Looking at how Americans use alcohol, it’s hard to pick a statistic. The data can be as specific and sensational as you want. Americans who reported increased drinking during COVID-19 lockdowns: 60%. The percentage of driving fatalities attributable to alcohol impairment in 2022: 32% or 13,524 deaths.
But there are softer numbers, too: 41% of U.S. adults reported that they were trying to drink less in 2024. More people are growing curious about sobriety, and where there is curiosity, there are books to recommend. I’ve gathered these titles for the reader who is curious about sobriety, evaluating their relationship with alcohol or interested in how other people have moved in and out of addiction.
Leslie Jamison’s book “The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath” travels through space and time; through science, memoir and myth; from the college apartment where she drinks alone, to the freezing car parked outside the Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, to the storied scenes of dead writers who drank. She learns to find meaning in the mundanity of addiction narratives — our insistence on the singularity of our relationships to alcohol, she suggests, is where danger lies.
While Jamison’s book is a triumph of the addiction narrative genre, “Drinking: A Love Story” by Caroline Knapp can be considered a predecessor. Another work that
exists in conversation with “The Recovering” is “The Trip to Echo Spring: On Writers and Drinking” by Olivia Laing, which examines the link between creativity and alcohol through the work and lives of such writers as Tennessee Williams and Ernest Hemingway.
“Modern life,” Hemingway wrote, “is often a mechanical oppression and liquor is the only mechanical relief.”
For readers seeking relief of a different sort, Amanda White offers practical advice in “Not Drinking Tonight: A Guide to Creating a Sober Life You Love.” White’s book does not ask the question, “Are you an alcoholic who needs sobriety?”, but rather, “In what ways might your life improve if you stopped or lessened your drinking?”
This improvement can be slow, like it is for Dennis Monk, the funny and floundering protagonist of Michael Deagler’s debut novel “Early Sobrieties.” For Monk, sobriety is best described not as redemption, but rather as a begrudging commitment he has made to resist abandoning his own human experience.
“If addiction stories run on the fuel of darkness — the hypnotic spiral of an ongoing, deepening crisis — then recovery is often seen as the narrative slack, the dull terrain of wellness,” Jamison writes in “The Recovering.” “Early Sobrieties” makes an adventure of this terrain, showing how stories about getting better can be as compelling as stories about falling apart.
Deagler’s protagonist experiences alcohol as a loss of control, and sobriety as progress towards it. In contrast, other writers have understood alcohol as a means of control in and of itself. In his autobiography “Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave,” Frederick Douglass writes that liquor “was the most effective means in the hands of the slaveholder in keeping down the spirit of insurrection.”
Readers interested in the hidden links between prohibitionism and other freedom movements, like abolitionism and suffragism, may enjoy the journey of Mark
Lawrence Schrad’s “Smashing the Liquor Machine: A Global History of Prohibition.” Schrad’s research sheds light on the “liquor machine” that profited off the addictions of oppressed people around the world and the advocates who worked against it.
There are many ways to tell a story about alcohol — with numbers, with memories; through the personal and the political; as a villain or an old friend, weapon or medication and everything in between. If you’re curious about casting alcohol in a different role in your life, or simply understanding its current and past roles better, someone else’s story might be a helpful place to start.
For more books related to alcohol sobriety, please see this staff-created list.
