Addiction Memoirs

Lynn grew up the carefree daughter of a Miami undercover narcotics agent—until her dad snuck out of the house in the dark of night without a glance back. She never knew what happened to her father until she was in high school, and he was in prison for drug smuggling. By then, Lynn had developed a dangerous drug and alcohol habit of her own. It was the perfect setup for her to latch onto the only connection to her dad that remained when he was paroled from prison—cocaine.

After a trophy-laden and record-setting club and international career, England’s greatest ever goalkeeper, Peter Shilton, could rightly look forward to an equally successful post-playing career. But a gambling habit forged in his playing days soon spiralled into a gambling addiction: a silent, self-destructive and ruinous obsession that destroyed relationships, his mental health and very nearly himself.

In 2001, Christine Yanke’s life was turned upside down after police raided her family’s home and arrested her Hells Angel husband. Suddenly an unemployed single mother of three boys, she had to fight to keep her home and family together. For the next three years, her husband awaited a trial that would determine their future together as a family. Blinded by an Angel is the true story of one woman’s struggle to survive mental, physical, and financial hardships.

I have been a hardcore junkie for many years and I am certain that I will never stop using heroin or any other street drug. I love to get high. Point-blank. I’m sure I will overdose again and my body will be found in a gutter somewhere in Los Angeles.

Sexual assault, addiction, and other traumatic experiences can leave both physical and emotional scars. For Jennifer Storm, these scars serve as a reminder - both of the darkness and suffering she once experienced, and of how far she has come. Blackout Girl is the heartbreaking, enlightening, and inspiring story of Jennifer's narrow escape from her own self-destructive instincts when all of the odds, and systems, were stacked against her.

Homosexuality, prostitution, pornography, cults--secret sins rival the glitter of Hollywood for young actor David Kyle Foster. Winning wholesome television roles, his star on the rise, he is relieved to be free from his father's harshness. But the desperate loneliness and sexual obsession that characterized his youth now accompany his rise to success and bondage to a double life seems the only answer. Can Jesus' love reach one so broken?

A pediatric oncologist and palliative care physician Dr. Adam B. Hill suffers stress and disillusionment with the culture of medicine. It led him to alcoholism, depression, and suicidal thoughts. Then, while in recovery, he loses a mentor to suicide, revealing the extent of the burnout epidemic in the medical field.

Harrowing, heart-breaking and often horrific were the challenges that confronted Marvin after his birth in prison. Born in distress, Marvin was wrenched from his drug-addicted parents and deposited into an orphanage. In this inspirational memoir, Marvin searches for his birth parents and battles his crack addiction with the help of the woman he loves, determined to start a family and to live his life crime and drug free.

A riveting and raw story of how one woman overcame alcoholism and mental illness and broke free from the genetic blueprint of addiction that demonized her family for generations. She sets you in a front row seat as she shares her life story and experiences, which show the strength, determination and courage of how she refused to continue with this way of life, and how she would do whatever it took to protect her children from being exposed to a life of addiction which is so normalized and influenced within society.

As chronicled in his hit memoir Straight Pepper Diet, one fateful summer night, Joseph Naus, a young LA lawyer, went out to have just a couple of drinks. He awoke the next morning handcuffed to a hospital bed and charged with attempted murder. And then it got worse. The Palsgraf Revelation begins where Straight Pepper Diet left off. Joseph survived the initial blast of the nuclear bomb he dropped on his own life, but if he wants to become more than a shocking cautionary tale, he must now learn to live with the devastating fallout.

When Liz Fraser's partner fell into a catastrophic vortex of depression and alcoholism, Liz found herself in a relentless hailstorm of lies, loneliness and fear, looking after their young child on her own, heartbroken, mentally shattered and with no idea what was happening or what to do. As she and her family moved between Cambridge, Venice and Oxford, she kept the often shocking truth entirely to herself for a long time, trying in vain to help her partner find a path to sobriety, until she herself finally broke from the trauma and started to speak out.

Andrew Brobyn's relationship was in shambles before he took the terrible acid that sent him on an almost decade-long journey seeking redemption. His immediate plans following university were to liquidate his illicit assets, sell his client list, pack up shop, and retire to his parents' home in Toronto, while he figured out what to do with a bachelor's degree in philosophy and a quarter million in cash. As his drug use and bipolar disorder spiral, his situation gets stranger and stranger, taking him from his university campus to strip clubs, psych wards, and the slammer.

Born in the Bronx, Guy Trebay was raised in an atmosphere of privilege on Long Island’s North Shore after his entrepreneurial father struck business gold with Hawaiian Surf, a wildly successful cologne company that capitalized on the optimism of the 1960s as marketed to “an adventurous new breed of men.’’ But behind the facade of material prosperity lay the emotional disarray of a household dominated by a charismatic, con artist father, a glamorous yet lost and careless mother, a family haunted by tragedy.

When Susan Stellin asked Graham MacIndoe to shoot her author photo for an upcoming travel book, she barely knew him except for a few weekends with mutual friends at a summer house in Montauk. He was a gregarious, divorced Scotsman who had recently gotten sober; she was an independent New Yorker who decided to take a chance on a rough-around-the-edges guy. But their relationship was soon tested when Susan discovered that Graham still had a drug habit he was hiding.

With three children under five, a set of twins and a newborn, Rachell Brownell wanted to feel like an adult again. So she turned to three bottles of white wine a night. Through wit and honesty, Brownell lets listeners into her world of addiction, but also towards hope. Through examples of community, wisdom, and support, this book provides a map for anyone trying to get through the early stages of recovery.Mommy Doesn’t Drink Here Anymore.

There wasn't one major reason that Kate Gunn decided to give up alcohol, more a few minor ones. She had an inkling that alcohol was holding her back from getting on top of her life. Plus the hangovers were getting worse. No longer just a dull headache throughout the day. At the worst times, entire weekends wiped out by one fun night she could hardly remember.

Endless ice. Thin air. The threat of dropping into nothingness thousands of feet below. This is the climb Silvia Vasquez-Lavado braves in her pulse-raising memoir. A Latina hero in the elite macho tech world of Silicon Valley, privately, she was hanging by a thread. Deep in the throes of alcoholism, hiding her sexuality from her family, and repressing the abuse she’d suffered as a child, she started climbing. She then took her biggest pain as a survivor to the biggest mountain: Everest.

When actress Claudia Christian flees a troubled childhood and moves to Hollywood at age 17, she steps through the looking glass into another world. From the set of Dallas to her starring role on the sci-fi series Babylon 5, Claudia's affairs with billionaires, supermodels, rock stars, and celebrities are mixed with shootings, stalking, heartbreak, and betrayal. Hollywood life takes its toll on Claudia as she descends into alcohol addiction and a desperate battle to reclaim her life.

In Coming Clean, Seth Haines writes a raw account of his first 90 days of sobriety, illuminating how to face the pain we’d rather avoid, and even more importantly, how an abiding God meets us in that pain. Seth shows us that true wholeness is found in facing our pain and anxieties with the tenacity and tenderness of Jesus, and only through Christ's passion can we truly come clean.

Best known for his hysterically funny and often scathing restaurant reviews for the London Sunday Times, journalist Adrian Gill writes about his near-fatal alcoholism in this extraordinary lucid memoir. By his early 20s, at London's prestigious Saint Martin's art school, Gill was entrenched in his addiction. He writes from the handful of memories that remain, of drunken conquests with anonymous women, of waking to morbid hallucinations, of emptying jacket pockets that "were like tiny crime scenes".