Luckily, there’s a whole genre of books that prove you are not the only one who has battled addiction. This is an approachable recipe book using everyday healthy ingredients to make delicious alcohol-free drinks for every occasion. Developed by registered dietitians, this book takes a new twist on classic cocktails. You’ll also find options for dessert drinks, frozen drinks, and holiday drinks without relying on sugar for flavor.
Blackout: Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget
Ever the feminist, she found that women and other oppressed people don’t need the tenets of Alcoholics Anonymous, but a deeper understanding of their own identities. Quit Like a Woman is her informative and relatable guidebook to breaking an addiction to alcohol. She started sneaking sips from her parents’ wine glasses as a kid, and went through adolescence drinking more and more. By the time she was an adult in a big city, all she did was drink. Blackout is her poignant story of alcoholism and those many missing hours that disappeared when she had just enough to drink to wipe out her memory.
- The pleasures we expect from the form range from the edifying (empathy, inspiration) to the unseemly (voyeurism, vicarious transgression) to mention just a few.
- During the most unsettling time of my life, I craved all the messy, tragic, complex, wonderful stories that could show me what was on the other side.
- Ann Dowsett Johnston combines in-depth research and her own story of recovery in this important book about the relationship between women and alcohol.
- But Ditlevsen’s single conventional moment also, I think, underlines her originality.
“The Sober Lush: A Hedonist’s Guide to Living a Decadent, Adventurous, Soulful Life–Alcohol Free”
Customers find the book exceptionally honest, without pretense. Blackout shows how you can grow into the person you want to be and leave alcohol in the past—no matter where you are now. It’s a witty, straightforward tale of the shenanigans, shame, and confusion that occurs in the morning-afters. Sarah also explores how alcohol affected her relationships with her friends, family, and even her cat. Discover additional details about the events, people, and places in your book, with Wikipedia integration. View high quality images that let you zoom in alcohol memoirs to take a closer look.
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- As a wildly famous celebrity, he struggled with more than just alcohol.
- If you’re looking to break free of the social pressure of cocktails and bar hopping, this is the book for you.
- Well, of course I tried my best to steal from them whatever I could.
- Identifying with accomplished writers whose creativity seemed to thrive in a haze of intoxication, she fell further into the depths of alcoholism before hitting rock bottom.
Opinions are mixed on the storytelling, with some finding it raw and funny, while others say they were bored after the first two chapters. Clegg’s manic spiral is related in a relentless present tense, in a prose that’s sparse and detached—and lit up by little flares of lyricism to conjure each hit. Horrified and enthralled, we see the world through Clegg’s increasingly despairing gaze—and a part of us longs as much as he does for another fix to provide some relief from the horror. Although both are worth reading, it’s the first I find myself returning to, marvelling at its ability to conjure the insanity of addiction from inside its diabolical reality. Customers find the writing quality brilliant, articulate, and readable. They describe the book as a fantastic page-turner and nourishing read.
Jamison is concerned from the outset that her book will not escape “the tedious architecture and tawdry self-congratulation of a redemption story”—that it will, in short, be boring. She needn’t have worried; such is her command of metaphor and assonance that she could rivet a reader with a treatise on toast. We perhaps have no writer better on the subject of psychic suffering and its consolations. Starting off on the night of her last drink, Stumbling Home quickly reveals the author’s love-hate relationship with the legal drug. Customers find the book deeply insightful, eye-opening, and life-changing.
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- This ethical dimension (or an aesthetic impurity) is a distinctive aspect of addiction memoir as a literary form.
- His teachings, spiritual principles, and a lot of work helped me achieve 32 years in recovery.
- Customers find the book insightful, informative, and entertaining.
- Readers praise the author as honest, believable, and genuine.
Reviews with images
This is the kind of myopic or unreliable narrator we encounter frequently in novels – conspicuously naïve or self-delusive, and unchaperoned by a consolingly wise authorial presence—but almost never in memoir. Told in the present tense (another rarity in autobiography), the result is a stunningly immersive and intimate story. We seem to experience Ditlevsen’s life with her, moment by vivid moment.
Leslie Jamison’s “The Recovering” and the Stories We Tell About Drinking
Meanwhile successful writing always surprises and challenges us, perhaps by defying the conventions of the form to which it belongs or simply by refreshing them in some way. Only a handful of the addiction memoirs of recent decades are also, in my view, singular works of art. When she was drunk, writer and editor Hepola was a creative force.
Readers praise the writing quality as well-written, elegant, and solid. In addition, they say the book is insightful, informative, and enlightening. Not about her sobriety—about how hard-won it was, how necessary to her survival as both a writer and a woman—but about the value of a story that isn’t unique at all.