A Few of My Favorite Recovery Memoirs

Finding myself in other people's stories of redemption

It’s that most wonderful time of the year, that is, list time! Not only is Santa making them, but so is every news outlet. There’s something about the end of the year that makes us feel like we need to compile things in easy-to-read numbered lists. Well, here I am, getting in on the action. 

Since my Substack is mainly about my recovery, I thought I’d share my list of favorite recovery memoirs, not from this year but from my life.

The background: 

When I was still drinking but knew I shouldn’t be, I read a lot of recovery memoirs. It was not a conscious decision, but subconsciously, I thought: If I just read this one book, I’ll figure out this drinking issue I have. Because, at that time, I didn’t want to stop drinking; I wanted my drinking to stop being a problem. 

I enjoyed the stories, but I’m not sure if they helped in my journey to sobriety. As I said, I wasn’t ready to stop drinking. Plus, at that time, it was difficult to penetrate through my alcoholic fog to hear the messages coming through. There were, of course, a few moments of “oh me too,” which I hope nudged me towards that last drink. 

Once I did put the “plug in the jug,” as they say, I picked the books back up again and had a different experience. Sure, I heard personal stories I could relate to in the recovery meetings I had just started attending. But there is something about words printed on a page and bound in a book that adds gravitas to a story and brings your connection to another level.

Also, recovery memoirs were written by WRITERS (duh). Although I was too insecure to admit it then, I desperately wanted to be a writer. And I may have bought into the stereotype that to be a profound literary writer, one needed to throw back shots of whiskey and smoke cigarettes while hanging out at a round table. Similarly to how I used to justify my drinking due to my grief, part of me justified my drinking because I was a certain type—a deep, emotional writer-ly type.

That our society tends to romanticize the literary writer as a heavy drinker is the topic of Leslie Jamison’s The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath, which I enjoyed but did not make my list of top memoirs. It had too much journalism in it for my tastes. Jamison debunks the myth that you must be a hard drinker to be a writer. And the evidence is clear in memoir after memoir. Take, for example, Stephen King’s masterful On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, a book about writing that also includes his recovery.

“Write drunk, edit sober” is an oft-repeated quote from Ernest Hemingway, which, by the way, he never said. And when people romanticize Hemingway’s drinking, I think He shot himself … For me personally, I didn’t start writing until I was four years sober. I tried to write when I was still drinking, but I never completed anything.

Anyway, back to My List. Here are my top four recovery memoirs based only on my personal experience with them! 

My Top Four Recovery Memoirs of All Time

1. Lit by Mary Karr

Description from bookshop.org: “Lit is about getting drunk and getting sober; becoming a mother by letting go of a mother; learning to write by learning to live. Written with Karr’s relentless honesty, unflinching self-scrutiny, and irreverent, lacerating humor, it is a truly electrifying story of how to grow up—as only Mary Karr can tell it.”

Side note: The highlight of my year was that I got to meet Mary Karr and Leslie Jamison. I describe my meeting in a book inc Journal called “Recovery, Memoir, and Daily Practice.” Read it here. 

My moment of connection: In Lit, Karr describes drinking herself into a stupor every night on a tiny back landing of her house while listening to punk rock songs on a Walkman. I spent years getting drunk by myself in the bathroom while listening to Kate Bush’s “This Woman’s Work” on my Sony Walkman. With Karr’s description of her back landing, I had never felt so seen in all my life.

And a quote I stumbled upon while writing this, that so perfectly explains what happened in my marriage: 

“If you lie to your husband—even about something so banal as how much you drink—each lie is a brick in a wall going up between you, and when he tells you he loves you, it’s deflected away.”

2. Dry: A Memoir by Augusten Burroughs

Description: Dry is a poignant and humorous memoir chronicling Burroughs’s journey from a seemingly ordinary life of excess in Manhattan’s advertising scene, marked by alcohol-fueled chaos and self-destruction, to the challenging path of sobriety in rehab, exploring themes of love, loss, and unexpected sources of strength.

My moment of connection: My life was very different than Burroughs’s, who was a marketing prodigy at a fancy schmancy ad agency. But the descriptions of the drinking were the same. And the moment when he comes home from rehab to find his apartment covered in empty beer bottles really hit a chord. 

