The top 10 books about addiction

Sex, food, envy, drugs, dreams and drink: addiction is never simple and rarely forgotten. SJ Watson, author of Before I Go To Sleep and now Second Life, shares his top 10 titles

Wasted … Ewan McGregor in Trainspotting. Photograph: Sportsphoto/Allstar

SJ Watson - Guardian

Wednesday 11 February 2015 cial networking allows us to present multiple versions of ourselves to the world, identities that are both highly curated and tightly controlled. At the same time, I’d been musing on how our sense of self is never really fixed, yet we tell ourselves one historical narrative, constantly rewritten to make sense of the changes in our lives. It can be all too easy to look back on the person that we “used to be”, on the road-no-longer-travelled, with a fondness and regret that are often misplaced.

I realised that it was this multiplicity of self that I wanted to write about. A character, Julia, began to emerge, but the wheels were still spinning until a friend said to me, “You know, addiction is a very patient disease.” That one phrase became the key that unlocked the novel; I began to see addiction as something cunning, lying in wait, biding its time. I realised it would form the backbone of the book: Julia would be a recovering addict, someone haunted by her past, yet also in some way nostalgic for it. She would come to see the internet as a means to explore the life she might have had, not realising that conquering one addiction does not mean conquering them all. Like many of us, her battle would ultimately be with herself. Here, then, are my top 10 books featuring addiction, in some form or other.
More