Audiobooks to Support You in Your Addiction & Recovery Journey

As a parent myself, I remember thinking how foolish that sounded as I would die for my children as most would. Today I get it, especially if the child is addicted to drugs or alcohol. Even if God is not your thing, putting your spouse and yourself before your child’s addiction is highly recommended. When your child is ready for help, getting them help becomes a priority. Putting their addiction first and your spouse second often ends in turmoil, divorce, and the addiction problem becoming progressively worse. When you put your child’s addiction first and enable them, you are making them worse along with yourself and everyone else around you. The primary enabler puts all their attention on the substance user, and all other relationships take a back seat. While each family member is blaming the substance user, the real problem lies in the breakdown of the family.

• The author argues that “one-size-fits-all” plans, like 12-step programs, do not set you up for success.
• Many readers that struggle with addiction resonate with Nick and his rocky journey to recovery.
• Her protector became her lover and this is the memoir of their twenty-years-long destructive relationship.

Before we get into books for children that explain addiction, two groups are highly recommended for young people who have a parent or loved one who has an addiction. Most of the books are trying to make a similar point, and that is why it is helpful to read multiple books on boundaries so you can read them from various perspectives. What is profound about Codependent No More by Melody Beattie is her ability to articulate the importance of boundaries while keeping the reader engaged. Her book has personal stories, reflections, quotes, self-tests, and exercises.

The best books and drinking and recovery from alcohol addiction

Today, she’s a lawyer and motivational speaker who wants to show others that change is possible. In one scene in the book, Brown describes losing her apartment and going on a four-day crack binge. Learn more about Tempest’s unique approach to alcohol recovery. When she looked around she couldn’t help but notice that she wasn’t alone. In a relatable style, Lush explores the ongoing addiction crisis amongst middle-aged females. This is a darkly comic book about the slow road through recovery, really growing up, and being someone that gets back up after screwing up. He also addresses his experience of feeling out of place in the music industry as a rapper who also practices a Christian faith, feeling excluded at red carpet events due to discussing his faith in his lyrics.

She has produced a multitude of integrated campaigns and events in the behavioral health and addictions field. Through strategic marketing campaign concepts, Alyssa has established Banyan as an industry leader and a national best alcoholic memoirs household name. Some of the closest friendships are forged in the crucible of hard partying. This lyrical, dark, biting novel is about one of those friendships, between Tyler and Laura, roommates and codependent hot messes.

Gripping Books About Alcoholism and Recovery

In the literature world, you can find books about addiction and recovery in a genre known as “quit lit.” Quit lit is full of authors sharing their personal experiences and resources to help others who are where they’ve been. Admittedly, there are a lot of lists there about the best recovery memoirs, which is why ours is a little different. We were inspired by the diverse experiences of our own community members. Since we care about all kinds of recovery, we wanted to emphasize that drugs and alcohol are not the only ways that women suffer and not everyone recovers through a 12-Step program. And while memoirs centered around alcohol addiction are prevalent on this list, there are plenty of others to choose from, too. There are countless memoirs about addiction and recovery, but not quite so many about stopping drinking and its aftermath. When author Kristi Coulter stopped drinking, she began to notice the way that women around her were always tanked, and how alcohol affected those around her. Admittedly, there are a lot of lists out there about the best recovery memoirs, but ours is a little different. When a child does not feel love, attention, and affection, they can trust and form healthy relationships and bonds later in life.

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”…. This powerful book narrates his ups and downs, setbacks, and unimaginable challenges in recovery. Ultimately, Augusten tells the story of how his most difficult experiences led him to getting clean and helping others. The Sober Diaries follows the narrative of author Clare Pool’s journey in quitting drinking. The book covers her whole first-year experience of sobriety, as well as the unexpected challenges she faced along the way.

I’m drinking cognac—the booze of kings and rap stars—and I love how the snifter sinks between the crooks of my fingers, amber liquid sloshing up the sides as I move it in a figure eight. An intervention is not about how to control the substance user; it is about how to let go of believing you can. A darkly comic, honest, and completely relatable inside look at high-functioning addiction in the world of corporate law-a sort of ‘Sex and the Psych Ward.’ It’s inspiring, informative, and impossible to put down. Immediate New York Times bestseller and released to high praise, Journalist Beth Macy focuses on central Appalachia as the heart of crisis and widens the scope from there to show how individuals and communities best alcoholic memoirs are affected. Through talking to opioid users, family members, dealers, doctors, judges, activists, emergency responders, and law enforcement, we get a much larger picture of the causes and effects. The best audiobooks on happiness mine learnings from science, philosophy, and psychology to point the way toward a more joyful, carefree life. “Giving up” alcohol might sound daunting…but what are you actually giving up when you’re hungover on the sofa all day? Cutting out the booze can transform your life in unexpected ways…. Many of them, like Caroline Knapp, started in their early teens and began to use alcohol as “liquid armor”…. Alcohol is an intense, addicting poison that will slowly eat away at you.

Bruno’s complete lack of contact with reality makes his alcoholism seemingly beside the point, but as the story progresses, I find my sympathies shifting as Bruno becomes more and more helplessly imprisoned by his disease. Highsmith manages to humanely portray a murdering, rich, hapless drunk so that near the end, one inevitably feels more complicated and ravaged by both Highsmith and Bruno’s trickery. Although everyone’s addiction and recovery stories are different, the core of these experiences is often the same. Sethe is haunted, literally and figuratively, by the daughter she killed while escaping slavery in this devastating Pulitzer Prize-winning classic. This is a book about the abject horror and howling trauma of slavery, but it’s also about how we metabolise the nightmares of our lives before. In my own healing, I have even questioned the use of the word “recovery” in this context at all, since it implies a retrieval of something lost. Some new habits and practices have had to be built from the ground up. From moving memoirs to self-help guides, these are some of the best listens on addiction and recovery we’ve found. Healing the Addicted Brain is a breakthrough work that focuses on treating drug and alcohol addiction as a biological disease….

