High on Arrival (2009)

She's best known as a TV star (One Day at a Time) and as the daughter of John Phillips (founding member of the Mamas & the Papas). But Mackenzie Phillips is an addict, and High on Arrival is a book not about celebrity life, but about the unremitting scramble to get high. She did her best to obliterate a miserable childhood by shooting, snorting, and swallowing every drug possible. Raped at 14 by a stranger and at 19 by her father, she continued a pattern of using and detoxing until an August 2008 drug arrest forced her, she says, to embrace sobriety. Though Phillips' incest revelations have made headlines, the rest of the book — a raw glimpse into the mind of a junkie — is equally dispiriting. C+

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