I’m sober for over 21 years after struggling with addiction and alcoholism and I thought my life would end—I would never have fun again—if I got sober. I found the opposite to be true and have devoted a large part of my career and life to helping those who are struggling with addiction. I want them to see the hilarious moments in recovery and how much it’s the beginning, and not the end, of life. Books that can do this do more than any one person talking about recovery since they can really start a domino effect and a movement. My company has published nearly a dozen recovery memoirs and I look forward to publishing more.
This book blew my mind when I first read it because I had no idea there could be such a thing as a hilarious novel about addiction. I will never forget this line she has in it about how recovery groups will be comprised of “middle-aged men in sweaters.” It was also the first time I realized that people in recovery outside of the US were just as hilarious as those here. The story is a fun sort of Bridget Jones romp if Bridget loved cocaine and men in leather pants but it’s the voice—self-deprecating, self-aware, and funny AF—that’s always stuck with me.
Here's Rachel Walsh, twenty-seven and the miserable owner of size 8 feet. She has regular congress with Luke Costello, a man who wears his leather trousers tight. And she's fond - some might say too fond - of recreational drugs. Until she finds herself being frogmarched to the Cloisters - Dublin's answer to the Betty Ford Clinic. She's outraged. Surely she's not thin enough to be an addict? Heartsick and Luke-sick, she seeks redemption in the shape of Chris, a man with a past. A man who might be more trouble than he's worth.
This gave me a story that I had no personal experience with—walking around as a successful person during the day (in her case, a lawyer) while managing a secret life of addiction. It’s great storytelling combined with insightful commentary on addiction and I believe was responsible for opening many people to the idea of being high-functioning while also struggling with addiction.
"Lisa Smith gives us a darkly comic, honest, and completely relatable inside look at high-functioning addiction in the world of corporate law-a sort of 'Sex and the Psych Ward.' It's inspiring, informative, and impossible to put down."
--Jennifer Belle, best-selling author of High Maintenance and The Seven Year Bitch
"Whether she's telling the town car driver to turn around so she can ditch showing up for her niece's birth and meet her coke dealer, or staging her own semi-intervention, Smith takes us into the mind of someone who's completely in control while being radically out of control. This girl may…
This is the Holy Grail of addiction memoirs, as far as I’m concerned. It came out years before memoirs about addiction became a “thing” and remains the darkest and funniest addiction memoir in existence. I read it years before I was able to face my own issues with addiction and it did the perfect job of entertaining me so that I didn’t even consciously realize it was teaching me lessons that would save my life.
Jerry Stahl's seminal memoir of drug addiction and a career in Hollywood, Permanent Midnight is a classic along the lines of Hubert Selby, Jr.'s Last Exit to Brooklyn. Illuminating the self-loathing and self-destruction of an addict's inner life, Permanent Midnight follows Stahl through the dregs of addiction and into sobriety. In 1998, Ben Stiller, Owen Wilson, and Maria Bello starred in a film version of Permanent Midnight to much acclaim. Nic Sheff, author of Tweak, writes the introduction to this edition.
While technically not a book about addiction, Money is actually 100% a book about addiction. It’s also my favorite book ever written—one I re-read often. There’s simply no living writer with a skill for language like Martin Amis. I mean lines like “Unless I specifically inform you otherwise, I am always smoking a cigarette”? Genius. Saying his apartment smells like “batch” (for bachelor)? Referring to his teeth problems as a pain on his Upper East Side, while walking around Manhattan? I could go on forever about how much I love this novel; what other novelist would include a character named Martin Amis who annoys the protagonist—and also, a bit, the reader? The lead character—John Self—bottoms out not just on addiction but also on life and the fact that the humor keeps you laughing throughout combined with the utter darkness of the story makes it one of the best books in existence.
One of Time's 100 best novels in the English language-by the acclaimed author of Lionel Asbo: State of England and London Fields
Part of Martin Amis's "London Trilogy," along with the novel London Fields and The Information, Money was hailed as "a sprawling, fierce, vulgar display" (The New Republic) and "exhilarating, skillful, savvy" (The Times Literary Supplement) when it made its first appearance in the mid-1980s. Amis's shocking, funny, and on-target portraits of life in the fast lane form a bold and frightening portrait of Ronald Reagan's America and Margaret Thatcher's England.
Veronica is one of the original voices out there talking about addiction and recovery—and it shows in this book. While the book shares personal experience, it also calls on her years as a psychotherapist and recovery coach. And yet, unlike most addiction and recovery books out there, it references many of the other leaders in the recovery movement—everyone from Gabor Mate to movies that touch on recovery.
"No thanks-I'm not drinking tonight." In a culture that equates alcohol with enjoyment and social acceptance, making this simple statement can make us feel like we're depriving or even punishing ourselves. "When we realize we can no longer drink safely, it can feel like the only choices are to spiral out of control or embrace a joyless life," says sobriety expert Veronica Valli. "But it's not true! Sobriety can be a path filled with fun, excitement, belonging, relaxation, and romance."
Soberful offers a practical and straightforward program on how we can get sober and stay sober by increasing our self-worth,…
A roman a clef about a wild and crazy party girl who gets a job writing a column about her wild and crazy party life right after going to rehab and getting sober. Funny and real, it’s the book credited with starting the “Quit Lit” movement. Now in development as a major motion picture, the New York Postdeclared when it was first released in 2007 that it “invented a new sub-genre: chick lit with a message.”
I come by my interest in history and the years before, during, and after the Second World War honestly. For one thing, both my father and my father-in-law served as pilots in the war, my father a P-38 pilot in North Africa and my father-in-law a B-17 bomber pilot in England. Their histories connect me with a period I think we can still almost reach with our fingertips and one that has had a momentous impact on our lives today. I have taken that interest and passion to discover and write true life stories of the war—focusing on the untold and unheard stories often of the “Average Joe.”
October 24, 1944, is not a day of national remembrance. Yet, more Americans serving in World War II perished on that day than on any other single day of the war.
The narrative of No Average Day proceeds hour by hour and incident by incident while focusing its attention on ordinary individuals—clerks, radio operators, cooks, sailors, machinist mates, riflemen, and pilots and their air crews. All were men who chose to serve their country and soon found themselves in a terrifying and otherworldly place.
No Average Day reveals the vastness of the war as it reaches past the beaches in…
October 24, 1944, is not a day of national remembrance. Yet, more Americans serving in World War II perished on that day than on December 7, 1941, when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, or on June 6, 1944, when the Allies stormed the beaches of Normandy, or on any other single day of the war. In its telling of the events of October 24, No Average Day proceeds hour by hour and incident by incident. The book begins with Army Private First-Class Paul Miller's pre-dawn demise in the Sendai #6B Japanese prisoner of war camp. It concludes with the death…
