100 books like Loving Someone in Recovery

What’s a book against language policing and cancel culture doing on a list about post-addiction marriage? Simple: the self-obsessed, oft-offended nonsense permeating universities exemplifies what married couples in recovery must roundly reject. 

The book’s co-authors – a social psychologist and a free speech activist – profess three Great Untruths adversely affecting Generation Z: 

What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker. This prompts us to avoid narratives challenging our preconceived notions or personal experiences. 

Always trust your feelings. Among other problems, unquestionably trusting our feelings leads to taking offense when none is intended.

Life is a battle between good and evil people. This leads to a blame-first mentality that assumes the worst about others. 

They may as well have been speaking to married couples attempting to stay together post-recovery.

You can’t stay married if you’re dead. Don’t die. Read this book. 

There’s a reason TIME Magazine included the central text of the world’s most prolific recovery organization on its list of Best 100 Nonfiction Books of All Time: the book that gave AA its name likely has saved more lives than any other singular narrative in the past century.

AA not really for you? Reading Alcoholics Anonymous does not mean joining Alcoholics Anonymous. The themes co-authors Bill Wilson and Dr. Bob Smith discuss – and the Twelve Steps of Recovery in particular – have near-universal relevance to anyone attempting to break the grip of alcohol or drugs.

More than eight decades after its publication, the book offers timeless truths that captivate addicts via ironclad identification. 

That two of my “best books” involve the 12 Steps of Recovery is no accident. They are a prescription to personal progress that can be parlayed into marital wellness. 

While Alcoholics Anonymous is the most influential recovery book ever written, the secondary text of the adjacent yet unaffiliated Narcotics Anonymous may be the most impactful. 
It Works, How & Why lays out the organization’s 12 Steps – which mirror those devised by its predecessor, Alcoholics Anonymous – in a deeper, more descriptive fashion than perhaps any other tome (it also uses more modern, accessible language, given its 1993 publication). With matter-of-fact language and easy-to-grasp metaphors, the text fleshes out what the 12 Steps are, what they aren’t, and why they are so vital to longstanding recovery from addiction.

More and more of our interactions occur via social media. This does more than poison our minds; it poisons our relationships, including our most intimate one: life partner. 

There are established downsides to social media, including its addictive nature and oxymoronic means of fomenting alienation. It promotes comparison-driven inferiority complexes, and allows racists and bigots to hide behind pseudonyms. 

But for marriages, social media’s most worrisome issue is its promotion of phoniness. Cyber platforms prompt people to portray themselves in a faux-optimized light – happier, wealthier, and more moral than they really are. They also promote groupthink and reticence driven by fear of backlash. 

A marriage in recovery requires two honest, unabashed partners. Two people trying to heal must minimize the festering wounds inherent in social media.

I remember when I first saw this title, I wished I had thought of it myself. Though mine may have been, Girl Walks Into a Bar and Stays Way Too Long. Another memoir by a woman who excelled professionally, as she hid her alcohol and coke addictions from herself and others, until it got so bad she couldn’t hide it anymore. 

I sat on a twin bed in rehab, turned to the back of the book, one of the personal stories published in the book, and felt like the narrator came out of the book, sat across from me, and told me her story.

Bill W. and Dr. Bob started a miracle fellowship that led millions like me to recover. However, every chapter in the book can be anyone’s story. Unfortunately, many people feel that if they don't have a drug or alcohol problem, then they have “no problems.” 

I read every story; I wanted to believe I had a chance if these people had straightened out their lives and were happy about it. In the beginning, the chapters were tough-hitting in defining how we honestly forget humility, gratitude, and simple service that leads to fulfilling lives.

I can read this book over and over again, and I do. 

Joshua Mohr should not be alive. Diagnosed young with a medical condition that could kill him any second, the author does what addicts do: continues grinding his own face in the dirt even as he struggles to keep his life together and stop. In vignettes of astonishing violence and poetry, Mohr careens from unspeakable despair to moments of fearless, weirdly laugh-out-loud intensity and beauty—sometimes in the same sentence. All that, and his portrait of San Francisco makes you want to show up, find a dive and bang your head off the floor until you’re healed. Mohr writes with everything on the line. Almost like he’s trying to save his own life as much as yours.

Set at the height of the Trump era, this very New York City novel follows its title character, a lesbian former cop turned heroin addict who’s now fresh out of rehab and, in her new job as a private investigator, stumbles onto a murder she becomes determined to solve.

Maggie is a total mess—barely able to navigate a cell phone or the Internet, holding on for dear life at her Narcotics Anonymous meetings, stalking her ex outside her window in the pouring rain, and desperate to have her daughter, whom she was raising with her ex, back in her life.

The novel’s promise of a tight murder mystery kind of unravels, but it doesn’t even matter because Maggie’s fumbling, stumbling effort to put her life back together in a disconcertingly sleek new version of downtown Manhattan is a voyeuristic joy to follow.

I wanted to understand other cultures and this book was a glimpse into Indian ways. I also love a good tale about the writing process. This book made me root for the Indian girl and see the world from a different point of view.

One book can change the world, I felt the author was trying to do so with this insight into her culture. A book I might re-read it was so sweet and magical. A romance that kept me on my toes for sure. Discovery, forgiveness, and a HEA that had me in the feels.

One of the qualities of mystery fiction that continues to draw me to the genre is the complex interplay between past and present. Nava’s 8th Rios novel utilizes separate narrative lines that resonate and then, like a parallel perspective drawing, converge in a powerful emotional twist. The first line is the story of Bill Ryan, a young gay man who, after being cast out of his home in Illinois, flees to 1970s San Francisco to discover himself and the gay community. The second line is Rios’s recovery from alcoholism and his investigation of Ryan’s suspicious death during the beginning of the AIDS epidemic. Ryan and Rios serve as foils: Ryan is a man losing the war with his self-loathing. Rios, in contrast, is winning his war.