“The truly odd part is that I really don’t know how they got there,” admits Burroughs.  

We alcoholics have a thing with garbage removal and/or recycling. In our drunken anxiety riddle state, something about taking out the trash becomes insurmountable. You don’t want your husband to see your empties, you don’t want your neighborhood to see the empties, and you yourself don’t want to face the empties. Burroughs’ description of his 1,452 empty beer bottles captured that weird alcoholic quirk perfectly. 

3. Drinking A Love Story by Caroline Knapp

Description from bookshop.org: In this extraordinarily candid and revealing memoir, Knapp offers important insights not only about alcoholism but about life itself and how we learn to cope with it.

My moment of connection: If Mary Karr is the Texas hilly billy, Knapp tells a similar drunk-a-log but from a WASP point of view. Whereas I couldn’t relate to Karr’s descriptions of her parents' crazed, alcoholic-fueled brawls, I could relate to Knapp's quiet, tense cocktail hours in their well-appointed living room. But the chapter that really got me, was Chapter Six on the relationship between drinking and sex. 

I had never read anything before that so candidly discussed the fraught relationship between saying “no” and being drunk.

“You lie there with your eyes closed. All you want to do is get out, just get out and go home and take a shower and get all of this out of your mind, shove it straight back into history.”

Not sure I need to say more about that.  

4. Undrunk: A Skeptic’s Guide to AA by A.J. Adams

Description from Amazon.com: “Beginning with the story of his first AA meeting, he takes the mystery out of what goes on behind closed doors. He presents a user-friendly history and introduction to AA, explaining the Steps, Traditions, terms, and sayings--all punctuated by honest, often hilarious descriptions of his own struggles and eventual transformation to ‘getting’ the program.”

My moment of connection: I love this book not because it’s a well-written masterpiece but because it helped me significantly when I was teetering on the edge of sobriety. 

When I first joined AA, I was confused by its lingo and rituals. Everyone seemed to know what was going on but me. I don’t like that feeling, and that uncomfortable cluelessness might have kept me away. But I went to the library to find books on recovery and found this one. I remember being so nervous that the librarian was judging me when I checked it out!

This book explained to me what was going on in the meetings, things like why the “Think Think Think” sign was upside down. It even had a glossary! I’m forever grateful for this “skeptic’s guide.” 

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Recovery Memoirs I Read This Year

I did read several books on recovery this year as I’m trying to find comps¹ for my memoir in progress. 

Here are my quick reviews: 

Quit Like A Woman by Holly Whitaker 

I would have thrown this book across the room if I had a hard copy of the book instead of listening to it on Audible. She bashes AA, which infuriated me, and I stopped listening about a quarterway through. I’m annoyed I gave her money.  She doesn’t have to like AA; there are many roads to recovery, but why disparage something that is helping so many people? Two thumbs down for me. However, I will begrudgingly say that if you tried AA and found it not for you, this memoir might resonate. Whitaker offers a different path to sobriety.    

We Are the Luckiest by Laura McKowen

I avoided this book for a while because I knew she was a friend of Holly Whitaker (see above), and I assumed she would be anti-AA as well. But she wasn’t. In fact, she tells a heart-wrenching story about how the women of AA helped her. This one, I recommend! 

Stash: My Life in Hiding by Laura Cathcart Robbins

Audible recommended this book, and I’m so glad it did. I enjoyed it so much that I tweeted about it: 

“Laura Cathcart Robbins’s gut-wrenching memoir is a must-read for anyone looking to understand addiction. She does a masterful job of describing the mental obsession, the insanity, the shame, and the guilt. Luckily, it has a happy ending.” 

And Robbins liked my tweet and thanked me! I love interacting with authors. 

Nothing Good Can Come from This: Essays by Kristi Coulter

I think I found this one by googling recovery memoirs. It was a delightful read, and I recommended it to a friend who is writing an essay collection. Coulter not only writes about recovery but also feminist issues in a humourous but powerful way. 

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Well, that’s my recovery memoir round-up! I worry sometimes that this topic is oversaturated and, therefore, no one will be interested in my recovery story if/when it eventually comes out. But personally, I will never tire of a good redemption story. 

1. “Comps” is short for comparative titles or books that are similar to yours. When you pitch your book to agents, you need to present your book as similar to another book that’s already in the market.