Addiction Memoirs

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.

After years of working as an image-obsessed actress in Hollywood, Roxanne finds herself at rock bottom from a disease that is anything but glamorous. In her first year of recovery, Roxanne has to take accountability for her past. From tales of being mistaken for a prostitute at the Hotel Bel-Air to botching a threesome attempt with an A-list celebrity, she must face the truth about herself and stop playing the victim.

From the creator of the blog Renegade Mothering, Janelle Hanchett's forthright, darkly funny, and ultimately empowering memoir chronicling her tumultuous journey from young motherhood to abysmal addiction and a recovery she never imagined possible. Pregnant at 21 by a man she'd known three months, Janelle Hanchett embraced motherhood with the determined optimism of the recklessly self-confident. After giving birth, she found herself bored, directionless, and seeking relief in wine, which she justified as sophisticated and going well with chicken.

Domenica Ruta grew up in a working-class, unforgiving Italian town north of Boston where in the seventeenth century women were hanged as witches. Her mother, Kathi, a notorious figure in this hardscrabble place, was a drug addict and sometime dealer whose life swung between welfare and riches, whose highbrow taste was at odds with her base appetites.

Prodigal: A Journey to Freedom from Abuse and Addiction tells the amazing story of a modern-day prodigal son. Read how God uses moments from Wynn's life to lead him to freedom in Christ and a ministry helping others overcome the same temptations that once enslaved him.

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.

Born to an abusive mother and a drug-dealer father, Ginelle Testa is not exactly set up for success—and her early years are just as troubled as one might expect. By the end of her thirteenth year, she’s started experimenting with alcohol and drugs, has fallen prey to anorexia, and has been sexually assaulted. And that’s only the beginning of her spiral down into addiction and disordered eating.

Meg Wilson watched her world fall apart when her husband confessed years of sexual addiction. She has an intimate knowledge of all you may have felt-and she's lived to tell about it. With honesty and hopefulness, Meg uses her own story, along with other examples and Scripture, to help women cope and find their way out of the darkness of their husbands' sexual compulsions. She wants you to know that God's first concern is for your relationship with Him - not your circumstances.

On the surface, Cameron Douglas had everything: descended from Hollywood royalty (son of Michael Douglas, grandson of Kirk Douglas), he was born into a life of wealth, privilege, and comfort. But by the age of thirty, he had become a drug addict, a thief, and—after a DEA drug bust—a convicted drug dealer sentenced to five years in prison, with another five years added while he was incarcerated.

There have been two great loves in Matt Rowland Hill’s life so far: Jesus and heroin. Hill grew up the son of a minister in a strict Baptist church. After a crisis of loss of faith, he obsessively turned to literature before becoming addicted to crack and heroin in his early twenties. Hill’s addiction stretched over a decade, culminating in a suicide attempt and weeks in a secure psychiatric unit. After undergoing rehabilitation, which forced him to confront the religion he had spent his whole life running from, he finally got clean.

For 21 years, Paul Merson played professional football. He won two First Division titles with Arsenal and was one of the finest players of his generation. But for 30 years, Paul Merson has also been an addict. Alcohol, drugs, gambling: a desperately unenviable cocktail of addictions and depression which has plagued his entire adult life and driven him to the verge of suicide.

College football fans have welcomed Emmy Award-winning ESPN sideline reporter Lauren Sisler into their homes weekly since 2016. But the popular journalist known for asking insightful questions and for the viral videos dancing her signature “sideline shimmy” shielded a tragic secret behind her smile for nearly two decades: her mother and father died within hours of each other, victims of their hidden battle with prescription drug addiction.

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.

I decided to write this book to share the last 20 years and how opiates devastated my life. I hope that people who listen to this book will learn about the disease of opiate addiction and seek help before it's too late. I share details about my life as it was before the injury and the many ways this injury turned my life and the lives of all those dear to me into a living hell over the next decade. This included my wife, children, extended family, and friends who also share their stories and experiences in this book.

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.

In this honest, yet humorous account of her year of not getting sh*tfaced, Pamela examines her long relationship with alcohol. She is shocked to realize just how much of a crutch alcohol has been for her. There is always a bottle of wine or prosecco around to help her manage the many demands of life as a freelancer and a parent.

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.

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.

In May 2005, authorities discovered the Groene family murdered in their Idaho home. The family’s youngest members—eight-year-old Shasta and her brother, nine-year-old Dylan—were nowhere to be found. As a community prayed for their return, Shasta and Dylan were already miles away in the woods of Montana at the hands of serial killer Joseph Edward Duncan. After a harrowing forty-eight day ordeal, Shasta was rescued. In many ways, her survival story was only beginning.

It is my absolute pleasure to add my own personal emotional tone as I read to you my story of redemption from trauma and addiction. "At the tender age of six, Mark Turnipseed received what he felt was a clear and devastating message: It isn't okay to like other boys, and if you do, you're bound for Hell. His confusion and self-hatred made him determined to become the boy he believed he was supposed to be, but in attempting to live a lie, he descended into a hell of his own making.