My most transformative reading experiences have been ones in which I see the worst parts of myself in full display on the page. From the time I was a teenager, I’ve gravitated toward women characters and writers whose behaviors, addictions, and ailments were at odds with their “potential.” Esther in The Bell Jar, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Dorothy Parker, and Tove Ditlevsen, to name a few, spoke and continue to speak to me. Because I was the girl who got scholarships and hid empty magnums of Yellowtail in her childhood bedroom. Because I’d sneak into my bedroom at 5 in the morning after destroying my body and drive to school at 7:30 am as if nothing had happened. Substance abuse, secrecy, and masking are salient themes in my first book, a lyric essay I’m still not comfortable calling a memoir, The Hurricane Book: A Lyric History. They are also an important feature of being a woman living with and around addiction and mental illness.
My Catholic inner child considers this attraction to femme addiction narratives perverse. The older, agnostic me considers it somewhat narcissistic. There might be some truth to both. As a writer dealing with shameful topics, there is the risk of character annihilation, alienation from those we want to love and be loved by. So why do we do it? I honestly have no idea.
None of the books on this list have provided a definite answer for me, but they do offer the reader (and writer) a variety of answers to the question of how, if not why, we write candidly about the unfeminine, scandalous upend-your-life decisions our bodies and minds make to help us cope. They also expose the insidious ways in which addiction can unfold in the most unlikely places and at the most inopportune times. They are also full of hard-earned grace and/or humor, two things we all need more of when we look in the mirror.
Smile, Please: An Unfinished Autobiography by Jean Rhys
Best known for penning the woman-in-the-attic-focused prequel to Jane Eyre, Wide Sargasso Sea, English writer Jean Rhys was always a little out of step. She was intimately acquainted with displacement and battled an inner duality since childhood. As a privileged girl from a family of colonists in early 20th-century Dominica, she clashed with her environment, her peers, and her parents. She was neither here nor there, but spent most of her life looking for a place to belong to. In her posthumous (and unfinished) autobiography, Rhys recounts her early years in the Caribbean, her time as a chorus girl in England, her experience as a wealthy man’s mistress, and her chaotic entanglements in bohemian 1920s Paris. We see her fall into the arms of the wrong men, debilitating alcoholism, and, despite all this, writing.
The Chronology of Water: A Memoir by Lidia Yuknavitch
Formally masterful and inventive, The Chronology of Water features poetic, non-linear prose that flows in and out of Yuknavitch’s experiences with parental violence and neglect, child loss, unmet expectations, and drugs and alcohol. The author, once a promising competitive swimmer with a scholarship, leaves behind a dysfunctional home only to fall into known destructive patterns, experimenting with self-destructive forms of escape. Reeling from a bad relationship and the loss of a child, the author enrolls in school and finds herself in a writing workshop that changes the course of her life. More than anything, this is a book about art, how the love of it (and the right people) can bring us back to ourselves.
Whip Smart by Melissa Febos
A brilliant, nuanced study in desire, self-actualization, and recovery, Melissa Febos’s debut focuses on her time as a dominatrix in NYC while studying at The New School and battling a heroin addiction. One of the things I admire most about Febos is her generosity, the palpable love with which she writes about herself, her gentle self-awareness. Here is a beloved daughter from a supportive home, a talented student. With measured curiosity, she challenges the notion that a woman like that can’t abandon herself and others, that she can’t be a sex worker, that she can’t be an addict, that any of these is guaranteed to beget the other.
Wishful Drinking by Carrie Fisher
“If my life wasn’t funny it would just be true, and that is unacceptable.” Yes, it’s a celebrity memoir. Yes, maybe it’s one of those things you’d pick up at a Hudson News. But beyond the Princess Leia-Paul Simon-Elizabeth Taylor-Eddie Fisher-Debbie Reynolds of it all, you can’t deny that Carrie Fisher wrote a memoir about painful family dynamics, public life, bipolar disorder, and addiction that can make you laugh (if you have the patience for this kind of thing). It’s voice driven, shiny, and a little indulgent. After years of keeping her battle with substance abuse under wraps, Fisher became an advocate for mental health awareness who spoke openly about her bipolar disorder diagnosis and her addictions, becoming sort of a den mother to unlikely celebrities and a beloved public figure. It’s easy to see why.
Lit by Mary Karr
The third in a memoir trilogy that includes the critically acclaimed The Liars’ Club and Cherry, Lit introduces Mary Karr as a full grown woman, poet, wife, and mother struggling with alcoholism. In her musical, no-nonsense style, she shows us how this disease, passed down from her own gun-toting, charming, erratic artist mother, almost wrecked her own life, following her on a quest for the stability she didn’t know as a kid. We see how through hard spiritual work, brutal self-effacement, hospitalization, community, and grace, she found a way through. This is also one of the first memoirs I ever read that included habitual disclosures about the haziness of memory, which made me feel safe as a reader and writer.
Good Morning, Destroyer of Men’s Souls by Nina Renata Aron
In an interview conducted while she was at work on the memoir, Aron said, “There’s this long history of, often women, living alongside this disease. But women’s experiences are seen as this secondary emotional corollary to the much more important story of male alcoholism and all the storminess that it entails.” At the center of her book is this secondary emotional corollary as it pertains to codependency. She had ample experience with it. At a young age, she became both protector and cop to her sister, who was addicted to drugs. After leaving home, marrying, and having a child, she reconnects with a charismatic man from her past, and the two begin an obsessive drug-filled affair that perpetuates a cycle of enabling and mutual destruction. Aron uses this as a springboard to talk about the psychology of codependency and even the roots of the temperance movement.
Drunk Mom by Jowita Bydlowska
Shortly after the birth of her son, Bydlowska relapses after three years of sobriety. She felt like a God, so she thought, why not keep that feeling going. Fast forward a bit and she’s sneaking drinks at the grocery store, waking up in a hotel with no panties on after a blackout. It is harrowing. She gets sober. After the book published, Bydlowska was celebrated for her bravery. She was also criticized for her seeming disregard for her child. In 2022, nine years after the release of the book (and six years after another relapse), she wrote, “Readers still write to tell me that this book helped them—to stop drinking, to stay sober another day, to feel less alone[…] I love every message. But the truth is, whatever the book does for people was never intentional.” Her initial motivation was only to write it. The truth is, that should be enough.
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