Give the gift of recovery books this holiday season! We have curated our list of top 12 recovery books we think should be in every sober person’s home library. These are books you will want to go back to again and again. The #Quitlit genre is one of our favs. Whether it be self-help or memoir style reading, we are here for all of it.
Gift Idea #1: Untamed – by Glennon Doyle (Hardcover)
Over 1 million copies sold, Glennon Doyle brings us her latest hit Untamed. This is a revealing and powerful book that explores the joy and peace we discover when we stop striving to meet the expectations of the world, and start trusting the voice deep within us. Untamed shows us how to be brave. As Glennon insists: “The braver we are, the luckier we get.” No #quitlit home library is complete without this addition.
Gift Idea #2: Save Your Own Damn Life
This is not a typical self help book. Save Your Own Damn Life is a book of action. Want a book that is going to light a fire under your ass? #Addtocart my friend! In this entertaining do it yourself-self help book, Jessica Jeboult will show you how to save your own damn life.
By upholding the 4 commitments outlined in this book, Jessica will teach you how to track where your life needs improvement. You will learn the tools and strategies to successfully implement a solution immediately. Through hilariously inspiring stories and user friendly exercises, you will learn how to do lots of other things as well.
Improve your health, override self doubt, and live a life you’re proud of. You will learn to cultivate fulfilling relationships and build an endless source of confidence.
Also, we’re kind of nuts about A Sober Girls Guide podcast, which you can read about here, and her Merch shop too!
A SOBER GIRLS GUIDE #ADDTOCART
Gift Idea #3: The Sober Lush
A sober hedonist’s guide to living a decadent, wild, and soulful life–alcohol-free.
We live in a culture where sipping “rosé all day” is seen as the epitome of relaxation and “grabbing a drink” the only way to network. Single? Then, as you know, meeting at a bar is the quintessential “first date.”
Sound familiar? Drinking alcohol has been falsely advertised and marketed as the only way to cultivate joy and connection in life.
Jardine Libaire and Amanda Eyre Ward wanted to live spontaneous and luxurious lives, to escape the ordinary and enjoy the intoxicating. Their drinking, however, had started to numb them to the present moment instead of unlocking it.
Ward was introduced to Libaire when she first got sober. As they became friends, the two women talked about how they yearned to create lives that were technicolor, beautifully raw, connected, blissed out, and outside the lines . . . but how? In The Sober Lush, Libaire and Ward provide a road map for living a lush and sensual life without booze.
Gift Idea #4: Party Girl, A Novel
Party Girl by Anna David. Celebrity journalist Amelia Stone is the quintessential Hollywood party girl. She stays out late, rubs shoulders (and occasionally more) with celebrities, and ingests copious amounts of cocaine.
After losing her job, her friends, and much of her mind, Amelia makes the drastic decision to end her drug abuse. Once sober, she’s hired by a big-name magazine to write a column detailing her wild adventures. She starts seeing the man who could be her Mr. Right.
There’s just one problem. Overnight, Amelia has become the new face of Hollywood nightlife, and her editors, who don’t know she’s come clean, want her to play the part. As the lure of her former fast-and-furious lifestyle begins to pull at her, she must decide whether to save herself or salvage her reputation as the ultimate party girl.
Gift Idea #5: High Achiever: The Incredible True Story of One Addict’s Double Life
When word got out that Tiffany Jenkins was withdrawing from opiates on the floor of a jail cell, people in her town were shocked. Not because of the twenty felonies she’d committed, or the nature of her crimes, or even that she’d been captain of the high school cheerleading squad just a few years earlier, but because her boyfriend was a Deputy Sheriff, and his friends—their friends—were the ones who’d arrested her.
A raw and twisty page-turning memoir that reads like fiction, High Achiever spans Tiffany’s life as an active opioid addict, her 120 days in a Florida jail where every officer despised what she’d done to their brother in blue, and her eventual recovery.
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.
Need a good LOL? You may want to check out Tiffany on “Juggling the Jenkins“, her YouTube channel where she talks about just about anything and everything.
