Notable Quit Lit Memoirs
Stories about getting sober.
Drinking: A Love Story (1996)
by Caroline Knapp
In this somber account of Knapp’s struggle, she attempts to keep her alcoholism a secret, with limited success. She calls a friend late one night and doesn’t remember. Later, her friend tells her about the embarrassing call, leaving Knapp feeling even more isolated and alone. The memoir details a fraught relationship with her boyfriend and the loss of both her parents to cancer. Before her mother dies, she implores Knapp to quit smoking. After finishing this book, I wondered what became of Knapp and Googled her. I was deeply saddened to learn that she died of lung cancer at the age of 42. Memoirs give us only a glimpse of a person, but by the end of this book, I felt as if I knew and cared for her.
We Are The Luckiest (2020)
by Laura McKowen
McKowen is a newly divorced mother of a little girl when she gets blackout drunk at a wedding and leaves her daughter unattended in a hotel room. She beats herself up over this, imagining all the horrible things that could have happened. And while she doesn’t quit drinking (yet), something inside her has changed, and she begins her journey to sobriety.
The Sober Diaries (2019)
by Clare Pooley
Married mother of three, Clare Pooley quits drinking, replacing her daily wine ritual with Labatt Blue nonalcoholic beer. She takes this new habit just as seriously and readers will laugh at the extreme lengths she goes to find the alcohol-free beer one evening while on vacation. Just after her two-hundredth sober day, she is diagnosed with breast cancer. (Note: Audiobook listeners can enjoy the author’s lovely British accent).
Blackout (2018)
by Sarah Hepola
Hepola writes lyrically about the allure of drinking that began in her youth. She lands her first job at the Austin Chronicle and discovers that writing can be euphoric after a few drinks. Her self-doubt falls away and she finds her voice:
Those pages were full of typos and run-ons, but they had the hypnotic clickity-clack of a train barreling across the high plains. They had the last call honesty of someone pulling the listener close: We only have a few more minutes. Let me tell you everything.
And yet, she knows her drinking is problematic. She quits drinking for 18 months but can’t shake her desire to be the person she believes herself to be when she’s drinking. She starts again. We follow her to New York and on a short freelance assignment to Paris, where she has a “devastating” encounter. She is once again forced to reexamine her life.
The Unexpected Joy of Being Sober (2018)
by Catherine Gray
Catherine Gray delivers a funny and upbeat account of drinking in her twenties and disproves the assumption that life is better with alcohol.
Note: These last two books are more self-help than memoir, giving the reader insight into why we choose to drink.
This Naked Mind
by Annie Grace
This book about finding freedom from alcohol — free from its hold on your everyday thoughts — was the precursor to a movement and online community. Detractors of Grace’s method are turned off by her monetization of the program, but she has many devout followers as well. I joined the community for a few weeks to see what it was all about, but I did not find any additional insight that wasn’t contained in the book.
Alcohol Explained
by William Porter
Porter writes about the science of why we drink with chapters like “The Physiological Effects of Drinking” and “Fading Effect Bias” which describes the process in which our memory of bad experiences fade over time, rendering them rosier than they in fact were. If you’re thinking about quitting alcohol, prime yourself with the six books above and cap it off with this one.
