Recovery Memoirs

With a rare mix of honesty, humor, and compassion, comedian and movie star Russell Brand mines his own wild story and shares the advice and wisdom he has gained through his 14 years of recovery. Brand speaks to those suffering along the full spectrum of addiction - from drugs, alcohol, caffeine, and sugar addictions to addictions to work, stress, bad relationships, digital media, and fame. Brand understands that addiction can take many shapes and sizes and how the process of staying clean, sane, and unhooked is a daily activity.

With heart-racing urgency and unflinching honesty, Jenkins takes you inside the grips of addiction and the desperate decisions it breeds. She is a born storyteller who lived an incredible story, from blackmail by an ex-boyfriend to a soul-shattering deal with a drug dealer, and her telling brims with suspense and unexpected wit. But the true surprise is her path to recovery. Tiffany breaks through the stigma and silence to offer hope and inspiration to anyone battling the disease - whether it’s a loved one or themselves.

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.

Steve-O is best known for his wildly dangerous, foolish, painful, embarrassing, and sometimes death-defying stunts. At age 48, however, he faces his greatest challenge yet: getting older. A Hard Kick in the Nuts: What I’ve Learned from a Lifetime of Terrible Decisions is a captivating exploration of life and how to live it by an individual who has already lived way more than a lifetime’s worth of extreme experiences. Steve-O grapples with the right balance between maturity and staying true to yourself, avoiding selfishness, and finding the right partner for life.

Fifteen million Americans a year are plagued with alcoholism. Five million of them are women. Many of them, like Caroline Knapp, started in their early teens and began to use alcohol as "liquid armor", a way to protect themselves against the difficult realities of life. In this extraordinarily candid and revealing memoir, Knapp offers important insights not only about alcoholism, but about life itself and how we learn to cope with it.

The two-time Emmy Award-winning actress has written her first book, a surprisingly raw and triumphant memoir that is outrageous, moving, sweet, tragic, and heartbreakingly honest. Guts is a true triumph - a memoir that manages to be as frank and revealing as Augusten Burroughs, yet as hilarious and witty as David Sedaris.

In 2015, Barbara Lipska - a leading expert on the neuroscience of mental illness - was diagnosed with melanoma that had spread to her brain. Within months, her frontal lobe, the seat of cognition, began shutting down. She descended into madness, exhibiting dementia- and schizophrenia-like symptoms that terrified her family and coworkers. But miraculously, the immunotherapy her doctors had prescribed worked quickly. Just eight weeks after her nightmare began, Lipska returned to normal. With one difference: she remembered her brush with madness with exquisite clarity.

In his first book, author Jason Smith explores the depravity and desperation required to maintain an opiate addiction so fierce, he finds himself jumping continents to avoid jail time and learns the hard way that some demons cannot be outrun. While teaching in Europe, he meets a prostitute who secures drugs for him at the dangerous price of helping out the Russian Mafia; in China he gets his Percocet and Xanax fixes but terrifies a crowd of children and parents at his job in the process.

"This book will blow your mind! The amount of research and insight puts it in a class of its own. Couldn’t put it down. So authentic and raw, loved it!" - Amazon reviewer I'm writing these books because I'm tired of watching my friends die. Everything that we have done in America to deal with the opioid epidemic has made us drastically worse, and people don't seem to realize it. Irresponsible, profit-mongering pharmaceutical companies created millions of addicts like me. By becoming acquainted with the power and peace that a pocketful of oxy can bring an anxious teenager, readers will ...

No Woman Should Have To Experience Cancer Alone . . . TOUGH: Women Who Survived Cancer is the ultimate recovery companion for women facing any type of cancer. This book is for newly-diagnosed women, survivors, thrivers, & the people who love them. It makes a great gift! Working from interviews with 37 women with a variety of cancer types, Iliev-Piselli, a survivor herself, has created honest and triumphant essays that will lift readers up like a conversation with good friends (if all your friends had survived cancer!). During life's most difficult moments, these women found joy in creative ...

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.

Pennies from Heaven for Kevin is a remarkable story of a man whose life spiraled out of control after the death of his two-year-old son, Kyle. Blaming himself and ridden with pain and guilt, Kevin went on a downward path spending a total of seven years locked up in nineteen different jails and prisons, along with numerous rehabilitation centers over twenty years for alcohol and drug addiction. At one treatment facility, Kevin found a penny on his nightstand. The year of the penny was the year Kyle was born. Money was not allowed at the facility and, in that moment, the spirit of Kyle filled...

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.

On a summer night in 1984, 19-year-old UC Berkeley sophomore Karen Thomas leaves her uniformed patrol job at the University of California Police Department and walks home alone in darkness. At the threshold of her apartment a man assaults her at knife point. After a soul chilling struggle she manages to escape and call 911. Police catch her assailant, she identifies him, and he is arrested. Fast forward 2014, 30 years after her assault. Why does the body remember what the mind tries so desperately to forget?

Marcia, a young woman nearing twenty, is on her way to jail. She has been busted, again, this time for using heroin. As she passes buildings and bus stops that remind her of her childhood, she tries to recall what incidents led her to her dilemma. With barely a goodbye, her mother leaves her at the steps of the jail. Terrified, she is processed and placed in a new world—cell 6, bed 8. Unexpected Angels is a true account of a young woman, once an academic superstar, who is thrown into jail to await trial on a narcotics charge. At nineteen, she's already a three time loser. She must dig ...

Brooke Siem was among the first generation of minors to be prescribed antidepressants. Initially diagnosed and treated in the wake of her father’s sudden death, this psychiatric intervention sent a message that something was pathologically wrong with her and that the only “fix” was medication. As a teenager, she stepped into the hazy world of antidepressants just at the time when she was forming the foundation of her identity. For the following fifteen years, every situation she faced was seen through the lens of brokenness.

Jude Hassan was an ordinary, all-American kid. He had two amazing parents who gave him everything, especially a loving home. At fourteen, Jude's family moved from their home in the city to a beautiful suburban town on the outskirts of St. Louis. Suddenly, Jude was faced with being the new kid for the first time in his young life. He struggled to find his way in his new surroundings but continued to make straight A’s and excel in sports. When a fellow student approached him about attending a party, he was apprehensive but eager to experience his first social gathering. Unfortunately, that ...

A best seller in its native Canada, Drunk Mom is a gripping, brutally honest memoir of motherhood in the shadow of alcoholism. Three years after giving up drinking, Jowita Bydlowska found herself throwing back a glass of champagne like it was ginger ale. It was a special occasion: a party celebrating the birth of her first child. It also marked Bydlowska's immediate, full-blown return to crippling alcoholism.

After twenty-four years of daily drinking, Ed Wyrick hit his bottom and tossed out his last bottle of vodka. As a high school counselor in a rural county in the middle of the Bible belt, he feared for his job if he revealed his addiction, so he tried detoxing on his own. When he gave up and surrendered to a treatment center, doctors said he was lucky to have survived. Three months later, he quit smoking cigarettes. Eighteen months after that, he’d lost seventy pounds and was running five miles a day. More than twelve years have passed, and he remains free of alcohol, cigarettes, fat, and ...

Piecing Together the Mind of an Addict Drug abuse and addiction don't start with a drug. They don't begin with that first use, or first high; and they certainly don't manifest in the ensuing darkness of drug dependence and depression. Addiction and alcoholism, true addiction and alcoholism, begin well before we ever indulge. It is the mind before matter, a unique clockwork of chemicals and wirings, of thoughts and feelings that bring us to truth: We, the drug addict, are not like the others Mental illness can be seen the world over, in numerous forms and numerous ways. For some of us, the ...