Books

I have been cramming information into my brain ever since I started working to retrain it out of a life of wine drinking.  I'm quite addicted to recovery memoirs now..

Here I'm going to list out the books I enjoyed or got useful material from.  I'll try write out what it was that spoke to me within the pages.

But first - my books! Since I have gotten sober and unlocked my writing voice I have been fortunate to have two books published. My first memoir - Mrs D Is Going Without - charts the story of how I got sober, how this blog helped and all that was going on outside of the blog. It is here.

My second memoir - Mrs D Is Going Within - is all about next-stage recovery. The work that I needed to do after the work of getting sober was done. It is available for pre-order here.

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Probably the best book for retraining my brain has been Jason Vale's 'Kick The Drink ... Easily!'. I read it really early in my sobriety and it was brilliant.  He's got some great words, I really enjoyed it actually.  He's breaks down life into a series of events and examines exactly what you are getting by adding alcohol into each one (answer: nothing) and talks about how we are brainwashed and conditioned into accepting this drug as a normal part of life from day one.  Really examining what alcohol does to the brain and body, and how the addiction rules you, and how it's not necessary to drink alcohol in order to have fun or enjoy any special occasion.  He talked about being free.  And I like that.  Free!  It's a light word, denotes a lightness of mood and mentality.  A fun, free attitude to being sober.  Not brooding around being tense and glum, dreading events, feeling left out or hard done by.  Free!  Sober but still fun. This book really worked for me.

It was after my 90 days sober that I read Allen Carr's "The Easy Way To Stop Drinking" and by then I had done a lot of the retraining that he is also talking about.  Allen Carr's book felt like he was working much harder to really get inside my brain and make me see alcohol in a completely different way than society has had me see it all my life.  It offers you nothing, it doesn't make anything better, it tastes awful, no drinker is in control of their intake we're all just alcoholics in waiting, you're not giving anything up, you're gaining so much.  He talks about the 'critical point' being when the drinker has two parts of their brain working just as strongly as the other.  One part wants to drink as often and as much as you want, the other part now sees your drinking as a problem.  I got to that point two years before I gave up!  But he says the problem is that both parts when working make you miserable, they work in complete opposition to each other.  So the only solution is to stop drinking but doing it by (what he calls) the 'willpower' method doesn't work as you'll still feel miserable that you're depriving yourself of something desirable.  You have to use his method (which is what I've been doing!) and retrain your brain to realise that you're not giving anything up you are freeing yourself of something you don't want or need.

Both Allen Carr and Jason Vale have the technique that I am working on.  Not living a life feeling deprived and miserable but being free and happy and living just as well and fun realising that the booze doesn't make any event better.

The memoir 'Blackout' by Sarah Hepola is fantastic. First half a rollicking drinking memoir, second half a fantastic recovery memoir. This is one of the main reasons I love this book, there is LOADS about the recovery process... the 'getting sober' bit of the story. Usually so many memoirs are just the car crash drinking/drugging story and then a tiny blip at the end about giving up. This book spends many chapters on what the author went through in redefining her life and her self-image after drinking. She's a fantastic writer, and brutally honest.

After I'd been sober a while I was lucky enough to be sent a review copy of 'Recover to Live' by Christopher Kennedy Lawford. It is bloody marvellous resource and exactly what I was looking for when I first got sober and was frantically looking around for books and information to educate myself about alcohol addiction. This book  is a massive tome bursting at the seams with loads of information from so many clever, educated and knowledgeable recovery experts. If you have a question about anything to do with addiction the answer will be here. It's great. And I really like that it calls itself a 'self-treatment guide' as self-treatment is all I've been doing. Actually that's a big fat lie. Self treatment and the undisputed, undeniable, unbelievable support of a community of online bloggers and readers.  Kudos to you lot too. 'Moments of Clarity' by Christopher Kennedy Lawford is also very good.

Augusten Burroughs brilliant memoir "Dry" I got a lot out of.  Bloody brilliant, really recommended it.  A great story well told.  Ripping through the story of his terrible boozing, being sent into rehab by his employer, going through rehab, home and into recovery, a shocking relapse finishing with recovery mark 2 (which, from looking at his website, has lasted to this day).  Such a great story and heaps of insights into rehab and AA and stuff that I'm not doing giving I'm reshaping my new sober life on my own.  He reveals a counsellor telling him to 'tell on your addict.' Apparently you need to visualise your own internal addict.  Think of it as a separate 'being' that lives inside of you. And it wants nothing more than for you to drink.  It's that whole 'only as dark as your secrets' thing or whatever that saying is.  I also learnt from this book about Pink Clouds, the wonderful feeling in early recovery when it all starts clicking and the using days seem far behind and life is just great great great.  I think the Pink Clouds come and go actually.  Also learnt from this book about warnings of a 9-month point in recovery when lots of people relapse.

