Addiction Memoirs

Debbie Harry is a musician, an actor, an activist and the iconic face of New York City cool. As the front-woman of Blondie, she and the band forged a new sound that brought together the worlds of rock, punk, disco, reggae and hip-hop to create some of the most beloved pop songs of all time. As a muse, she collaborated with some of the boldest artists of the past four decades. The scope of Debbie Harry’s impact on our culture has been matched only by her reticence to reveal her rich inner life - until now.

At seven, Brandon was a skateboard prodigy. By the time he was fourteen, he was living the dream. Discovered by skate legends Bucky Lasek and Tony Hawk. Touring the US with the elite Powell-Peralta team. Signing autographs and appearing in films and magazines. Brandon had it all. Then he got hooked on heroin. Soon he was living a down-and-out life in a garage, begging for change, and hustling to score his next fix. He stole from his family and friends. He pushed the fantasy that everything was okay, that he was going to rehab, getting help, and getting better. But it was all a lie.

Brandon Novak, an actor known for the films Jackass and Viva La Bam, among others, was a teenage skateboarder, but his lust for heroin led to a junkie’s destiny on the streets of Baltimore. Arrests, rehabs, and drug-tortured love triangles consumed Novak’s life, until his childhood friend and Jackass alumnus Bam Margera guided him to MTV fame. But Novak’s stardom led him down a self-destructive path that forced him to sculpt his future.

From reckless drug addict to one of Australia’s top chefs and television stars: MasterChef judge Jock Zonfrillo's powerful life story will shock and inspire. Jock’s life spiralled out of control when he tried heroin for the first time as a teenager while growing up in 1980s Glasgow. For years he balanced a career as a rising star amongst legendary chefs with a crippling drug addiction that took him down many dark paths.

Matt Rowland Hill grew up the son of a minister in an evangelical Christian church in South Wales and then South-East England. It was a childhood fraught with bitter family conflict, the ever-present threat of hell and damnation, and a burgeoning cycle of temptation, sin and shame. After a devastating loss of faith in his late teens, Matt began his search for salvation elsewhere, turning to books before developing a growing relationship with alcohol and drugs. This story takes us to his bleakest, most desperate moments and recounts his struggle towards the light.

Lisa Smith was a bright young lawyer at a prestigious law firm in New York City when alcoholism and drug addiction took over her life. What was once a way she escaped her insecurity and negativity as a teenager became a means of coping with the anxiety and stress of an impossible workload. Girl Walks Out of a Bar explores Smith's formative years, her decade of alcohol and drug abuse, divorce, and her road to recovery.

Born to an abusive mother and a drug-dealer father, Ginelle Testa is not exactly set up for success—and her early years are just as troubled as one might expect. By the end of her thirteenth year, she’s started experimenting with alcohol and drugs, has fallen prey to anorexia, and has been sexually assaulted. And that’s only the beginning of her spiral down into addiction and disordered eating.

My name is Brett. I'm a college-educated man who was once a husband of 26 years with two children, three businesses, and a large home with an actual white picket fence. I'm also a drug addict. And I have a tale to tell. It's about the despair of addiction and the absolute certainty that it can be overcome. Recovery is not simply abstinence, but a process of growing up. I spent my entire life searching for the key to long-term sobriety. I would like to share with you what I have learned.

Born in Manchester in 1977, Anthony Kavanagh's rise to fame was stratospheric, scoring a record deal at the age of just eighteen and winning the much-coveted Smash Hits Male Artist of the Year Award in 1997, all the while achieving top ten hits, appearing on countless magazine covers, performing on Top of the Pops and gigging alongside the Spice Girls. The stuff that dreams are made of. But Anthony - or Kavana as he came to be known - was also trying to keep his sexuality a secret while navigating his way through an industry where image was everything.

In his first book, author Jason Smith explores the depravity and desperation required to maintain an opiate addiction so fierce, he finds himself jumping continents to avoid jail time and learns the hard way that some demons cannot be outrun. While teaching in Europe, he meets a prostitute who secures drugs for him at the dangerous price of helping out the Russian Mafia; in China he gets his Percocet and Xanax fixes but terrifies a crowd of children and parents at his job in the process.

