What does recovery even mean?

The Small Book gathers stories from the margins of darkness: mental illness, love, sex, debt, sobriety, inadequacy, loneliness, grief, and the long shadows that follow us forever — long enough to become our closest companions.

What happens in the coldest, darkest-bird hours after you relapse and abandon your family in favor of a bar and your mistress? When do you stop being terrorized by your newfound clarity after your wife disintegrates from a rare form of cancer in your arms? When can you stop being angry at your brother for overdosing and dying alone on his filthy couch in front of his cats?

These are not clean stories of redemption or instructions for becoming better. They are funny, brutal, intimate accounts of what happens when the ways we numb ourselves stop working, and when the secrets we keep begin to cost more than we can bear.

Brought to you by The Small Bow, the community A.J. Daulerio founded to collect and share the type of recovery writing he wanted to read, The Small Book gathers 30 essays and interviews from Clancy Martin, Cord Jefferson, Rax King, Mary H.K. Choi, Emily Gould, J Wortham, and others. Woven throughout are 50 anonymous reader Check-Ins: short, cinematic, sometimes gleefully depraved dispatches from the trenches of recovery.

Whatever brought you here, we're glad you came.