"Unwasted: My Lush Sobriety" by Sacha Scoblic,  I practically read the damn thing in one sitting.  Seriously.  Yes this book is as good as everyone says.  She just writes so well and so punchily.  It motors along and probably about 250 times I was thinking - yup, me too.  There was so much that I could relate to; when she described how she drank and why she drank, and what a reliance on alcohol is all about, and what becoming sober is like.  It's very good. 

I speed-read "Smashed: Growing Up A Drunk Girl" by Koren Zailckas. A great read if you want to read all about someone's crazy boozy exploits (and boy did she have some crazy boozy exploits). As seems to often be the way with these memoirs the bit where she got sober was pretty brief (this is always what I want to read about) but she does sum up nicely what she has learned about herself since she took the booze away (a lot, and not all of it peaches and roses). She ends up by railing against the alcohol industry; "which alternates between pandering to women and using us to bait men" and with a great feminist rant about all of the evils alcohol creates for women; "I've had it with a world that has created a generation of women who are emotionally dependent on alcohol". And then there's this: "I'm tired of the world that won't rescue girls until we're long past the point of saving. Too many people rely on outward signs of aggression to indicate their daughters or girlfriends or sisters have problems with alcohol. They wait for fights, or D.U.I charges, or destruction of property, when girls who drink are far less apt to break rules in overt ways. As a gender we are far more likely to turn our own drunken destructiveness inward, to wage private wars against ourselves, to attempt suicide, to be pinned down by fear and depression. So very true, remove the alcohol and we un-pin ourselves and really start to live. 

"Mackenzie Phillips "High on Arrival". That woman is living breathing proof of just how much a human body can take.  It's quite a dark read of drugs, drugs, drugs.  Sad, intense, prolonged drug taking.  Her dad clearly had no moral compass whatsoever so from a young age she was pretty stuffed.  When writing about what she learned at her final rehab, and what hadn't worked with previous rehabs which led to relapses, she said; '..maybe what I'd also gotten wrong was that I couldn't throw away who I was to be clean.  It sounds corny, but what I realised was that I could still be my quirky left-of-centre self without doing drugs.'

'A Piece of Cake' by Cupcake Brown which I finished in tears, and felt all inspired by, is similarly hard-core. You must read this memoir!!! What an amazing story of a woman who drank and drugged from the age of 11 until her late 20's when she turned her life around. I could not put it down. Harrowing yet wonderful, wonderful, wonderful. So life-affirming and powerful - how to turn even the shittiest life around. I do so recommend it.

'All or Nothing' by Jesse Schenker is a rip-snorter of a memoir by a very successful young chef in the States. This is one of those books you read and can't believe that the author made it out of their debauchery alive let alone with enough brain cells to actually write a book! Boy was he big into pills & needles etc. It rips along and is really compelling, he seems very honest and upfront. I would have liked more about the getting-sober process and what it's like to be in recovery and how he works at it but that's always how I feel after reading a lot of these memoirs. Still a great read.

Really enjoyed 'Happy Accidents' by Jane Lynch the coach from Glee.  It was the fact that she lives sober now that got me to her book, I always like reading about other people's paths to sobriety.  She says she was 'struck sober' one day.  I thought that was cool.  Once she decided to stop she just stopped, went to AA for a long time but doesn't any more because she feels she's locked in her non-drinking habit.  I love that her mind seems like a steel trap that she can exercise at will and bend to form the new habits she wants to form.  She's a woman totally in control of her own life.  Cool!

