Love Junkie (2008)

Growing up with an alcoholic mother and an indifferent father can't be good for an addictive personality. It certainly wasn't good for the sexually obsessed Rachel Resnick, who sought the constant validation of abusive men. Resnick, who calls her addiction ''lethal,'' says she gave into anything that would please her partners, even if she knew it would be emotionally damaging — from threeways to sex with a female prostitute in Phuket. Shaking her addiction, she says, was ''tantamount to weaning oneself off of the most powerful drugs.'' Although the larger themes in Resnick's 12-step program — ''we can't control the universe'' and ''accepting we are broken [as a species]'' — are admirable, it's difficult to slog through Love Junkie's more than 200 pages of gory self-destruction. B–