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Darkness Before Light: 12 Writers on Addiction, Sobriety and Recovery
From New York Times and #1 bestselling Amazon author Anna David
12 Writers Share Their Experiences with Overcoming Addiction, Drug Dependency and Alcoholism
Robbing banks to feed a heroin habit. Taking acid to get sober. Thinking you’re being asked to park cars while looking for a recovery meeting in India.
Darkness Before Light: 12 Writers on Addiction, Sobriety and Recovery is the first volume in a series that will encompass all the shocking, earnest, hilarious and tender moments for people in and around addiction, sobriety and recovery.
Most of the information out there about addiction and how to get sober is pretty bleak. These essays show the lighter side—from the point of view of people who have found their way through a seemingly hopeless state. Some are best-selling memoirists, some are seasoned essayists and some are being published for the first time.
Whether they’re marrying in a panic or deciding to take medication in sobriety, the tales are as varied as their experience. Fans of Mary Karr and Augusten Burroughs, as well as anyone who wants to know more the personal side of a widely misunderstood disease, will find the first book in this series an essential part of the addiction and recovery literary canon.
12 Writers Share Their Experiences with Overcoming Addiction, Drug Dependency and Alcoholism
Robbing banks to feed a heroin habit. Taking acid to get sober. Thinking you’re being asked to park cars while looking for a recovery meeting in India.
Darkness Before Light: 12 Writers on Addiction, Sobriety and Recovery is the first volume in a series that will encompass all the shocking, earnest, hilarious and tender moments for people in and around addiction, sobriety and recovery.
Most of the information out there about addiction and how to get sober is pretty bleak. These essays show the lighter side—from the point of view of people who have found their way through a seemingly hopeless state. Some are best-selling memoirists, some are seasoned essayists and some are being published for the first time.
Whether they’re marrying in a panic or deciding to take medication in sobriety, the tales are as varied as their experience. Fans of Mary Karr and Augusten Burroughs, as well as anyone who wants to know more the personal side of a widely misunderstood disease, will find the first book in this series an essential part of the addiction and recovery literary canon.
59 pages, Kindle Edition
Published August 6, 2018
13 people are currently reading
40 people want to read
About the author
Anna David
55 books138 followersAnna David is a New York Times bestselling author of eight books and the founder of Legacy Launch Pad Publishing, a boutique book publishing company trusted by high-income entrepreneurs to build seven-figure authority.
A three-time TEDx speaker, she has appeared on Good Morning America, Today Show, The Talk and dozens of other programs.
Anna has also written for the New York Times, Time, Playboy, Vanity Fair and the Huffington Post, among many others, and been written about in such publications as Entrepreneur, Martha Stewart magazine and Forbes.
Her first novel, Party Girl, is in development as a feature film and she's the on-air book critic for KATU Portland. Her company has published over 50 books, many of which have become Wall Street Journal and USA Today bestsellers.
She lives in Hollywood with her boyfriend, filmmaker Jim Agnew, their son Benjamin and their cranky-looking cat Bernie.
A three-time TEDx speaker, she has appeared on Good Morning America, Today Show, The Talk and dozens of other programs.
Anna has also written for the New York Times, Time, Playboy, Vanity Fair and the Huffington Post, among many others, and been written about in such publications as Entrepreneur, Martha Stewart magazine and Forbes.
Her first novel, Party Girl, is in development as a feature film and she's the on-air book critic for KATU Portland. Her company has published over 50 books, many of which have become Wall Street Journal and USA Today bestsellers.
She lives in Hollywood with her boyfriend, filmmaker Jim Agnew, their son Benjamin and their cranky-looking cat Bernie.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
August 11, 2018
An excellent collection of essays. Amanda Fletcher's “10 Stupid Things People Say When You’re Sober” had me laughing out loud. I am so totally honored to have my essay "My Last Robbery" included in such a great company of writers.
August 6, 2018
Tired but not Defeated: Anna David Curates a Book That Will Save Lives
All of the 12 stories collected by Anna David in Darkness Before Light: 12 Writers on Addiction, Sobriety and Recovery share a common theme: all are examples of the strength we hold inside of us as human beings to survive. There is much talk of “rock bottom,” and what it means to fall upon hard times. In this often chilling, but more often funny, collection of essays, David has compiled a compendium of strong voices that inspire readers from a variety of points of view. The recovery world, like these stories, is peopled by strong sorts who are down but not out. The hope is that this book will inspire its readers and, yes, save lives.
In the piece that opens the book – A Sober Passage in India – Kristen McGuiness tells of her travels, from being a “stoned and drunk” backpacker making her way through Europe, to being a shaky six months into her sobriety and looking for, and finally finding, a support group to join. (This would become a practice she took up in all of her various travels.) Her sense of otherness, of being an alien, seems relieved only by how connected she feels with the others she finally finds, to humorous and touching effect, in a parking garage in Mumbai. Although all the other members are men, and Indian, and some speak only Hindi, McGuiness feels she’s arrived “home.” As she movingly puts it, “Whether it’s in Hindi, German, Greek, Italian, Spanish, Russian, French, Tamil, or English, that home is Grace – the Grace I found when I first got sober and the one that I am rediscovering as I cross the world today.”
