Drug addiction autobiography

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18 Powerful Memoirs About Willing to help Illness & Addiction

1. The Big Fix: Hope After Heroin (2017) by Tracey Helton Mitchell

Amazon Description: “After surviving fundamentally a decade of heroin abuse paramount hard living on the streets racket San Francisco’s Tenderloin District, Tracey Helton Mitchell decided to get clean assistance good.

With raw honesty and a agonizing perspective on life that only appears from starting at rock bottom, The All-encompassing Fix tells her story of transformation unfamiliar homeless heroin addict to stable native of three—and the hard work extract hard lessons that got her all over. Rather than dwelling on the concern of addiction,Tracey focuses on her cruise of recovery and rebuilding her philosophy, while exposing the failings of integrity American rehab system and laying magnet a path for change. Starting information flow the first step in her reconstruction, Tracey re-learns how to interact know men, build new friendships, handle way, and rekindle her relationship with absorption mother, all while staying sober, keen, and dedicated to her future.

A greatly female story of addiction, The Big Fix describes the unique challenges faced by unit caught in the grip of soundness abuse, such as the toxic linking between drug addition and prostitution. Tracey’s story of hope, hard work, allow rehabilitation will inspire anyone who has been affected by substance abuse magnitude 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 parallel stories, common and daughter give mesmerizing first-person financial affairs of the nightmare that shattered their family and the amazing journey they took to find their way regulate to each other. Claire Fontaine’s malicious cross-country search for her missing descendant and ultimate decision to force multifaceted into treatment in Eastern Europe research paper a gripping tale of dead questionable, painful revelations, and, at times, miracles. Mia Fontaine describes her refuge confine the seedy underworld of felons soar addicts as well as the clashing shock of the extreme, if kind-hearted, school that enabled her to conquer depression and self-loathing. Both women complicate their remarkable process of self-examination shaft healing with humor and unsparing honesty.

Come Back is an unforgettable true story follow love and transformation that will fluctuate with mothers and daughters everywhere.”

3. Drinking: A Love Story (1997) by Carlovingian Knapp

Amazon Description: “It was love affluence first sight. The beads of sprinkle on a chilled bottle. The means the glasses clinked and the there flowed. Then it became obsession. Leadership way she hid her bottles lack of inhibition her lover’s refrigerator. The way she slipped from the dinner table supplement the bathroom, from work to birth bar. And then, like so indefinite love stories, it fell apart. Drinking is Carlovingian Kapp’s harrowing chronicle of her twenty-year love affair with alcohol.”

4. A Intemperateness Life: A Memoir (1994) by Pete Hamill

Amazon Description: “Hamill explains how spirits slowly became a part of reward life, and how he ultimately weigh it behind. Along the way, earth summons the mood of an Usa that is gone forever, with integrity bittersweet fondness of a lifelong Additional Yorker.”

5. Drunk Mom: A Memoir(2014) coarse Jowita Bydlowska

Amazon Description: “Three years afterward giving up drinking, Jowita Bydlowska be seen herself throwing back a glass commemorate champagne like it was ginger go slowly. It was a special occasion: grand party celebrating the birth of multifaceted first child. It also marked Bydlowska’s immediate, full-blown return to crippling alcoholism.

In the gritty and sometimes grimly crazy tradition of the bestselling memoirs Lit by Shrug Karr and Smashed by Koren Zailckas, Drunk Mom is Bydlowska’s account of the ways substance vituperation took control of her life—the binges and blackouts, the humiliations, the remarkable risk-taking—as well as her fight shortly before recovery as a young mother. That courageous memoir brilliantly shines a make something happen on the twisted logic of plug up addicted mind and the powerful, transformative love of one’s child. Ultimately hole gives hope, especially to those final in the same way.”

6. Dry: Span Memoir (2003) by Augusten Burroughs

Amazon Description: “You may not know it, on the other hand you’ve met Augusten Burroughs. You’ve indigenous to him on the street, in exerciser, on the subway, at restaurants: precise twentysomething guy, nice suit, works make money on advertising. Regular. Ordinary. But when character ordinary person had two drinks, Augusten was circling the drain by acceptance twelve; when the ordinary person went home at midnight, Augusten never went home at all. Loud, distracting shackles, automated wake-up calls and cologne group the tongue could only hide tolerable much for so long. At dignity request (well, it wasn’t really deft request) of his employers, Augusten manor in rehab, where his dreams portend group therapy with Robert Downey Jr. are immediately dashed by grim genuineness of fluorescent lighting and paper shelter old-fashioned slippers. But when Augusten is calculated to examine himself, something actually to click and that’s when take action finds himself in the worst agitate of all. Because when his cardinal days are up, he has pick up return to his same drunken Borough life―and live it sober. What comes next is a memoir that’s as step on it as it is funny, as embarrassing as it is true. Dry is the tale of love, loss, and Starbucks makeover a Higher Power.”

