Recovery Memoirs

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.

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.

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.

In this deeply moving and lyrical memoir, Hoppe shares an intimate, courageous account of what it means to truly interrupt cycles of harm. For fans of The Recovering by Leslie Jamison, Somebody’s Daughter by Ashley C. Ford, and Heavy by Kiese Laymon. During the first year of quarantine, drug overdoses spiked, the highest ever recorded. And Hoppe’s cousin was one of them. “I never learned the true history of substance use disorder in my family,” Hoppe writes. “People just disappeared.” At the time of her cousin’s death, she’d been in recovery for nearly four years, but she hadn’t told anyone.

Alan Kaufman recounts with unvarnished honesty the story of the alcoholism that took him to the brink of death, the post-traumatic stress disorder that drove him to the edge of madness, and the love that brought him back. Son of a French Holocaust survivor, Kaufman was a drinker so mauled by his indulgences that it is a marvel he hung on long enough to get into recovery.

Victoria Vanstone grew up in 1980s England in a happy home full of laughter, booze and a disturbing amount of fancy-dress parties. From her youthful days downing cheap wine at the local park to dodging disastrous relationships, her reliable mate alcohol was never far from reach. Eventually, Victoria found herself with a husband and a child on the way. After sobering up for her first pregnancy, becoming a boring, bottom-wiping, cleaning machine meant she soon returned to her binge-drinking ways, and had to grapple anew with the habits and beliefs that had gone unchecked since childhood.

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.

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She had big plans of becoming a country music star, but her life went in a different direction than her dreams. She developed an eating disorder early in life to gain a sense of control in her strict upbringing. As she continued to struggle with body image and her obsession with being perfect her entire adult life, she was also met with other difficult situations. Her husband and father of her two eldest daughters, Dallas and Demi, had his own troubles that effected the entire family. She coped with alcohol and pills, forming a long-lasting addiction.

A music prodigy, head of her class, and well-liked in school, Emily Paulson decided early that embellishment paved the road to success. As she grew up, she figured out how to make the picture look even better - with a successful husband, five beautiful children, and all the required accompanying accoutrements. Then along came social media, where those pictures of the perfect life grew her a following of women who believed that everything about Emily was #blessed #inspo. But behind the filtered façade was a reality filled with trauma, addiction, and dysfunctional behavior.

At the age of 27, married, living in New York, and working in book design, Mary Cregan gives birth to her first child, a daughter she names Anna. But it’s apparent that something is terribly wrong, and two days later, Anna dies - plunging Cregan into suicidal despair. Decades later, sustained by her work, a second marriage, and a son, Cregan reflects on this pivotal experience and attempts to make sense of it. She weaves together literature and research with details from her own ordeal - and the still visible scar of her suicide attempt....

In 1984, John Hanrahan was featured in Interview magazine's iconic Olympic Issue as one of America's top athletes vying for a spot on the US Olympic Team. He had come within a point of defeating the mighty Soviet world medalist and had defeated other prominent world competitors. He was within reach of a lifetime dream, but then abandoned the Final Trials. He was nowhere to be found. He hadn't exactly fallen off the face of the earth, but he'd become a full-blown drug addict, unable to face his competition, and unwilling to confront the truth of his situation.

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.

No Addict Left Behind is Pagano’s unflinching personal account of battling addiction. When he was discharged from the military, he was actually left on the side of a highway. ER doctors and nurses begrudged reviving him from an overdose. Society showered him with stigma and shame. Still, some people never gave up on him. And he never gave up on himself.

What do you do when your world ends? At 28 years old, Krista Schlyer sold almost everything she owned and packed the rest of it in a station wagon bound for the American wild. Her two best friends joined her - one a grumpy, grieving introvert, the other a feisty dog - and together they sought out every national park, historic site, forest, and wilderness they could get to before their money ran out or their minds gave in.

The story of a young girl's entrapment in gambling addiction. The true advert for problem gambling and how it controlled her every movement, her every thought and almost took her life. How the guilt and shame that go hand-in-hand with addiction stopped her from reaching out for help for eight years as she didn't feel it was okay for a young female to be a problem gambler. How she believed it was a male dominated problem, and how eventually, she did find the tools that enabled her to become free of her addiction.

"It's cancer." Dr Philippa Kaye was 39 years old when she heard those dreaded words. The diagnosis of bowel cancer would change her life and mean crossing the divide from being a doctor to being a patient. She soon discovered that her years of training and experience had not prepared her for the realities of actually living with cancer. Doctors Get Cancer Too tells Dr Kaye's moving story of being on both sides of the desk, and shares the insights she gained not only through the diagnosis and treatment but in surviving and thriving through cancer and beyond.

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.

In the tradition of Blackout and Permanent Midnight, a darkly funny and revealing debut memoir of one woman's 20-year battle with sex, drugs, and alcohol addiction, and what happens when she finally emerges on the other side. Growing up in Beverly Hills, Amy Dresner had it all: a top-notch private-school education, the most expensive summer camps, and even a weekly clothing allowance. But at 24, she started dabbling in meth in San Francisco and unleashed a fiendish addiction monster.

In the nineties, Ryan Dusick and his friends Adam Levine and Jesse Carmichael dreamed about making it big . . . and against all odds, they did. This inside story recounts Maroon 5's founding and their road to becoming Grammy-winning megastars, told through the eyes of former drummer Ryan Dusick. He takes listeners behind the scenes of the band's meteoric rise to success—and the grueling demands that came with it—as well as his personal struggles with anxiety and addiction after his departure from the band.