In the summer of 2012 a woman named Eva was found dead in the London townhouse she shared with her husband, Hans K. Rausing. The couple had struggled with addiction for years, often under the glare of tabloid headlines. Now, writing with singular clarity and restraint, Hans' sister, the editor and publisher Sigrid Rausing, tries to make sense of what happened. Mayhem is an eloquent and timely attempt to understand addiction and a memoir that is as poignant and riveting as it is devastating.

From the outside, Seana Smith lived an enviable life. An Oxford graduate, a successful career with the BBC and Sydney’s Channel 9, a bestselling author, happily married. But behind this perfect life she had a secret: Seana was a drinker, and alcohol was slowly taking away her life, destroying her health, her emotional well-being, her world. With engaging style and wit, Going Under reveals the true story behind Seana’s lifelong battle with drink. It lays bare a confusing childhood of Scottish sailing adventures and also brutal violence from her bullying, alcoholic father.

From an early age, Amber van de Bunt knew she wasn't like the other girls in town. From childhood struggles with depression and eating disorders, her years as a topless dancer in Florida, and an eventual abortion and suicide attempt, to her rebirth in Los Angeles as a porn star named Karmen Karma, overcoming her relationship with her abusive mother, and her struggle to maintain a clean and sober lifestyle - van de Bunt's life has been a roller coaster. With humor, alacrity, and profound insight, she reveals her deepest, darkest secrets and pulls no punches - least of all with herself.

Neil 'Razor' Ruddock tells the inspiring and uplifting story of how he faced the battle of his life: to become a different person. In this inspiring and uplifting memoir, Neil Ruddock charts his toxic journey of self-destruction, a path littered with food addiction, plummeting self-confidence and a dangerous relationship with drink which took him to the brink of death.

Aside from her rock star looks, Catra Corbett is a standout in the running world on her accomplishments alone. And, unbelievably, she's also a former meth addict. After two years of addiction, Catra is busted while selling, and a night in jail is enough to set her straight. She gives up drugs and moves back home with her mother, abandoning her friends, her boyfriend, and the lifestyle that she came to depend on. Her only clean friend pushes her to train for a 10K with him, and surprisingly, she likes it and decides to run her first marathon after that.

Dr. Carder Stout's clientele includes Oscar-, Golden Globe-, Emmy-, Tony- and Grammy-winners, best-selling authors, and billionaires. He may not be able to share their dark secrets, but for the first time, everyone will know his. At the age of 34, Carder would have gladly pawned the silver spoon he was born choking on for a rock of crack. His downfall was as swift as his privilege was vast - or had he been falling all along?

While his wife and two-year-old daughter watched TV in the living room, David Poses was in the kitchen, measuring the distance from his index finger to his armpit. He needed to be sure he could pull the trigger with a shotgun barrel in his mouth. Twenty-six inches. Thirty-two years old. More than a decade in a double life fueled by depression and heroin.

This deeply personal and illuminating memoir about her 15-year struggle with heroin, Khar sheds profound light on the opioid crisis and gives a voice to the over two million people in America currently battling with this addiction. Growing up in LA, Erin Khar hid behind a picture-perfect childhood filled with excellent grades, a popular group of friends and horseback riding. After first experimenting with her grandmother’s expired painkillers, Khar started using heroin when she was thirteen.

In Young Offender we see what turned a good kid into a wanted criminal. Abused by his uncle, bullied at school, at the age of 12 he found the safety he craved in the ranks of a local gang in West London. He graduated from shoplifting to armed robbery and for five years Michael was in and out of Feltham, on a downward spiral of crime and drug and alcohol addiction. At rock bottom, he began attending AA meetings. But the road to recovery would mean changing himself in the deepest possible ways. Could Michael finally learn what it meant to be a good man?

A. A. Gill's memoir begins in the dark of a dormitory with six strangers. He is an alcoholic, dying in the last-chance saloon - driven to dry out, not out of a desire to change but mainly through weariness. He tells the truth - as far as he can remember it - about drinking and about what it is like to be drunk. Pour Me is about the blackouts, the collapse, the despair. Lacerating, unflinching, uplifting, it is a classic about drunken abandon. Read by Dougray Scott.