Gift Idea #6: Girl Walks Out of a Bar, a Memoir
We have previously featured Girl Walks Out of a Bar in our #Quitlit section. Why? Because we just love it so much. You can read that interview with Author Lisa Smith here. This memoir accurately recounts the days, weeks, and months leading up to Lisa’s last days of using. If you are in recovery, we know it will be easy for you to relate to Lisa’s story. You may find it is darkly familiar to your own.
Gift Idea #7: Blackout: Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget
For Sarah Hepola, alcohol was “the gasoline of all adventure.” She spent her evenings at cocktail parties and dark bars where she proudly stayed till last call. Drinking felt like freedom, part of her birthright as a strong, enlightened twenty-first-century woman.
But there was a price. She often blacked out, waking up with a blank space where four hours should be. Mornings became detective work on her own life. What did I say last night? How did I meet that guy? She apologized for things she couldn’t remember doing, as though she were cleaning up after an evil twin. Publicly, she covered her shame with self-deprecating jokes, and her career flourished, but as the blackouts accumulated, she could no longer avoid a sinking truth. The fuel she thought she needed was draining her spirit instead.
A memoir of unblinking honesty and poignant, laugh-out-loud humor, Blackout is the story of a woman stumbling into a new kind of adventure — the sober life she never wanted. Shining a light into her blackouts, she discovers the person she buried, as well as the confidence, intimacy, and creativity she once believed came only from a bottle. Her tale will resonate with anyone who has been forced to reinvent or struggled in the face of necessary change. It’s about giving up the thing you cherish most — but getting yourself back in return.
Gift Idea #8: Spirit Junkie Book & 52-Card Deck
Before she became a celebrated teacher and lecturer, Gabrielle Bernstein was going down a dangerous path. For years, Bernstein struggled with eating disorders, drug and alcohol abuse, and constant self-doubt and self-loathing. That all changed when she discovered A Course in Miracles, which taught her that much of what she feared in life was not frightening at all and, in many cases, not even real.
Now, Bernstein lives an empowered, healthy, and joyful life. In Spirit Junkie, Bernstein guides readers through the life-changing lessons that shaped her spiritual journey. You will learn how we become accustomed to fearful ways of thinking. How to recognize and change those thought patterns to make way for bliss. Plus, you will learn how to maintain your happiness and share it with the world.
Sober Curator Pro Tip: Bernstein even offers this really cool Spirit Junkie 52-Card deck that is a must check out item and perfect stocking stuffer.
These Spirit Junkie cards will guide and uplift you on your journey to living an inspired life. Let them support you as you release old fears and patterns, step into your power, and choose love. Each message brings you back to the truth. Truth that you can find grace in every challenge, that miracles are available to you in every moment, and that you already have within you everything you need to shine.
Gift Idea #9: How to Murder Your Life, A Memoir
At twenty-six, Cat Marnell was an associate beauty editor at Lucky, one of the top fashion magazines in America—and that’s all most people knew about her. But she hid a secret life. She was a prescription drug addict. She was also a “doctor shopper” who manipulated Upper East Side psychiatrists for pills, pills, and more pills; a lonely bulimic who spent hundreds of dollars a week on binge foods; a promiscuous party girl who danced barefoot on banquets; a weepy and hallucination-prone insomniac who would take anything—anything—to sleep.
How to Murder Your Life is a tale of self-loathing, self-sabotage, and yes, self-tanner. It begins at a posh New England prep school—and with a prescription for the Attention Deficit Disorder medication Ritalin. It continues to New York, where we follow Marnell’s amphetamine-fueled rise from intern to editor through the beauty departments of NYLON, Teen Vogue, Glamour, and Lucky.
We see her fight between ambition and addiction and how, inevitably, her disease threatens everything she worked so hard to achieve. From the Condé Nast building to seedy nightclubs, from doctors’ offices and mental hospitals, Marnell “treads a knife edge between glamorizing her own despair and rendering it with savage honesty.…with the skill of a pulp novelist” (The New York Times Book Review) what it is like to live in the wild, chaotic, often sinister world of a young female addict who can’t say no.
Gift Idea #10: Coming Clean, A Memoir
Kimberly Rae Miller is an immaculately put-together woman with a great career, a loving boyfriend, and a beautifully tidy apartment in Brooklyn. You would never guess that behind the closed doors of her family’s idyllic Long Island house hid teetering stacks of aging newspaper, broken computers, and boxes upon boxes of unused junk festering in every room—the product of her father’s painful and unending struggle with hoarding.
