https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jul/15/top-10-books-about-recovery-nina-renata-aron-good-morning-destroyer-of-mens-souls

Finding a life beyond addiction, or other kinds of damaged personal life, is more complicated than we might wish. But as these books show, it is possible

When we hear the word “recovery”, especially alongside “literature”, we tend to think of books on alcoholism or drug addiction. But humans recover from all manner of trials and they do so in ways that defy the traditional arc of addiction lit – a hero’s journey through denial to rock bottom and back up again.

In those stories, the decision to get better often arrives like a bolt of lightning, but this is rarely the case. My own recovery from codependency and alcoholism, which I write about in my memoir Good Morning, Destroyer of Men’s Souls, has felt elusive, circuitous, and sometimes rather boring. To me, recovery is a long and always-occurring process. Since I don’t love the word “journey”, I prefer to think of it as a kind of endurance art, the term performance artists give to work that requires long periods of hardship, solitude or pain.