Top 10 books about recovery

When we hear the word “recovery”, especially alongside “literature”, we tend to think of books on alcoholism or drug addiction. But humans recover from all manner of trials and they do so in ways that defy the traditional arc of addiction lit – a hero’s journey through denial to rock bottom and back up again.

In those stories, the decision to get better often arrives like a bolt of lightning, but this is rarely the case. My own recovery from codependency and alcoholism, which I write about in my memoir Good Morning, Destroyer of Men’s Souls, has felt elusive, circuitous, and sometimes rather boring. To me, recovery is a long and always-occurring process. Since I don’t love the word “journey”, I prefer to think of it as a kind of endurance art, the term performance artists give to work that requires long periods of hardship, solitude or pain.

In my own healing, I have even questioned the use of the word “recovery” in this context at all, since it implies a retrieval of something lost. But I’m not sure I ever had what I needed to begin with. Some new habits and practices have had to be built from the ground up. Perhaps for this reason, I am drawn to less formulaic narratives, to books that reveal how stuttering and arduous our paths through hardship often are, how painstaking and honest we must be to get healthier, how tender and how tenuous our newfound peace can be.

1. In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado
A relationship is, among other things, a shared story – or sometimes, a mutually held delusion. In this haunting, sometimes hallucinatory memoir, Machado inventively recounts the tale of her abusive relationship with a volatile aspiring writer, who viciously warns her not to write about the relationship, among other things. The book serves as a powerful corrective to the fallacy that queer relationships are by nature egalitarian. And the reader roots for Machado fiercely as she finds her way out.

2. Mayhem by Sigrid Rausing
I searched for years for literary treatments of life alongside alcoholism and addiction, so I was grateful to find Rausing’s atmospheric, melancholic 2017 memoir about her brother’s struggle with heroin and cocaine, the challenge and heartache of becoming a temporary guardian to his four children, and her sister-in-law’s death from drugs. Rausing, the editor of Granta and heiress to a Swedish beverage-packaging fortune, writes beautifully of the idyllic seaside summers of her 1970s childhood and the heavy bonds of family. She does not recover in any straightforward way from worry, obsession, or attempts to control her brother or – obviously – the narrative, but she makes her way towards a kind of serenity.

3. The Outrun by Amy Liptrot
This recovery story captures the anguish and doubt that accompany the choice to quit drinking. The book, set mostly in the author’s native Orkney (to which she returns after hard-drinking years in London) also explores the legacies of family and geography, and includes exquisite writing on the wildness as well as the rhythms and cycles of natural life in a remote locale.

4. Joy Enough by Sarah McColl
Diagnosis, illness and death are typically the three acts in a grief memoir, and though this one does follow the decline of the author’s late mother, Allison, it reads like a long love letter. The reader is invited to witness the delights and struggles of a life fully lived, and to absorb Allison’s idiosyncratic lessons, most revolving around seeking pleasure and feeling. When she dies, McColl finds the fruits of that motherlove everywhere in bloom. “When the sun shone, I tilted my face up to it and closed my eyes,” she writes. “God was not everywhere, but she was.”

5. The Sober Lush by Jardine Libaire and Amanda Eyre Ward
Must I retire all my old indulgences? we think as we’re getting sober, in spite of the fact that by the time we quit drinking, we’re not typically leading very glamorous lives. This new book argues that a life without alcohol can still be glittering and unpredictable, decadent, messy and thrilling, that it is still possible to be “dirty and wild”, to “trip out on life” and to fall in love without booze as fuel. The reminder that sober life need not be ascetic or dull is welcome to seasoned veterans of recovery and newcomers alike, but I think the blueprint here for an abundant life of pleasure could be useful for anyone.

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6. Beloved by Toni Morrison
Sethe is haunted, literally and figuratively, by the daughter she killed while escaping slavery in this devastating Pulitzer Prize-winning classic. The novel is not related to recovery in any traditional sense, but it’s one of the most powerful stories I’ve ever read about the cost of survival, the ways that the past lives on in the present, and the dark deals we strike to get right with our conscience. This is a book about the abject horror and howling trauma of slavery, but it’s also about how we metabolise the nightmares of our lives before.

7. Blackout: Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget by Sarah Hepola
Blackouts are a special horror and humiliation, and not all drinkers experience them. In this memoir, Hepola shares the science of blackouts and traces her own drinking life, focusing on the blank spaces where memories should be – piecing together nights out, near misses, bad decisions and also the kindnesses of strangers. Hepola’s tone is often funny and loose but she writes with a journalist’s precision and the book reads almost like a thriller. After one particularly harrowing experience in a hotel, Hepola gets sober and the reader realises she has been holding her breath for a couple hundred pages.

8. Ordinary Girls by Jaquira Díaz
A tale of survival more than recovery, Díaz’s memoir is about unlearning the powerful ideas we are raised with – in this case, that violence and chaos are normal. Díaz writes of her childhood in a public housing project in Puerto Rico and, later, Miami Beach, and an adolescence marked by “juvenile delinquency” and marred by violence, addiction, mental illness, and abuse. Díaz’s resilience – and success – in the face of mighty obstacles registers as part luck, part strength, and part audacity.

9. Know My Name by Chanel Miller
This should be compulsory reading in every high school. Miller was long known as Emily Doe, the anonymous victim of a sexual assault at Stanford University and the voice behind a viral victim impact statement that changed the terms of debate around consent, violence and rape. With this book she breaks her anonymity, describing the jarring moment of waking into trauma and victimhood, and the onerous emotional and legal battle that followed. Miller’s candour and her language are breathtaking. This book shows better than any I’ve read the effects of sexual assault and the possibility of forging a new freedom in its aftermath.

10. Animals by Emma Jane Unsworth
Some of the closest friendships are forged in the crucible of hard partying. This lyrical, dark, biting novel is about one of those friendships, between Tyler and Laura, roommates and codependent hot messes. They wonder throughout whether they’re overdoing it … and order another round anyway. When the cycle of druggy nights and hardcore hangovers starts getting to Laura, their bond must be reevaluated.

• Good Morning, Destroyer of Men’s Souls by Nina Renata Aron is published by Serpent’s Tail. To order a copy, go to guardianbookshop.com.