In this dazzling memoir, Coming Clean, Miller brings to life her experience growing up in a rat-infested home, hiding her father’s shameful secret from friends for years, and the emotional burden that ultimately led to her suicide attempt. In beautiful prose, Miller sheds light on her complicated yet loving relationship with her parents, which has thrived in spite of the odds.
Coming Clean is a story about recognizing where you come from and understanding the relationships that define you. It is also a powerful story of recovery and redemption.
Gift Idea #11: Carrie Fisher Wishful Drinking
Intimate, hilarious, and sobering, Wishful Drinking is Fisher (may she RIP), looking at her life as she best remembers it (what do you expect after electroshock therapy?). It’s an incredible tale: the child of Hollywood royalty—Debbie Reynolds and Eddie Fisher—homewrecked by Elizabeth Taylor, marrying (then divorcing, then dating) Paul Simon, having her likeness merchandised on everything from Princess Leia shampoo to PEZ dispensers, learning the father of her daughter forgot to tell her he was gay, and ultimately waking up one morning and finding a friend dead beside her in bed.
Carrie Fisher’s performance at the Seattle Rep was unforgettable. The most memorable quote of the evening was this…
“Saying you are an alcoholic and an addict is like saying you are from Seattle and Washington. It’s the same damn thing!” – Carrie Fisher
If you haven’t seen this HBO Documentary, we recommend you add it to your playlist.
Gift Idea #12: Lit, A Memoir
The Liars’ Club brought to vivid, indelible life Mary Karr’s hardscrabble Texas childhood. Cherry, her account of her adolescence, ‘continued to set the literary standard for making the personal universal’ (Entertainment Weekly). Now Lit follows the self-professed blackbelt sinner’s descent into the inferno of alcoholism and madness–and to her astonishing resurrection. Karr’s longing for a solid family seems secure when her marriage to a handsome, Shakespeare-quoting blueblood poet produces a son they adore. But she can’t outrun her apocalyptic past. She drinks herself into the same numbness that nearly devoured her charismatic but troubled mother, reaching the brink of suicide. A hair-raising stint in ‘The Mental Marriott,’ with an oddball tribe of gurus and saviors, awakens her to the possibility of joy and leads her to an unlikely faith.
Not since Saint Augustine cried, ‘Give me chastity, Lord-but not yet!’ has a conversion story rung with such dark hilarity. Lit is about getting drunk and getting sober, becoming a mother by letting go of a mother, learning to write by learning to live. Written with Karr’s relentless honesty, unflinching self-scrutiny, and irreverent, lacerating humor, it is a truly electrifying story of how to grow up–as only Mary Karr can tell it. Your #Quitlit library will not be complete without a copy of this heartbreaking memoir on the shelf.
If you missed some of our other curated holiday lists, you can find them here:
- Advent Calendars: 12 Advent Calendars curated for those unique and quirky people in your life
- Recovery Gifts: 12 Runway worthy recovery gifts curated for the people in recovery from alcohol or drugs
- Give Art Therapy: 12 artsy gift items for the sober people in your life who love to keep their hands busy creating fun projects
- Alcohol-Free Gifts: 12 alcohol-free recipe books and zero proof beverages curated for the sober people in your life who still want to have fun with their zero-proof beverages
- Selfie Care: 12 selfie care gift items for the sober people in your life who need to slow their roll and have some good selfie care downtime
- Alcohol-Free Barware: 12 barware gift items for the sober people in your life who love to have fun making and mixing mocktails
- Give Entertainment: 12 entertaining gift items for that sober person in your life who still likes to have fun
- Ice Ice Baby: 12 ice molds for the sober people in your life who still want to have fun with zero-proof beverages
- Keep it Glassy: 12 glassware items for that sober mocktail-maker in your life!
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If you or someone you know is experiencing difficulties surrounding alcoholism, addiction, or mental illness, please reach out and ask for help. People everywhere can and want to help; you just have to know where to look. And continue to look until you find what works for you. Click here for a list of regional and national resources.