Scouted as a model while his mother lay dying, he walked Paris shows weeks later. Then colitis took his colon, and the painkillers took the next ten years.

In a blackout he threw a shovel at a man and lost the job he had held ten years. Two detoxes failed. What held was a 7am meeting and a job cleaning dog kennels.

He paraded groceries past the neighbors at 10am so his wife looked like the crazy one, and drank mouthwash when the vodka ran out. What finally ended it.

Her mother carried every grudge to her deathbed. A coach on radical acceptance, why she will never coach a narcissist, and pain that begins as buried anger.

He overdosed in ninth grade, cut off his ankle monitor at seventeen and ran for a month, until his father made him turn himself in. Sober again after a relapse.

She waited up and called the bars. Then Al-Anon told her to go to bed at eleven and let her husband be a grown man. How she rebuilt a marriage from her side.

A cryptogram in a jail cell told him life in the fast lane ends in an awful hurry. He weighed 121 pounds at intake, and his parents mortgaged a paid-off house.

Thirty-five days at his first program, then high thirty-five minutes later. He was reading Tulsa arrest records for a place to buy when he called a friend.

An appendectomy at 31 handed him his first pills and six years of daily use. Then he dozed off on the commuter train and saw his grown daughter grieving him.

A shot of dorm vodka at 2am to help her sleep was the night she found her medicine. A classmate reported the smell, and the fifth rehab was the one that held.

After a blackout crash and 57 stitches she decided to stop driving, not drinking. What worked was an adviser who smelled it on her and handed her a pamphlet.

For four weeks she drank vodka from a water bottle in front of her own therapist. Then a flood took the apartment she was not in, and doctors warned her family.

He talked himself into two federal felonies, served three and a half years and left with $172 and a bus ticket. He drank another decade before a death woke him.

Her boss drove her to a meeting instead of lunch and she sat there and shook. Cans filled her washer and microwave before her dad found her after a seizure.

He put the first rock act into Las Vegas and sold not one ticket. Handcuffed on a New Jersey rail track at 4am, his only thought was what to tell his wife.

Five sober years left him just as dishonest and angry. A book about adoption, and one drive he should never have made, changed what recovery meant to him.

At seven the barman at the Ritz knew his order. At sixteen he watched grief go quiet with a handful of pills and wanted it. He got to New York with $50.

He spent graduation night handcuffed to a chair in a police station. A year later, hiding in a motel as a missing person, he found a hotline in a phone book.

His father bought him a burial plot, then refused to post bail. He left jail in prison flip-flops with a $90 gift card and walked miles to a car wash job.

He turned up high to his own father’s intervention and still talked him into treatment. A year later he landed home with thirty seconds left to say goodbye.