Addiction Memoirs

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.

For a long time, Carmelo Anthony’s world wasn’t any larger than the view of the hoopers and hustlers he watched from the side window of his family’s first-floor project apartment in Red Hook, Brooklyn. He couldn’t dream any bigger than emulating his older brothers and cousin, much less going on to become a basketball champion on the world stage.

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.

As Melissa Bond raises her infant daughter and a special-needs one-year-old son, she suffers from unbearable insomnia, sleeping an hour or less each night. She loses her job as a journalist (a casualty of the 2008 recession), and her relationship with her husband grows distant. Her doctor casually prescribes benzodiazepines—a family of drugs that includes Xanax, Valium, Klonopin, Ativan—and increases her dosage regularly.

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.

Over the past four decades, the landmark NBC hit television series I Dream of Jeannie has delighted generations of audiences and inspired untold numbers of teenage crushes on its beautiful blond star, Barbara Eden. Part pristine Hollywood princess and part classic bombshell, with innocence, strength, and comedic talent to spare, Barbara finally lets Jeannie out of her bottle to tell her whole story. Jeannie Out of the Bottle takes us behind the scenes of I Dream of Jeannie as well as Barbara’s dozens of other stage, movie, television, and live concert performances.

The ultimate front-row seat to the rise, fall, and rebirth of a band that was - for a time - the biggest in the world, Hootie & the Blowfish, and Jim Sonefeld’s shattering and redeeming spiritual path from addiction to recovery and a more fruitful life.

A scorching memoir of a love affair with an addict, weaving personal reckoning with psychology and history to understand the nature of addiction, codependency, and our appetite for obsessive love. "The disease he has is addiction," Nina Renata Aron writes of her boyfriend, K. "The disease I have is loving him."

Part Oz, Shawshank Redemption, and Orange Is the New Black, this true, warts-and-all, David vs. Goliath tale is about a journalist/addict/alcoholic whose five prison-mates ready him for the outside world, while taking on the prison industrial complex of 2018.

As a long-time Christian, Heather Kopp never expected to become an out-of-control alcoholic. Engaging, funny and bracingly honest, Kopp shares her remarkable journey into darkness... and back to the light again. Her story reveals the unique challenges and spiritual conundrums Christians face when they become ensnared in an addiction. If you love Jesus but shop too much, drink too much, eat too much, crush on men who aren't your husband, or otherwise fixate on doing things you hate but can't stop doing, Sober Mercies is for you.

At the age of 15, Kelle Groom found that alcohol allowed her to connect with people and explore intimacy in ways she'd never been able to experience before. She began drinking before class, often blacked out at bars, and fell into destructive relationships. At 19, already an out-of-control alcoholic, she was pregnant. Accepting the heartbreaking fact that she was incapable of taking care of her son herself, she gave him up for adoption to her aunt and uncle. When he was nine months old, the boy was diagnosed with leukemia....

When Jim Wahlberg went to prison the second time at 22 years old, he was sentenced to six to nine years for breaking and entering, bargained down from life for home invasion. He had staggered into a Boston cops apartment, helping himself to the sellable stuff and all the beer in the fridge. The cop came home, found Jim passed out at the kitchen table, beat the hell out of him, and arrested him.

Nile Wilson has always been one of life's winners; a charismatic young man with an Olympic bronze medal in the Horizontal Bar at just 21 years old. But after a serious neck injury, forcing him to retire early and miss taking part in the Tokyo Olympics, Nile's world fell apart. Swamped with depression, anxiety and addictive behaviours, his mental health went over a cliff. Over the past few years, Nile has had to face down his demons and accept his new reality, and this is the book he wish he'd been given before it all began.

Gary Barlow is one of the most successful British musicians and songwriters of all time, but 15 years ago, as he himself admits, he hit rock bottom - he was out of shape, out of work, depressed. Food for him had become an addiction, a means not only of comfort but almost of self-medication as he grappled with the cruel twists of fate of musical stardom. In 2003, as he struggled with the disappointment of an underperforming solo career alongside the tireless media taunts; Gary turned to food.

One phone call. That's all it took to change Stephanie Wittels Wachs's life forever.... Her younger brother Harris, a star in the comedy world known for his work on shows like Parks and Recreation, had died of a heroin overdose. How do you make sense of such a tragic end to a life of so much hilarious brilliance? In beautiful, unsentimental, and surprisingly funny prose, Stephanie Wittels Wachs alternates between her brother's struggle with addiction, which she learned about three days before her wedding, and the first year after his death, in all its emotional devastation.

Dr. Kerry McAvoy was juggling the life of an overly-committed mom, wife, and psychologist when the loss of her husband brought her world to a crashing halt. Then she meets Cesar, a charming, handsome, and ambitious man who sweeps her off her feet with the promise of new love.

Josh Hamilton was the first player chosen in the first round of the 1999 baseball draft. He was destined to be one of those rare "high-character" superstars. But in 2001, working his way from the minors to the majors, all of the plans for Josh went off the rails in a moment of weakness. What followed was a four-year nightmare of drugs and alcohol, estrangement from friends and family, and his eventual suspension from baseball.

On a hot summer day, twenty-eight-year-old Tommy Dorfman was enjoying a beautiful outing on a boat. But inside she felt unmoored. After a lifetime of confusion, she’d finally gained clarity around her gender and had begun to transition. But there were still parts of herself she’d locked away, elements of her story that she needed, for the first time, to fully confront. She sought guidance in a tarot deck, using it as a tool to make sense of her life up until that point. Maybe This Will Save Me, Dorfman’s spellbinding debut memoir, is structured through the cards of that tarot pull.

Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, Thomas De Quincey's best-known work, is an account of his early life and opium addiction, in prose that is by turns witty, conversational, and nightmarish.

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.