Addiction Memoirs

Mike Doughty's Book of Drugs is a good one. you kinda end up really disliking him towards the end but I suppose that's true of a lot of these

Nico Walker's Cherry is ostensibly a novel, but I think it's pretty autobiographical.

xp
that's not surprising, M. Doughty's episode of WTF definitely made me dislike him strongly as a person.

Those Drinking Days by Donald Newlove

Indirectly, A Scanner Darkly, PK Dick.

The excerpts of xpost Straight Life that I've come across, also Art's "interview"/monologue in a Grover Lewis collection: scary, scarry af and def beyond what calstars finds appealing---but/and I may get around to reading all of SL, maybe---he became a great artist despite it all, so hopefully some of that comes across in the book as well.

The late David Carr's memoir has always sounded promising--wiki:

In his 2008 memoir, The Night of the Gun, Carr detailed his experiences with cocaine addiction and included interviews with people from his past, tackling his memoir as if he were reporting on himself.

Olivia Laing's *To Echo Spring* mostly fits the bill, as does Amy Liptrot's *The Outrun*. The former is about the relationship between drink and writing; the latter is probably as much a nature healing book but it's booze Liptrot is running from.

Oh, I like Olivia Laing, that sounds interesting.

Arre teh 2 memoirs by Violet leduc drug related it's been a few decades since I read them so I'm not remembering fully. I remember them being pretty good anyway.

I was reading the Nikki Sixx Heroin Diaries at one point during the year but it must have disappeared into the pile of books on the bed.

Jerry Stahl - Permanent Midnight

How harrowing is The Copenhagen Trilogy?

just finished this yesterday. first 2 parts 'childhood' and 'youth' not really harrowing at all, just really beautifully written and clear eyed and completely lacking in any unearned sentimentality. third part 'dependency' where the addiction starts is p tough but still remains remarkably clear eyed especially wrt her relationship with her kids.

Speed and Kentucky Ham by William Burroughs Jr

Something that kind of is and kind of isn't an addiction memoir but is very good regardless: Mark Lanegan's Sing Backwards and Weep, which I happened to be listening to early last year right around the time he passed.

Gabor Maté’s In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts was kind of an addiction memoir from the other side of the desk: outside looking in. A doctor on skid row. I got a lot of value from it, though he completely falls down on theory (o hey guess what everything that’s wrong in the world is because trauma) — the human-narrative element of the book (most of it) was really well done, I thought.

Olivia Laing's *To Echo Spring* mostly fits the bill, as does Amy Liptrot's *The Outrun*. The former is about the relationship between drink and writing; the latter is probably as much a nature healing book but it's booze Liptrot is running from.

Glad to hear it calstars. It's probably against the spirit of the thread (and the book, tbf) but a boozy road trip following some of her routes would be great.

Selma Blair’s memoir was really good — it’s not specific to addiction necessarily but as an unvarnished look at what alcoholism really looks like as a lifelong issue, I was really impressed & would recommend

It’s called MEAN BABY

Am I the only mean-spirited person who clicks on this thread hoping someone will innocuously recommend A Million Little Pieces?

I hope so — that impulse certainly is mean-spirited I’ll give you that. Idgi

Not an addiction memoir, but the chapter on (or somewhat on) the genre in Maggie Nelson’s On Freedom is pretty interesting.

xp yikes, well I will keep such impulses to myself in future

I suppose I feel uneasy with the genre per se because I’ve never had a life-overturning addiction so it feels vicarious to me, that book pretty much leveraged that sentiment

I'm pretty sure lots of people read that book before the truth came out because they did have experience of addiction

I worked for David Carr some years ago. Much missed.

Yeah, I didn't know him, but miss his radio comments, esp. when as an On The Media contributor. Oh one I forgot is Mary Karr's Lit. She starts by masterfully interpolating elements her previous two memoirs, building towards the era when she seemed most overtly into the work-drink cycle, self-medicating to deal with depressive tendencies tied in with her weird-ass parents (very warm and well-meaning in their preoccupied ways, but father was a stone barstool alkie and Mom was seemingly capricious like the weather/secretly motivated to begin with, turned out). Also her teen vagabond years out West before becoming Poet Laureate of Minneapolis and then a competent writer, according to her---the better the writing, also actually holding down a fulfilling job and having an excellent husband and baby, the worse the drinking.
Stuff about rehab wow, but eventually things are better. Although, "I think we can see who was the asshole in the marriage." She doesn't mean him.
(Her The Art of Memoir, based on her teaching as well as writing experience, is also a pretty awesome read (typically, she doesn't spare herself for having swallowed doubts about, and even recommending, a Holocaust memoir that turned out to be fraud)

Think exact quote was more like, "It's clear who the asshole in the marriage was."