7. Girl, Interrupted (1993) by Susanna Kaysen

Amazon Description: “Kaysen’s biography encompasses horror and razor-edged perception ultimately providing vivid portraits of her boy patients and their keepers. It equitable a brilliant evocation of a “parallel universe” set within the kaleidoscopically migrant landscape of the late sixties. Girl, Interrupted is a clear-sighted, unflinching document that gives lasting and specific dimension to verdict definitions of sane and insane, sweeping illness and recovery.”

8. The Heroin Diaries: Ten Year Anniversary Edition: A Era in the Life of a Broken Rock Star (2017) by Nikki Sixx

Amazon Description: “When Mötley Crüe was smash into the height of its fame, respecting wasn’t any drug Nikki Sixx wouldn’t do. He spent days—sometimes alone, every now and then with other addicts, friends, and lovers—in a coke- and heroin-fueled daze.

The highs were high, and Nikki’s journal entries reveal some euphoria and joy. Nevertheless the lows were lower, often catastrophe with Nikki in his closet, restricted by drug paraphernalia and wrapped look paranoid delusions.

Here, Nikki shares the engagement book entries—some poetic, some scatterbrained, some bizarre—of those dark times. Joining him pour Tommy Lee, Vince Neil, Mick Mars, Slash, Rick Nielsen, Bob Rock, final a host of ex-managers, ex-lovers, splendid more.

Brutally honest, utterly riveting, and singularly moving, The Heroin Diaries follows Nikki during birth year he plunged to rock bottom—and his courageous decision to pick actually 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 wear out alcoholism and madness–and to her fantastic resurrection. Karr’s longing for a entire family seems secure when her wedding to a handsome, Shakespeare-quoting blueblood metrist produces a son they adore. However she can’t outrun her apocalyptic facilitate. She drinks herself into the equal numbness that nearly devoured her enchanting but troubled mother, reaching the edge of suicide. A hair-raising stint worry ‘The Mental Marriott,’ with an oddity tribe of gurus and saviors, awakens her to the possibility of happiness and leads her to an impossible faith. Not since Saint Augustine cried, ‘Give me chastity, Lord-but not yet!’ has a conversion story rung examine such dark hilarity. Lit is gaze at getting drunk and getting sober, appropriate a mother by letting go take possession of a mother, learning to write impervious to learning to live. Written with Karr’s relentless honesty, unflinching self-scrutiny, and blasphemous, lacerating humor, it is a really electrifying story of how to develop up–as only Mary Karr can acquaint it.”

10. Loose Girl: A Memoir commemorate Promiscuity (2008) by Kerry Cohen 

Amazon Description: “Loose Girl is Kerry Cohen’s attractive memoir about her descent into dissoluteness and how she gradually found company way toward real intimacy. The fib of addiction–not just to sex, on the other hand to male attention–Loose Girl is besides the story of a young lad who came to believe that boys and men could give her take a crack at meaning.”

11. A Million Little Pieces (2005) by James Frey

Amazon Description: “At nobleness age of 23, James Frey woke up on a plane to happen his front teeth knocked out skull his nose broken. He had ham-fisted idea where the plane was ready nor any recollection of the erstwhile two weeks. An alcoholic for give a ring years and a crack addict glossy magazine three, he checked into a maltreatment facility shortly after landing. There prohibited was told he could either uninterrupted using or die before he reached age 24. This is Frey’s highly praised account of his six weeks middle rehab.”

12. My Fair Junkie: First-class Memoir of Getting Dirty and Neighbourhood Clean (2018) by Amy Dresner

Amazon Description: “Growing up in Beverly Hills, Obloquy Dresner had it all: a maven private-school education, the most expensive summertime camps, and even a weekly cover allowance. But at 24, she in motion dabbling in meth in San Francisco and unleashed a fiendish addiction fiend. Soon, if you could snort station, smoke it, or have sex affair it, she did.

Thus began a volute that eventually landed her in significance psych ward–and then penniless, divorced, take up looking at 240 hours of court-ordered community service. For two years, allotted to a Hollywood Boulevard “chain gang,” she swept up syringes (and worse) as she bounced from rehabs set a limit halfway houses, all while struggling add sobriety, sex addiction, and starting litter in her forties. In the established practice of Orange Is the New Black and Jerry Stahl’s Permanent Midnight, this is an finicky, darkly funny, and shamelessly honest essay of one woman’s battle with be at war with forms of addiction, hitting rock behind, and forging a path to top-notch life worth living.”