The stories that follow share the sensation of the loss of tether that being an addict entails. Patrick O’Neal takes us from the depths of his drugs, depression, relapse, and, finally, being someone he has always wanted to be “—someone with integrity, compassion and commitment.” Unfortunately, in a nod to “rock bottom,” he ends his powerful essay with the one sentence paragraph that says it all: “Of course, I had to destroy my life to get here.”
The rest of the selections in this book play a number of variations on the theme. For Laura House (“My Panic Marriage,”) alcoholism and low self-esteem (ultimately leading to marrying the wrong person) weave a net she must carefully unravel, before she’s able to come out the other end. In Saying Yes to Drugs in Sobriety, Lisa Smith talks about the important healing effects that some prescription drugs have in helping her escape feeling “like skeletal fingers of despair were prying their way between my skull and my brain. The voice in my head had a clear message: ‘You’re worthless.’” In this slight twist on the mantra of the book, Smith tells of how heeding her doctor and taking medication “as I would any medication to treat an illness,” give her the breathing room to get sober, go to meetings, and stay clean. In one of the lighter (no pun intended) essays, Amanda Fletcher breaks down “10 Stupid Things People Say When You’re Sober,” a self-explanatory, and very funny, chapter in this collection. One of the challenges in this type of book is finding new ways to describe essentially the same thing, and Fletcher does this in spades, perhaps no better than when she says that “getting sober could look like an old grocery bag full of dog shit.”
This book is an eminently readable treatise on the fact that drug addiction and the struggle for sobriety and survival are both harrowing and potentially hilarious. Many of the pieces have humor at their core, and this will, as the song says, help the medicine go down. For those readers who are struggling, like the ones with whom both Jesse Monreal (How Can I Go Back to Being Myself When There’s No One There?) and Gayle Saks (There Was an Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe) work, the life-affirming nature of this book is palpable. For the rest of us, it makes for a damn good read. Above all, the guiding principle of this work is, plain and simple, love. Each one of these pieces is a kind of love letter to those who suffer and need our help; Anna David’s choice to put these all together, in an attempt to help them is the ultimate work of love, and will, most certainly, save lives.
All of the 12 stories collected by Anna David in Darkness Before Light: 12 Writers on Addiction, Sobriety and Recovery share a common theme: all are examples of the strength we hold inside of us as human beings to survive. There is much talk of “rock bottom,” and what it means to fall upon hard times. In this often chilling, but more often funny, collection of essays, David has compiled a compendium of strong voices that inspire readers from a variety of points of view. The recovery world, like these stories, is peopled by strong sorts who are down but not out. The hope is that this book will inspire its readers and, yes, save lives.
In the piece that opens the book – A Sober Passage in India – Kristen McGuiness tells of her travels, from being a “stoned and drunk” backpacker making her way through Europe, to being a shaky six months into her sobriety and looking for, and finally finding, a support group to join. (This would become a practice she took up in all of her various travels.) Her sense of otherness, of being an alien, seems relieved only by how connected she feels with the others she finally finds, to humorous and touching effect, in a parking garage in Mumbai. Although all the other members are men, and Indian, and some speak only Hindi, McGuiness feels she’s arrived “home.” As she movingly puts it, “Whether it’s in Hindi, German, Greek, Italian, Spanish, Russian, French, Tamil, or English, that home is Grace – the Grace I found when I first got sober and the one that I am rediscovering as I cross the world today.”
The stories that follow share the sensation of the loss of tether that being an addict entails. Patrick O’Neal takes us from the depths of his drugs, depression, relapse, and, finally, being someone he has always wanted to be “—someone with integrity, compassion and commitment.” Unfortunately, in a nod to “rock bottom,” he ends his powerful essay with the one sentence paragraph that says it all: “Of course, I had to destroy my life to get here.”
The rest of the selections in this book play a number of variations on the theme. For Laura House (“My Panic Marriage,”) alcoholism and low self-esteem (ultimately leading to marrying the wrong person) weave a net she must carefully unravel, before she’s able to come out the other end. In Saying Yes to Drugs in Sobriety, Lisa Smith talks about the important healing effects that some prescription drugs have in helping her escape feeling “like skeletal fingers of despair were prying their way between my skull and my brain. The voice in my head had a clear message: ‘You’re worthless.’” In this slight twist on the mantra of the book, Smith tells of how heeding her doctor and taking medication “as I would any medication to treat an illness,” give her the breathing room to get sober, go to meetings, and stay clean. In one of the lighter (no pun intended) essays, Amanda Fletcher breaks down “10 Stupid Things People Say When You’re Sober,” a self-explanatory, and very funny, chapter in this collection. One of the challenges in this type of book is finding new ways to describe essentially the same thing, and Fletcher does this in spades, perhaps no better than when she says that “getting sober could look like an old grocery bag full of dog shit.”
This book is an eminently readable treatise on the fact that drug addiction and the struggle for sobriety and survival are both harrowing and potentially hilarious. Many of the pieces have humor at their core, and this will, as the song says, help the medicine go down. For those readers who are struggling, like the ones with whom both Jesse Monreal (How Can I Go Back to Being Myself When There’s No One There?) and Gayle Saks (There Was an Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe) work, the life-affirming nature of this book is palpable. For the rest of us, it makes for a damn good read. Above all, the guiding principle of this work is, plain and simple, love. Each one of these pieces is a kind of love letter to those who suffer and need our help; Anna David’s choice to put these all together, in an attempt to help them is the ultimate work of love, and will, most certainly, save lives.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews