Lately, the most common feedback I get is a question: “Can you recommend a good recovery book?” I want to help, so I make suggestions, but I do it with multiple disclaimers and all of my fingers and toes crossed. Why? Because I know from experience that what helps one person with an alcohol use disorder (AUD) may not help the next person—may, in fact, make recovery seem too difficult or, worse, not worth having. “Different strokes” holds for rehab, support groups, medication, and other forms of treatment for AUDs, and it’s no less true for “quit lit,” so, if I don’t know anything about the person writing to me, I have little basis on which to recommend a book.

But you do know yourself, so what I can do that might actually help is describe some trends and a few individual books so you can judge their potential usefulness to you. One admission first: there are a lot of recovery books out there, so many that I could not possibly read even a representative fraction of them, so please don’t regard this survey as comprehensive.

Within the genre of quit lit, there are subgenres, the two most popular right now being books based on the principles of Alcoholics Anonymous and books based on Allen Carr’s Easyway method, which was developed to help people quit smoking but later extended to drinking and other problems. Right now, Amazon’s top ten books in the category “alcoholism recovery” are exactly split between these two subgenres, with the Easyway method represented by Carr’s Quit Drinking Without Willpower,[1] Holly Whitaker’s Quit Like a Woman, and the most popular book of all, Annie Grace’s This Naked Mind. Alcoholics Anonymous is represented by Alcoholics Anonymous (“the big book”) and Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions (“the twelve and twelve”), as well as the more recent Drop the Rock: Removing Character Defects by Bill P., Todd W., and Sara S.

What ideas and methods do these two categories represent? By now, AA is so familiar that it hardly needs describing, but the basic premise is that some heavy alcohol users have an incurable disease rendering them unable to stop drinking once they start. The disease, “alcoholism,” is progressive, destructive, often fatal, and not within the sufferer’s power to remedy, but it can be arrested by a higher power, normally God, sometimes an abstraction such as nature or AA itself. Though sobriety is considered a gift of this higher power, the recipient should support and develop that gift: attend AA meetings, identify and expunge personal flaws, make amends to others, and cultivate a deep relationship with the higher power. Finally, sobriety means complete abstinence from all psychoactive substances, though this rule has become less absolute in recent years, thanks partly to the acceptance of medication-assisted therapy in treating addiction.

The Easyway (EW) method rejects the idea of alcoholism as a permanent, incurable disease so overwhelming that only a higher power can relieve it. Instead, it views both smoking and drinking as addictions resulting from brainwashing, and it maintains that reversing the brainwashing will break the addiction, no deity (or willpower) required. With alcohol, people think they enjoy it because they’ve been taught to believe that it provides pleasure and sociability, whereas it’s actually a poison that tastes nasty, damages their health, and interferes with their goals, relationships, and daily functioning. The seeming pleasure of a drink is really just relief of mild withdrawal symptoms caused by the addiction, so quitting is not a renunciation of something good but a liberation from something bad. Understand that fact, and quitting becomes easy.

It’s fair, albeit reductive, to say that the AA method focuses more on the characteristics of an AUD, while the EW method focuses more on the characteristics of alcohol. Both methods identify and combat the delusions that sustain AUDs, but with AA the delusion is that you’re not really “alcoholic” and can stop (or cut back) drinking on your own, whereas with EW the delusion is that you don’t really want to stop (or cut back) drinking because it’s vital to your happiness. When it comes to recovery, the AA approach is moral and spiritual while the EW approach is intellectual, by which I don’t necessarily mean smart or complex, just concerned with how people think and why they think that way. In the simplest terms, AA sees alcohol problems as existential, while EW sees them as learned—and readily unlearned.

Despite their differences, there’s a fair amount of overlap between these literary subgenres. For example, some EW books have as strong a spiritual dimension as AA books, though they tend to reflect New Age beliefs, rather than more traditional doctrines. One reason for the emphasis on spirituality is that neither the AA approach nor the EW approach has a strong evidentiary foundation, which will be especially obvious to readers trained in the sciences or in critical thinking. Yes, some EW books make frequent reference to academic research, but, if you track down the articles cited, you’ll quickly discover problems, either in the studies themselves or in the way they’ve been interpreted and used, which is not surprising as EW books tend to be written by non-experts.

That said, what most people with an active AUD need is a new way of thinking about alcohol and their issues around it. The new way doesn’t have to be the most scientifically rigorous way, the way that most perfectly captures all the physical, mental, and social complexities of harmful drinking; it just has to be different enough from the way they already think to make space for new habits and new ways of interpreting their own drinking experience. Because AA has been so culturally dominant for so long, EW-leaning books are more likely to provide this new way of thinking than AA-leaning books, so, if pressed to choose among Amazon’s top-selling recovery books, I would choose Annie Grace’s This Naked Mind.

But there are other, less popular subgenres to consider as well. One that can be very useful to a person with an active AUD is a great recovery memoir—great because it’s insightful and well-written or great because the author’s experience echoes yours (or both). Such a story can also provide a new way of thinking about alcohol and alcohol problems, of course, but perhaps more important is the way it makes you feel less uniquely wretched in your struggles. AUDs are very isolating, particularly when they’re severe and/or long-lasting, so reading about someone a little bit like you who has faced and overcome similar difficulties can help you feel more hopeful and less alone. There are hundreds of such books, but there are also dozens of annotated “best of” lists online, some focusing on recent publications, and some focusing on all-time classics, so it shouldn’t be too hard to find a book that speaks to you. I haven’t read anything that rocked my world lately, but I just started Lidia Yuknavitch’s The Chronology of Water, which looks like it will, and I’ve long admired Caroline Knapp’s Drinking: A Love Story, Mary Karr’s Lit, and Augusten Burroughs’s Dry, even though I know some of it is made-up.

Another important subgenre is the expert’s overview of alcohol and alcohol problems. Written by physicians, neuroscientists, or other addiction specialists, these books tend to feature better, more up-to-date information than the other subgenres and to describe multiple therapeutic approaches, rather than just advocating for one. They also tend to acknowledge the complexities of dealing with an AUD and the limitations of what addiction treatment has to offer, so, if what you need right now is a book to lay out a clear path to sobriety and cheer you along it, choose a book from another subgenre. If you’re a skeptic like me, with an inbred distrust of easy answers, this subgenre is invaluable because it offers information that you can use to put together your own unique recovery plan. That’s how I got sober after repeatedly trying and failing to follow established paths that did not help me, however many other lives they may have saved.

At the moment, my favorite example of this subgenre is a book with a rather clumsy title: Drink? The New Science of Alcohol and Your Health by British neuropsychopharmacologist David Nutt. Professor Nutt is most famous as a controversial government drugs advisor fired for arguing that psychoactive drugs should be reclassified according to their actual harms, noting along the way that alcohol is more harmful than ecstasy. Though sometimes labeled “anti-alcohol” for such headline-grabbing comparisons, he actually likes a drink (and co-owns a wine bar) but, as a scientist, has to go where the evidence leads. Drink? is simply a straightforward, accessible survey of the latest research on alcohol and its effects, including a chapter on alcohol addiction that explains the physiology of it, how it develops, how to recognize it, what its root causes may be, and how it can be treated.

The last subgenre I want to mention does not qualify as quit lit, except to people like me who find sobriety easier—or only possible at all—if they understand the politics of alcohol use, misuse, and non-use. Good books about the history of the alcohol industry and the people who have opposed it, books that are both intellectually rigorous and willing to question conventional wisdom, help me understand more deeply how I learned to drink the way I did, what social and economic interests try to keep me drinking that way, and how to resist, or even overthrow, those interests. Yes, some books in other subgenres—the EW-based bestseller Quit Like a Woman, for example—touch on such matters (yay!), but I’m never going to be satisfied with a few quick digs at alcohol industry propagandizing. I want a full picture, complete with lots of solid documentary evidence, rigorous analysis, and recognition of other scholars’ work; that’s just who I am as a reader.

The past year or so has seen two superb additions to this not-really-a-subgenre: Smashing the Liquor Machine by Mark Lawrence Schrad and Drinking up the Revolution by James Wilt. Smashing the Liquor Machine, subtitled A Global History of Prohibition, blew my mind by showing me that everything I thought I knew about Prohibition was wrong—and way too ethnocentric. Rather than pinchy-lipped cabals of reactionary small-p-puritans, temperance movements tended to be progressive, anti-colonial, anti-slavery, pro-labor, pro-women’s suffrage, and generally on what I would consider the right side of history. Moreover, they were not interested in tut-tutting people who quaffed a little homebrew but in fighting a liquor industry that was using its products to cheat trading partners, steal land, expropriate natural resources, and commit other population-level harms, up to and including genocide. Reading the book, I learned that a good half of the world figures I most admire from the past few centuries were strong temperance advocates, even though that fact went unacknowledged in all of my college courses and is rarely mentioned in even the best, most up-to-date history books. I swear, if you want an antidote for that feeling you sometimes get when you quit drinking, that you’re now with the stodgy, dull, judgmental people instead of with the forward-thinking, exciting, open-minded people, this book is that antidote—and it will also explain to you why you had that feeling in the first place.

One caution from my experience: think twice before buying or borrowing this book in audio form, as I did. It’s long and dense, and I often wished I had bought it in book or e-book form so I could more easily highlight, annotate, and jump back to an earlier point in the text. If you’re an audio whiz, maybe you’ll feel differently, but I kicked myself for thinking I could listen effectively while exercising and doing chores. Maybe on a flight from, say, Seattle to Sydney . . ..