They had enough space from their drinking years to mold a narrative arc from entropy, finding meaning, or at least a story that was useful to someone who had been through the same thing. Addiction narratives are full of people who did die, but also people who lived, who told their stories and helped others through their own. I feel like we’ve been stuck in the middle chapters of a drinking life like a skipping record. This part of the story is simultaneously melodramatic and routine, a slow and dangerous sink. Well-meaning people in my life keep stressing to me that alcoholism is a disease, and that relapse is statistically a nearly-certain symptom. “You wouldn’t get mad at someone if they had cancer,” they say. In the tradition ofBlackoutandPermanent Midnight, a darkly funny and revealing debut memoir of one woman’s twenty-year battle with sex, drugs, and alcohol addiction, and what happens when she finally emerges on the other side.

These authors have shown incredible bravery and resilience as they share their most painful experiences and deepest vulnerabilities in public. More than a journey through addiction and recovery though, this is a tale about how trauma shapes us and how we can only free ourselves by facing it. You may have heard about Hunter Biden before and maybe even know that he published a memoir about his struggles with drug and alcohol addiction. Often, we hear the stories of people with addiction finding redemption once they have children—but this is not that kind of story, which is precisely why we love it.

But humans recover from all manner of trials and they do so in ways that defy the traditional arc of addiction lit – a hero’s journey through denial to rock bottom and back up again. Of course, books and audiobooks are just one component in your recovery toolkit. If you are struggling with addiction, depression, anxiety, or need help with any other mental substance abuse or health-related issues, be sure to reach out to a professional. Your doctor can provide guidance on the best way to quit an addictive substance safely. Author Caroline Knapp shares her personal memoir and brings to light the fact that more than 15 million Americans a year are plagued with alcoholism and 5 million of them are women. Caroline describes how she drank through her years at an Ivy-League college, her award-winning career, while masking herself as a dutiful daughter and professional. Readers looking for sobriety books geared towards women will appreciate Caroline’s honest account. When I first read this book over ten years ago it felt like I was reading my own journal . I almost wanted to snap it shut, but instead finished it in one day and have read it at least three more times since. Knapp so perfectly describes the emotional landscape of addiction, and as a literary study it’s as perfect a memoir as I’ve ever read.

It Calls You Back is Luis Rodriguez’s second memoir, following Always Running. In this audiobook, Rodriguez recalls his final days in prison as a teenager and his struggle with heroin addiction and alcohol. But just as he begins to see a light at the end of the tunnel for his own fight against addiction and criminal life, Rodriguez realizes that he must now fight to make sure his son doesn’t follow down the same path. Have you noticed that our world is increasingly obsessed with drinking? Work events, brunch, baby showers, book club, hair salons—the list of where to find booze is endless. Holly Whitaker, in her own path to recovery, discovered the insidious ways the alcohol industry targets women and the patriarchal methods of recovery. Ever the feminist, she found that women and other oppressed people don’t need the tenets of Alcoholics Anonymous, but a deeper understanding of their own identities. Quit Like a Woman is her informative and relatable guidebook to breaking an addiction to alcohol. I started reading addiction memoirs in college, well before I admitted to having an alcohol use disorder. Why else would I have been mesmerized by When a Man Loves a Woman or 28 Days in my early 20s?

At the end of the day, this memoir is a groundbreaking look into our current drinking culture while providing a road map to cut alcohol out of our lives so that we can truly live our best lives. You don’t have to be sober to get a great deal from Quit Like a Woman, the first book from Holly Whitaker, founder of the digital recovery platform Tempest. Sober Home In this memoir, he talks about the car accident that killed his mother and baby sister when he was just two years old. Then about how he lost his beloved big brother to brain cancer… and all of the hardships that led to his years-long battle with addiction. Here, he retells his journey from substance use disorder to a torturous path to sobriety.

I read this book before I became a parent and was floored, but have thought about it even more since. It is the heartbreaking and astute account of Sheff’s experience of his son, Nic’s, addiction and eventual recovery. He viscerally paints the picture of the hope-tainted despair, anguish, and havoc that addiction wreaks on an entire family. Annie’s book is so important (and she’s a wonderful human to boot). She brilliantly weaves psychological, neurological, cultural, social and industry factors with her own journey. Without scare tactics, pain, or rules, she offers a strategy to give you freedom from alcohol.

Her quest for sobriety includes rehabs and therapy — necessary steps to begin a journey into realizing and accepting an imperfect self within an imperfect life. For any mother or person who has felt like an outsider in your own life, you might just relate. If you’ve ever looked around the room and wondered why there is alcohol everywhere, then this is the book for you. From drinks at baby showers to work events, brunch and book clubs, graduations and funerals, alcohol’s ubiquity is a given and the only time that people get uncomfortable is when someone doesn’t drink.

In this essay collection, Coulter writes with wit about a life in transition—and what happens when you suddenly look up and realize that maybe everyone else isn’t quite doing things the right way. After getting sober, Allen devoted her life to recovery, and her memoir explores the life she lived through to get to where she is today. But wherever that journey starts, these memoirs prove that struggle can lead to something beautiful in the end. As a popular and accomplished teen, no one suspected that Erin Khar was tumbling towards a life of addiction. But beneath the veneer of success and happiness, Erin felt immense pressure from the world around her. Intervention is a commonly used term among addiction professionals. Most people think of an intervention as something you see on television.