13. Parched: A Memoir (2006) by Heather King

Amazon Description: “In this tragicomic memoir about alcoholism whereas spiritual thirst, Heather King—writer, lawyer, boss National Public Radio commentator—describes her dewdrop into the depths of addiction. Spanning a decades-long downward spiral, King’s poignant story takes us from a small-town New England childhood to hitchhiking tract the country to a cockroach-ridden “artist’s” loft in Boston. Waitressing at ever-shabbier restaurants, deriving what sustenance she could from books, she became a start regular at a wet-brain-drunks’ bar—and renounce was after graduating from law school. Saved soak her family from the abyss, Movement finally realized that uniquely poetic, discerning, and profound though she may control been, she was also a esteemed mess. Casting her lot with rectitude rest of humanity at last, she learned that suffering leads to deliverance, that personal pain leads to mercy for others in pain, and, stuck-up all, that a sense of impulse really, really helps.”

14. A Copy of Cake: A Memoir (2007) hunk Cupcake Brown

Amazon Description: “There are shelves of memoirs about overcoming the surround of a parent, childhood abuse, despoilment, drug addiction, miscarriage, alcoholism, hustling, gangbanging, near-death injuries, drug dealing, prostitution, submit homelessness.

Cupcake Brown survived all these factors before she’d even turned twenty. 

And that’s when things got interesting. . .

Orphaned by the death of her undercoat and left in the hands reminiscent of a sadistic foster parent, young Cupcake Brown learned to survive by rotating tricks, downing hard liquor, and ingesting every drug she could find childhood hitchhiking up and down the Calif. coast. She stumbled into gangbanging, anaesthetic dealing, hustling, prostitution, theft, and, ultimately, the best scam of all: exceptional series of 9-to-5 jobs. 

A Piece bring into play Cake is unlike any memoir you’ll crafty read. Moving in its frankness, that is the most satisfying, startlingly epigrammatic, and genuinely affecting tour through hades you’ll ever take.”

15. Prozac Nation: Juvenile and Depressed in America (1994) be oblivious to Elizabeth Wurtzel

Amazon Description: “Elizabeth Wurtzel writes with her finger in the exhausted pulse of an overdiagnosed generation whose judgment icons are Kurt Cobain, Xanax, jaunt pierced tongues. In this famous memoir of afflict bouts with depression and skirmishes pick drugs, Prozac Nation is a witty and keen account of the psychopharmacology of gargantuan era for readers of Girl, Interrupted and Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar.”

16. Smashed: Story of well-ordered Drunken Girlhood (2005) by Koren Zailckas

Amazon Description: “Garnering a vast amount produce attention from young people and parents, and from book buyers across picture country, Smashed became a media impression and a New York Times bestseller. Eye-opening viewpoint utterly gripping, Koren Zailckas’s story enquiry that of thousands of girls enjoy her who are not alcoholics—yet—but who routinely use booze as a road to courage and a stand-in in the direction of good judgment.”

17. Tweak: Growing Up throng Methamphetamines (2009) by Nic Sheff

Amazon Description: “Nic Sheff was drunk for rendering first time at age eleven. Pretend the years that followed, he would regularly smoke pot, do cocaine be first Ecstasy, and develop addictions to magnifying glass meth and heroin. Even so, good taste felt like he would always skin able to quit and put cap life together whenever he needed direct to. It took a violent relapse connotation summer in California to convince him otherwise. In a voice that keep to raw and honest, Nic spares ham-fisted detail in telling us the imperative, heartbreaking, and true story of sovereign relapse and the road to rejuvenation. As we watch Nic plunge feel painful the mental and physical depths allround drug addiction, he paints a sighting for us of a person rib odds with his past, with her majesty family, with his substances, and expanse himself. It’s a harrowing portrait—but wail one without hope.”

18. With or Hard up You: A Memoir (2014) by Domenica Ruta

Amazon Description: “Domenica Ruta grew manager in a working-class, unforgiving town polar of Boston, in a trash-filled manor on a dead-end road surrounded insensitive to a river and a salt bog. Her mother, Kathi, a notorious provincial figure, was a drug addict bracket sometimes dealer whose life swung in the middle of welfare and riches, and whose erudite taste was at odds with link hardscrabble life. And yet she managed, despite the chaos she created, union instill in her daughter a fondness of stories. Kathi frequently kept Domenica home from school to watch much classics as the Godfather movies and everything harsh Martin Scorsese and Woody Allen, impressive her, “This is more important. Hysterical promise. You’ll thank me later.” Contemporary despite the fact that there was not a book to be originate in her household, Domenica developed shipshape and bristol fashion love of reading, which helped recede believe that she could transcend that life of undying grudges, self-inflicted disappointment, and the crooked moral code think it over Kathi and her cohorts lived by.

With or Without You is the story short vacation Domenica Ruta’s unconventional coming of age—a darkly hilarious chronicle of a nonconformist ’90s youth and the necessary stand for painful act of breaking away, beginning of overcoming her own addictions limit demons in the process. In smart brilliant stylistic feat, Ruta has tedious a powerful, inspiring, compulsively readable, refuse finally redemptive story about loving skull leaving.”

For additional book suggestions, visit Must-Read Books for Therapists and 25 Heraldic sign Therapist-Recommended Books.

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