Drinking up the Revolution, subtitled How to Smash Big Alcohol and Reclaim Working-Class Joy, is another great book for people in recovery. Unfortunately, most of them wouldn’t read it even if Margot Robbie or Timothée Chalamet brought the book to their house and offered to read it to them naked. The reason is that Drinking up the Revolution is essentially two books in one, a work of scholarship and a manifesto, and the manifesto is written for a small, highly-specialized audience that too many Americans love to hate. But the work of scholarship is for everyone, especially people who want to quit drinking, because it’s a scathing, substantive indictment of the alcohol industry, page after well-documented page tracing the history of Big Alcohol’s growth and consolidation, demonstrating how it has shaped policy, influenced research, and encouraged dangerous drinking to maximize profits. For people with AUDs, it illuminates the question “Why do I drink so much?” from a critical—and long-neglected—social and economic perspective, which can be extremely helpful to anyone struggling with sobriety. Moreover, it rouses genuine anger at the alcohol industry, making it a lot easier to walk away from that industry’s products.

The manifesto, however, addresses the socialist left, saying, in effect, “I know you don’t care about alcohol, the problems it creates, or the industry that pushes it, but here’s why you should care—and should embrace my vision of state-run alcohol distribution and a society less centered on alcohol.” Okay, despite my slightly flippant summary, I completely agree with Mr. Wilt that the left should stop ignoring alcohol issues, as I’ve said repeatedly. And I’m on board with de-centering alcohol, obviously, and even the state-run distribution fantasy, though with a tiny eye-roll about the fantasy given that policy is hurtling at warp speed in the opposite direction all over the planet. Still, the fantasy is more than just a blueprint: it’s a way to reassure leftists that they’ll still be able to drink after Big Alcohol is smashed and to say very clearly “I am NOT advocating prohibition,” reassurances I also make over and over to preempt accusations of neoprohibitionism. But I also agree with the principle that people who want to drink should be able to buy and consume alcohol, as long as they do it in a way that preserves the health, safety, and happiness of the whole community. In other words, I don’t dispute a single idea in the manifesto; I’m just sad because I personally believe that convincing socialists to add alcohol policy to their bulging portfolios is less important than informing people with AUDs, as well as the general public, about the role Big Alcohol has played in the development and maintenance of alcohol addiction.

And there’s no way to carve the book up for general readers because the whole thing is larded with socialist terminology. So, with a heavy heart, I recommend it only to people comfortable with that language and the ideas it references. Damn, where’s George Orwell when you need him?

Double damn, I meant this to be a short blog post. Okay, I’ll wrap up, but, before I go, I want to qualify my comments about subgenres by saying that some quit lit, including some I’ve already mentioned, looks hybrid because authors writing “how to get sober” books often include thousands of words devoted to their own recovery stories, so their books appear to be both self-help and memoir. They’re not, though; they’re pure how-to with the author as a case study.

Why does the difference matter? The purpose of a case study, even of the author by the author, is to reveal patterns that predict other people’s behavior, whereas pure memoirs are just supposed to be “true stories, well told.” It’s not that memoirists never analyze their experience in ways readers can learn from and apply to their own lives; they certainly do. But they don’t present their experience as paradigmatic in the way that the author of a case study does. And that matters to readers because authors who see their own experience as paradigmatic sometimes overgeneralize from that experience, stating or implying that what was true for them must be true for you, what worked for them will work for you.

That idea is, not to put too fine a point on it, horseshit. More than three million people worldwide die of alcohol-related causes every year, some comfortable, some desperately poor, some high-functioning, some reeling from catastrophe to catastrophe, some in supportive homes, some in alcohol-soaked hellscapes, some unsure they have an alcohol problem, some unable to breathe unless there’s a bottle within arm’s reach. Recovery authors, not surprisingly, tend to come from the more comfortable ends of these spectrums; moreover, they tend to have more resources (time, money, health care, mental health care, social support) than most people, so their experience is likely paradigmatic only for a fairly narrow segment of the population—and that’s even before you factor in temperament, belief systems, cultural differences, and other ways that human beings vary. Look, I’m not saying these authors haven’t suffered from their addictions and that their stories don’t have hope and help to offer. I’m saying simply that readers should be a little skeptical when authors claim “If I can get sober this way, anyone can,” or otherwise treat their own experience as evidence that whatever recovery method they’re pushing will work for you.

It might, and that would be great! But, if it doesn’t, don’t blame yourself; consider the method a bad fit, and keep looking for a better one—or devise your own.

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[1] Where possible, I have hotlinked a book title to the author’s own web site unless the site required me to disclose information about myself, in which case I hotlinked to the book’s Amazon page. If you are an author mentioned in this survey and would like me to use a different link, please get in touch via my feedback page and send me the URL you prefer.