KEY POINTS:
Hic lit... no, not a typing error caused by a few too many inspirational tequilas, but rather the literary genre dedicated to the warts-and-all tales of excess penned by former junkies and alcoholics.
It's proven a lucrative, if voyeuristic, line of work: sober up and spend your drinking time sharing your war stories for the apparent reason of inspiring others to quit.
Quite possibly it works, although often there's an element of preaching to the converted with these releases and for the rest of us, there's the dangerous hint of making you feel quite complacent about your own levels of alcohol intake.
First at the bar is High Sobriety: Confessions of a Drinker by Alice King (Orion, $60). In many ways, King seems to have been predestined for a drinking problem, worshipping wine from an early age and moving straight into a job as a professional taster.
Hers is the classic tale of one who had a stellar career and found success in most areas of her life, only to wake up one fine morning to the realisation she'd drunk it all away.
She is brutally honest about her crimes and misdemeanours, even roping in one of her children, anonymously, to write the intro explaining just how bad she was before and just how far she's come.
Her honesty makes the book a compelling examination of the insidiousness of alcoholism, and her insightful, self-deprecating humour makes the grim events more palatable. It's a startling, sometimes brutal insight into the life of an alcoholic - and just what it takes to turn the problem around.
Tania Glyde's Cleaning Up (Serpent's Tail $35) follows a similar recipe. It's another, more explicit, tell-all confessional - drink, drugs, sex, lies - but Glyde also spends a lot of her time examining what it was that drove her to drink in the first place. It's also unique in that Glyde cleaned herself up - rather than committing to some 12-step or rehab programme.
It means the book is free of some of the group therapy platitudes that crop up in works by other therapy devotees. At times, you get the feeling writing this book is her 12-step programme.
She aims fire at everything from her ghastly sounding parents to attitudes towards alcohol in modern society for her drinking, but ultimately understands nobody but Glyde put the glass or bottle to her lips. Reading it is a searing, and yes, sobering, experience.
Hellraisers, by Robert Sellers (Random House, $54) is not strictly hic lit. Sellers is not documenting his battles with the bottle, but those of four of the world's most famous and arguably most glamorised and tolerated drinkers - Richard Burton, Oliver Reed, Richard Harris and Peter O'Toole.
Any aficionados of the antics and life stories of these four hellraisers won't find too much new here, but Sellers does a great job of gathering together the key stories that make up the legends.
He examines their - almost unanimously - unhappy childhoods and the most ludicrous of their exploits. It's partly a morality tale about what happens when huge personalities are never told no and the tragedy of wasted talent; and partly a toast to a bygone, much less-sanitised age.
