America Anonymous is the unforgettable story of eight women and men from across the country-including a grandmother, a scholar, a bodybuilder, and a housewife-who are struggling with addictions. For pretty much three years, acclaimed journalist Benoit Denizet-Lewis immersed himself within their lives as they battled drug and alcohol abuse, overeating, and compulsive playing and sexuality. Alternating using their stories is usually Denizet-Lewis’s candid accounts of his personal recovery from intimate craving about America Anonymous: Eight Addicts searching for a Existence and his convincing study of our culture of addiction, where we obsessively seek out fresh and innovative methods to escape the reality of today’s second and make ourselves experience ‘better.’

Dependency is arguably America’s biggest public-health crisis, triggering and exacerbating quite a few most pressing social problems (crime, poverty, skyrocketing health-care costs, and youth abuse and neglect). But while tumor and AIDS survivors have taken towards the streets-and to the halls of Congress-demanding to become counted, an incredible number of lovers with successful long-term recovery talk only to one another in the confines of private twelve-step conferences. (A notable exception may be the addicted celebrity, who often enters and exits rehab with great fanfare.) Through the riveting tales of Americans in a variety of stages of recovery and relapse, Denizet-Lewis shines a limelight on our most misunderstood medical condition (Is cravings a mind disease? A spiritual malady? A moral declining?) and breaks through the shame and denial that still shape our cultural understanding of it-and hamper our ability to deal with it.

Are Americans more addicted than people in other countries, or will it just appear that way? Can meals or sex be as addictive as drugs and alcohol? And can we ever have the ability to treat addiction having a pill? These are just some of the queries Denizet-Lewis explores during his exceptional journey inside the lives of women and men struggling to be, or stay, sober. As the addicts in this publication stumble, fall, and try once again to produce a different and better life, Denizet-Lewis records their struggles-and his own-with honesty and empathy.