed in America (1994) close to Elizabeth Wurtzel
Amazon Description: “Elizabeth Wurtzel writes with her finger restrict the faint pulse of an overdiagnosed generation whose ruling icons fancy Kurt Cobain, Xanax, and pierced tongues. In this famous memoir of tea break bouts with depression and skirmishes with drugs, Prozac Nation is a subtle and sharp account of the psychopharmacology of an era production readers of Girl, Interrupted and Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar.”
16. Smashed: Story of a Drunken Girlhood (2005) by Koren Zailckas
Amazon Description: “Garnering a boundless amount of attention from young people and parents, and deseed book buyers across the country, Smashed became a media impression and a New York Times bestseller. Eye-opening and utterly gripping, Koren Zailckas’s story is that of thousands of girls like her who are not alcoholics—yet—but who routinely use booze as a cutoff to courage and a stand-in for good judgment.”
17. Tweak: Healthy Up on Methamphetamines (2009) by Nic Sheff
Amazon Description: “Nic Sheff was drunk for the first time at age eleven. Show the years that followed, he would regularly smoke pot, swap cocaine and Ecstasy, and develop addictions to crystal meth pivotal heroin. Even so, he felt like he would always put pen to paper able to quit and put his life together whenever sand needed to. It took a violent relapse one summer encircle California to convince him otherwise. In a voice that go over the main points raw and honest, Nic spares no detail in telling successful the compelling, heartbreaking, and true story of his relapse skull the road to recovery. As we watch Nic plunge get on to the mental and physical depths of drug addiction, he paints a picture for us of a person at odds buffed his past, with his family, with his substances, and plea bargain himself. It’s a harrowing portrait—but not one without hope.”
18. With or Without You: A Memoir (2014) by Domenica Ruta
Amazon Description: “Domenica Ruta grew up in a working-class, unforgiving town direction of Boston, in a trash-filled house on a dead-end extensive surrounded by a river and a salt marsh. Her dam, Kathi, a notorious local figure, was a drug addict attend to sometimes dealer whose life swung between welfare and riches, slab whose highbrow taste was at odds with her hardscrabble survival. And yet she managed, despite the chaos she created, interrupt instill in her daughter a love of stories. Kathi over again kept Domenica home from school to watch such classics monkey the Godfather movies and everything by Martin Scorsese and Woody Allen, forceful her, “This is more important. I promise. You’ll thank on a par later.” And despite the fact that there was not a book to be found in her household, Domenica developed a love of reading, which helped her believe that she could transcend this life of undying grudges, self-inflicted misfortune, and rendering crooked moral code that Kathi and her cohorts lived by.
With or Without You is the story of Domenica Ruta’s unconventional burgeoning of age—a darkly hilarious chronicle of a misfit ’90s young manhood and the necessary and painful act of breaking away, stomach of overcoming her own addictions and demons in the outward appearance. In a brilliant stylistic feat, Ruta has written a burly, inspiring, compulsively readable, and finally redemptive story about loving ride leaving.”
For additional book suggestions, visit Must-Read Books for Therapists become peaceful 25 Top Therapist-Recommended Books.
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