Books like Dry by Augusten Burroughs

Jeannette Walls' memoir chronicles her turbulent childhood in a dysfunctional, itinerant family, detailing poverty, alcoholism, and homelessness across the United States as she seeks stability and personal growth.

When Libby Day’s family is brutally murdered, she blames her older brother Ben, who is imprisoned for life. Twenty‑four years later, a coaxing group suggests Ben’s innocence and forces Libby to revisit the night’s trauma and unravel the truth.

Dave Eggers' 2000 memoir chronicles his struggles and resilience after the cancer-related deaths of his parents, as he assumes responsibility for his younger brother and confronts the challenges of growing up alone.

A Jewish American teen travels to Ukraine with a tattered photograph, seeking the woman who saved his grandfather during the Holocaust, guided by a quirky translator, a blind veteran, and an oddly named guide dog.

Augusten Burroughs recounts his turbulent adolescence spent in a decaying Victorian home run by a psychiatrist, where ordinary rites of childhood give way to a surreal blend of family eccentricity, escape from school, and the early years of a future author.

In the Gulf‑swamp town of Leechfield, Texas, a group of oil workers called the Liars’ Club spin tall tales, while a young woman confronts her family’s hidden past, unmasking lies that threaten her sanity.

This is how: Practical advice on surviving life's challenges.

A lively, humorous memoir recounting the life of mystery author Mary Higgins Clark, tracing her early work as a secretary, stewardess and radio writer to her acclaim as a bestselling novelist, all set against the backdrop of 1929 New York and the Great Depression.

Burroughs’s *My Education* compiles vivid, visionary dreams that probe perception and creative consciousness, offering a memoir‑like glimpse into his artistic psyche.

Pete Hamill’s memoir chronicles four decades of his life intertwined with New York drinking culture, revealing how alcohol shaped his personal and professional bonds before he finally left the habit behind.

Joseph Heller, author of *Catch‑22*, chronicles his life from a Depression‑era Coney Island childhood through wartime service, postwar education, career in advertising, and literary success.

In 1940s Pacoima, Mary Helen Ponce navigates poverty, adventure and longing for a better life, sneaking into circuses, church bazaars, and neighboring trees while dreaming of shiny patent‑leather shoes.

A memoir spanning the life of author Felice Picano, chronicling his love affairs, bookstore adventures, and the writing of his novels, while reflecting on the 1970s 'Gay 2,000' and the AIDS crisis in the Pines.

"An astounding and brilliant memoir, A.A. Gill's Pour Me a Life is a riveting meditation on the author's alcoholism, seen through the lens of the memories that remain, and the transformative moments that saved him from a lifelong addiction and early death. Best known for his hysterically funny and often scathing restaurant reviews for the London Sunday Times, journalist Adrian Gill writes about his near-fatal alcoholism in this extraordinary lucid memoir. By his early twenties, at London's prestigious Saint Martin's art school, Gill was entrenched in his addiction. He writes from the handful of memories that remain, of drunken conquests with anonymous women, of waking to morbid hallucinations, of emptying jacket pockets that "were like tiny crime scenes," helping him puzzle his whereabouts back together. Throughout his recollections, Gill traces his childhood, his early diagnosis of dyslexia, the deep sense of isolation when he was sent to boarding school at age eleven, the disappearance of his only brother, whom he has not seen for decades. When Gill was confronted at age thirty by a doctor who questioned his drinking, he answered honestly for the first time, not because he was ready to stop, but because his body was too damaged to live much longer. Gill was admitted to a thirty-day rehab center--then a rare and revolutionary concept in England--and has lived three decades of his life sober. Written with clear-eyed honesty and empathy, Pour Me a Life is a haunting account of addiction, its exhilarating power and destructive force, and is destined to be a classic of its kind"--