I highly recommend "Dry" by Augusten Burroughs. It's a memoir about his dealing with his alcoholism and recovery. Reading this book, one paragraph I would be relating to what I was reading and crying and in the next I would be laughing out loud.
Here are a few excerpts that hit me hard:
"I go to the bed and sit on the edge, sinking into the plush down comforter and the featherbed below. I feel a
pr*ck of good fortune, an awareness that I am lucky to have such a nice bed to sit on during my anxiety attack. Why am I so anxious? And the it hits me. I'm not anxious, I'm lonely. And I'm lonely in some horribly deep way and for a flash of an instant, I can see just how lonely, and how deep this feeling runs. And it scares the sh*t out of me to be so lonely because it seems catastrophic--seeing the car just as it hits you. But then all of a sudden, that feeling is gone and I'm blank. So it's like a door quickly opened, just a crack, to show me what a mess I was inside. But not enough to really stare for long and absorb all the details...
...A bell rings. I think of my apartment. It's my deepest, darkest secret. The fact that I drink is not a secret. The fact that I'm usually already drunk when I meet Jim for drinks is not a secret.
My apartment is my secret. It's filled with empty liquor bottles. Not five or six. More like three hundred. Three hundred one-liter bottles of scotch, occupying all the floor space not already occupied by a bed or a chair. Sometimes I myself am stunned by the visual presentation. And the truly odd part is that I really don't know how they got there. You'd think I'd have taken each bottle down to the trash room when it was empty. But I let two collect. And because two is nothing, I let three collect. And on it went....
...Every time I've removed the bottles from my apartment, promised myself it would never happen again, it always happens again. And when I used to drink beer instead of scotch, the beer bottles would collect. I counted the beer bottles once: on thousand, four hundred and fifty-two. You have not felt anxiety until you have carried a plastic trash bag stuffed with a few hundred beer bottles down the stairs in the middle of the night, trying not to make a sound."
When I read these paragraphs from the book, I felt naked, like someone had peeked into my life and wrote down the details that I've tried so hard to hide. But then I felt a strange comfort that I wasn't the only one.