Best $100 I Ever Spent: The 6 Books That Helped Me Quit Drinking
The greatest books on my quit lit shelf and the lessons they taught me
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Back when I drank alcohol, $100 wouldn’t get me very far. On a Friday night, I’d easily spend $100 on cocktails and wine, plus an Uber. Later, as the pandemic hit and I drank by myself at home, $100 would buy me a month’s worth of cheap beer. The latter might seem like a better deal, but it wasn’t— I was drinking almost every day and felt sick, lonely, and anxious. The good news is I don’t feel miserable anymore, and I can thank my library of quit lit (quitting literature) for that. These six books in particular (worth around $100 altogether), and the lessons they taught me, have been integral to my sobriety.
#1. It’s not your fault if you drink too much
This Naked Mind: Control Alcohol: Find Freedom, Rediscover Happiness & Change Your Life — Annie Grace ($15.99)
Ever since I started drinking in my teens, I have wondered why I always drank more than I wanted to. Despite telling myself and others, “I’m having just one drink tonight,” I rarely kept my promise. As soon as a drop of alcohol touched my lips, I found it difficult to stop drinking it. For a long time, I believed there was something inherently wrong with me, and that my inability to moderate was a personality flaw or a sign that I lacked discipline. When I picked up Annie Grace’s book, This Naked Mind, I learned the radical notion that my failure to moderate wasn’t a personal defect but a design feature. “You have been caught in a deadly trap that was designed to ensnare and slowly kill. It is subtle and insidious, and millions of people are deceived every day,” she writes. “The trap is designed to keep you a prisoner for life by making you believe you drink because you want to.”
#2. You are not alone in your struggle
Blackout: Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget — Sarah Hepola ($17.99)
“We all want to believe that our pain is singular — that no one else has felt this way — but our pain is ordinary, which is both a blessing and a curse. It means we’re not unique. But it also means we’re not alone,” Sarah Hepola writes in her excellent memoir. Despite knowing that millions of people worldwide struggled with alcohol abuse, every time I woke up hungover, I felt desperately lonely. In my late twenties, I started to experience regular blackouts — where I’d forget things I’d said or done, even when I wasn’t drinking that much. After waking up one morning and failing to remember how I walked home from a dinner party the night before, I googled “blackout drinking”. That’s how I found Sarah’s book, a brutally honest and unexpectedly funny account of her blackout drinking days and subsequent recovery. Hungover in bed, I read the whole thing in one sitting, and for the first time, I felt truly seen.
#3. The alcohol industry is trying to gaslight you
Quit Like a Woman: The Radical Choice to Not Drink in a Culture Obsessed with Alcohol — Holly Whitaker ($15.99)
This book is a goldmine for anyone questioning their relationship with alcohol and looking for ways to cut back or quit drinking for good. What blew my mind was Holly’s extensive research on the pervasive influence that the alcohol industry exerts on women. She argues that liquor companies are essentially gaslighting women into believing that drinking alcohol is a feminist act, much like tobacco companies did in the 1920s. “Very smart people with assloads of money and power and access benefit from our complicity, from our believing that drinking is an act of empowerment for women, instead of what it truly is: a drug designed to keep us down, no matter how much we drink,” she writes.
#4. Your love affair with alcohol could destroy you
Drinking: A Love Story — Caroline Knapp ($15.99)
“One of the first things you hear in AA — one of the first things that makes core, gut-level sense — is that in some deep and important personal respects you stop growing when you start drinking alcoholically,” Caroline Knapp writes in Drinking: A Love Story, where she recounts her destructive, twenty-year relationship with alcohol. Unlike Caroline, I never labeled myself as an alcoholic or went to AA, and yet I highlighted dozens, if not hundreds of sentences like this one. I read her book just two weeks into my second stint of sobriety. And while I never carried liquor in my purse or drank in the mornings, Caroline’s relationship to alcohol felt unerringly similar to mine. It was like catching a glimpse of the future, and I was terrified of what I saw. The good news? I doubled down on my commitment to never drink alcohol again.
#5. Self-criticism is also a toxic substance
Self-Compassion: Stop Beating Yourself Up and Leave Insecurity Behind — Dr. Kristin Neff, Ph.D. ($11.59)
While Self-Compassion isn’t about alcohol abuse or addiction in general, I found this book just as essential to my recovery as the other books on my quit lit shelf. And that’s because, for a long time, self-criticism was my default way of life, and the only time I would stop berating myself was when I drank alcohol. In fact, before reading Self-Compassion, I thought that being nice to myself would make my drinking worse. As Dr. Neff puts it, this is a common misconception. In fact, the opposite is true: when we no longer beat ourselves up, self-acceptance comes more easily, and we increase our ability to make positive changes in our life. “By giving ourselves unconditional kindness and comfort while embracing the human experience, difficult as it is, we avoid destructive patterns of fear, negativity, and isolation,” she writes.
#6. Drinking alcohol doesn’t make you more creative
The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath by Leslie Jamison ($18.99)
I used to believe that drinking alcohol made me a better writer. Never mind that I would regularly get so wasted I could barely string a sentence together or that I would be in no mood to write with a raging hangover. Many creatives — writers especially — believe in the trope of the tortured artist, who needs alcohol to produce their best creative work. Drawing on the lives of writers and artists including Jean Rhys and Amy Winehouse, fiction writer and essayist Leslie Jamieson explores and debunks this idea: “The lie wasn’t that addiction could yield truth; it was that addiction had a monopoly on it,” she concludes.
A final thought: Over the past three years, I’ve read a ridiculous quantity of quit lit, but these are the books I return to again and again whenever I need a reminder that life is so much better sober. They’re the best investment I’ve ever made.
