On the road to recovery: writing as a therapy for people in recovery from addiction

Writing autobiographically is not alien to the addiction recovery setting. Many treatment centres ask clients to write their ‘life story’ to read to their peers within the first weeks of arrival. Autobiographical writing in an addiction recovery setting is a powerful tool. Autobiography is different from creative writing because it emphasises a quest for personal truth: ‘AUTOBIOGRAPHY: …literary work, novel, poem, philosophical treatise, etc., whose author intended, secretly or admittedly, to recount his life, to expose his thoughts or to describe his feelings’ (Lejeune 1989:123).