'Unhooked: How to quit anything' by Dr Frederick Woolverton and Susan Shapiro I really really enjoyed.  He's quite a full on addiction therapist who doesn't believe in pussy-footing around people who are seriously hooked on a substance.  He's really blunt and gets really stuck in with practical and direct instructions for people who need help re-learning how to live without their crutch of choice.  He's got these really meaty case-studies (he says they're stories of past patients but I'm sure they're made up) to help illustrate the point he's making in each chapter.  Great reading for someone like me who is addicted to stories of recovery. One of his big recommendations to patients wanting to quit an addiction is to start writing every day.  Write your feelings, your food and drug intake, your plans, dreams, hopes, frustrations, favorite songs.  He says write write write, be honest and write. He says "It is my belief that you cannot successfully treat an addiction without confronting the deep, emotional issues that are giving rise to the substance abuse in the first place.  If you do not dig deeply enough into the roots of the behavior, you will either start using again, or you will switch vices sometimes without even realizing it."

Andrew Weil and others wrote in 'From Chocolate to Morphine'; "We think that addiction is a basic human problem whose roots go very deep.  Most of us have at some point been wounded, no matter what kind of family we grew up in or what kind of society we live in.  We long for a sense of completeness and wholeness and whatever satisfaction we gain from drugs, food, sex, money, and other "sources" of pleasure really comes from inside of us.  That is, we project our power onto external substances and activities, allowing them to make us feel better temporarily.  This is a very strange sort of magic.  We give away our power in exchange for a transient sense of wholeness, then suffer because the object of our craving seems to control us. Addiction can be cured only when we consciously experience this process, reclaim our power, and recognise that our wounds must be healed from within."

Jane Velez-Mitchell wrote 'iWant; My Journey From Addiction and Overconsumption to a Simpler, Honest Life'.  So she's quite intense and sounds like she was an alcoholic, workaholic, co-dependent, super-consumer, altogether a much more intense person than I think I am. But the alcoholic chapter I was very interested in, I always love to read about others battles with the bottle, and she gave up at 40 too!! Anyway in the book, after chronicling her boozy lifestyle she writes about her euphoria at discovering she was free of the obsession to drink. She says; 'Before I got sober, the notion of any kind of spiritual conversion would have made me roll my eyes'. Me too!  She also writes about having to mourn the death of her old self and get to know a new one, learning who she really is along the way.  Yes I know what she means. She also gives tips of the sober trade.  Saying you can't replace drinking with just not-drinking and you have to re-tool a lot of daily habits so they're not associated with wine.  'It took me a while to disentangle alcohol from everyday pleasures and reinvent them.'  But here's the passage that really spoke to me.  'Another component of the disease, which is both a cause and an effect, is a spiritual toxicity.  Some call this the alcoholic's soul sickness.  This rancid attitude manifests itself in an overall cynicism about life, a sense that life is a joke and not worthy of being taken seriously.  Perhaps more than anything else practicing alcoholics abhor earnestness.  The alcohol dichotomy is this: while alcoholics exert tremendous energy pretending to be happy-go-lucky and carefree, alcoholism is really a terrible coping method for an underlying fear and pessimism about life.  After all, we drink to escape.  So, obviously, alcoholics - in feeling the need to drink a lot - believe there is much from which they need to escape.  That's why experts call boozing or drugging self-medicating. The happier a drunk acts, the more depressed he or she actually is.'

'The Happiness Project' by Gretchen Rubin, that's a great book about taking control of your life.  I like that she offers loads of detail about lots of little things she did to make positive changes. It's kind of silly and ridiculous in its simplicity, and a kind of uptight and really methodical way of making yourself feel better but it is full of ideas of things to do to improve day-in-day-out living.

Kelly Cutrone in her book "If you have to cry go outside" had some good words about being mentally powerful and controlling your own life.  I found her words really helpful.

"The mind uses fear throughout our lives as one of many blunt objects with which to clock our soul over the head before gagging it, binding it with black electrical tape, and throwing it out of the driver's seat and into the trunk.  So I started to play ball with my fears.  "Bring it!" I'd say when seized by that familiar pit in my stomach. .. I asked my fear exactly what it had to say to me.  .. I followed my fears to their worst possible conclusions, .. , and what I realised each time was that no matter what happened, I was going to be fine.  I remembered that family and tribe members are key, but also that ultimately I have everything I need to survive inside of me.  I believe that the universe constantly rearranges itself to support your idea of reality.  If you're always thinking Life sucks, and I suck, you're definitely going to see a lot of dismal shit out there.  On the other hand, if your idea of reality is that you're a privileged, elegant human being and every day you think, I am a privileged, elegant human being I am a privileged, elegant human being then eventually you will become a privileged and elegant human being.  It may take five minutes or it may take five years, but that will become your experience of yourself."