20 Best Memoirs of 2022

Posted by secure_admin on Sep 25, 2020 in Sober living | 0 comments

When Hsu arrived at Berkeley in the 1990s, a rebellious undergrad obsessed with creating zines and developing “a worldview defined by music,” he made an unexpected friend. It all came crashing down when Ken was murdered in a carjacking, sending Hsu into a decades-long spiral of grief and guilt. Ever since, Hsu has been trying https://ecosoberhouse.com/ to write Stay True, a wrenching memoir about who Ken was and what Ken taught him. At once a love letter, a coming-of-age tale, and an elegy, it’s one of the best books about friendship ever written. This memoir’s title is the question Jeanette Winterson’s adoptive mother asked after discovering her daughter was a lesbian.

best alcoholic memoirs

Straightforward and to the point, Carr helps you examine the reasons you drink in the first place in The Easy Way to Control Alcohol. This book is a great place to start if you’ve been feeling sober curious. Punch Me Up to the Gods is a beautifully written series of personal essays that describe Brian Broome’s experience growing up Black and queer in Ohio, and the effect early substance use had on his upbringing. Survival Math is an incredible look at race and class, gangs and guns, addiction and masculinity.

“Drinking: A Love Story” by Caroline Knapp

(“Cockroach” was the Hutu epithet of choice for the Tutsis.) It is a compendium of unspeakable crimes and horrifically inventive sadism, delivered in an even, unwavering tone. Lars Eighner’s memoir contains the finest first-person writing we have about the experience of being homeless in America. Yet it’s not a dirge or a Bukowski-like scratching of the groin but an offbeat and plaintive hymn to life. It’s the sort of book that releases the emergency brake on your soul. Eighner spent three years on the streets (mostly in Austin, Tex.) and on the road in the late 1980s and early 1990s, after suffering from migraines and losing a series of jobs. Carrère weaves in his own experiences, coming up against his own limitations, his own prejudices, his own understanding of what defines a meaningful life.

I’m Reading About My Mother’s Addiction Because I Don’t Know How to Write About It – Electric Literature

I’m Reading About My Mother’s Addiction Because I Don’t Know How to Write About It.

Posted: Tue, 28 Jan 2020 08:00:00 GMT [source]

The book is suffused with issues of race, religion and identity, and simultaneously transcends those issues to be a story of family love and the sheer force of a mother’s will. When she was 9 years old, Lucy Grealy was stricken with a rare, virulent form of bone cancer called Ewing’s sarcoma. She had radical surgery to remove half of her jaw, and years of radiation and chemotherapy, and recovered.

The Best Binge Drinking Memoirs

A stunning debut novel about a short but intense friendship between two girls that ends in tragedy, Marlena pinpoints both what it feels like to be the addict and what it’s like to be the friend of one. Karr arrived with a unique literary voice that combined rich Texan and burst of lyricism. And she had an almost miraculous ability to portray her broken family with best alcoholic memoirs wit and love, without ever flinching from pain. 2000’s Cherry picked up the story by showing Karr as an adolescent, already dabbling with drugs and profoundly lacking any sense of belonging. This is a lesser known series of essays on the intersection of alcohol and womanhood. The author, Kristi Coulter, engages the reader with her deep insight and quick wit.

Recovery-related books, AKA ‘quit lit,’ can be great for seeing how others have navigated similar experiences, gaining tips that can help you along your journey, and learning more about the science behind substance use.
When we meet Helen Macdonald in this beautiful and nearly feral book, she’s in her 30s, with “no partner, no children, no home.” When her father dies suddenly on a London street, it steals the floor from beneath her.
Son of David Sheff (Beautiful Boy), Nic Sheff describes the challenges of staying sober after several rounds of rehab and his non-linear but ultimately successful path to recovery.
While the Islamic Revolution raged outside, these women came together, removed their veils, and found themselves in the words of writers like Vladimir Nabokov, Jane Austen, and F.
Ditlevsen’s failure of nerve, causing her to wrap up three volumes of the most trenchant and unillusioned autobiography ever written with a feeble daydream, is easily explained.