Writing Your Way to Recovery: How Stories Can Save Our Lives

by James Brown

Writing Your Way to How Stories Can Save Our Lives is an extraordinary collection of personal stories and creative writing exercises designed to help others achieve lasting sobriety.  This book provides a vital roadmap to the artistic, personal and spiritual growth to all those battling addiction.

The authors of this unique approach to recovery should be dead.  That they are not is a testament to the resiliency of the human spirit and the power of hope.  Although they now share over three decades of sobriety, they spent even more years as alcoholics and addicts. 

Hell on earth is real for those suffering from substance abuse, but the authors know that there is a way out of this hell.  For they have lived it, and in these pages they offer the hope, strength and wisdom of the once seemingly damned.  

Paperback

About the author

James Brown is the author of several novels, and the memoirs, The Los Angeles Diaries, This River, and Apology to the Young Addict (to-be-published March 2020). He is the recipient of a National Endowment of the Arts Fellowship in Fiction Writing and the Nelson Algren Award in Short Fiction. His work has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, GQ, The Los Angeles Times Magazine, Ploughshares, and The New England Review.

Reviews

[Andrea · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’ve read and enjoyed books by both of the authors of this book, so I trust them when it comes to writing and recovery advice. Writing Your Way to Recovery is a great way to jump-start the writing process and learn some things about oneself along the way.

[Julie Sichi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wonderful book

If you are struggling with addiction or love someone who is I strongly recommend that you read this book and do the writing exercises. The concept of writing to help with personal problems is now new, but the authors have tailored it to specifically help people with alcohol and drug addictions. They offer a unique combination of their own personal stories and college level creative writing prompts that provides a new way to look at the harm addicts do to themselves and others and a way forward to a healthy sober life free from self destruction and regrets.

[Max Lemuz · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a fantastic creative writing guide for the budding addict-writer. Interweaving their own personal experiences in the context of jumpstarting a readers’ own creative (and therapeutic) journey, Brown and O’Neil are raw and to the point when it comes to approaching their own process in a way to help the reader. Furthermore, I came into this book not being an addict of alcohol or hard drugs, but the tools and assignments are universal nonetheless for any activity which has come to rule your life in a negative way.

[Joseph Hirsch · Rating 5 out of 5]

Some poet (I forget who) said that writing poetry could be therapeutic, but that that didn't make it therapy. The point being, I think, that when one writes, craftsmanship must matter at least as much as catharsis. For writing exercises in therapeutic rather than professional settings, that's obviously much less of an issue. If you're writing to overcome the trauma of being sexually abused or OD'ing, you're probably not too worried about split infinitives and passive sentence structure.

That's what makes "Writing your Way to Recovery" such a cool and challenging book, challenging both in the sense that it demands a lot of self-examination from the reader and challenging inasmuch as it blurs the line between where art ends and therapy begins. The old Stephen King line about art being a support system for life and not the other way around comes to mind.

Exercises are uniformly strong, but the one on the taxonomy of A-holes was the best, probably because it brought unexpected levity to a subject where there's usually very little to laugh about. The final section "Putting it all Together," is also a standout, being a compact and stellar mini-short story workshop for the aspiring writer (or the old hand in need of a refresher), be they an addict or no.

The book is a tag team effort between two memoirists of addiction, James Brown, whose work I was familiar with, and Patrick O'Neil, whose work I hadn't previously encountered. Switching voices from chapter to chapter can be jarring, but these offerings are well-sequenced enough that the two teacher-narrators—one a former bank robber and IV drug user, the other an alcoholic who also struggled with a rage problem of Vesuvian proportions—compliment rather than detract from each other.

Highest recommendation, for those looking for catharsis, craft, or both.