I’M David Colman, and I’m an alcoholic.

In the 15 years since I quit drinking, I’ve neither spoken nor written those words, and now, in doing so, I have more or less violated the first-name-only tenet of Alcoholics Anonymous, the grass-roots organization whose meetings have helped me (and millions of others) quit drinking. As A.A.’s 11th Tradition states, “We need always maintain personal anonymity at the level of press, radio and films.”

Of course, in the meetings I’ve attended over the years, anonymity has always been a kind of collective fiction. Before and after sessions, I find myself talking to people I know from work: greeting an artist I’ve interviewed or a fashion designer I want to; hashing over logistics with a P.R. guy or a magazine editor. At one of these, a big Sunday meeting in Greenwich Village, I’ve been surprised to see well-known actors and authors up on the dais to share their stories — often, I’ve noticed, when they have something to promote, as if it’s just another a stop on the press tour. Frequently, I find friends introducing me to others in the group by my full name, “You know David Colman, don’t you?”

More and more, anonymity is seeming like an anachronistic vestige of the Great Depression, when A.A. got its start and when alcoholism was seen as not just a weakness but a disgrace.

Over the past few years, so many memoirs about recovery have been released that they constitute a genre unto itself. (Kick Lit?) Moreover, many of them share a format that comes from A.A. itself: most 12-step meetings revolve loosely around what is called a “qualification” — an informal monologue by one member about his or her battle with the bottle. The last few years have brought us fleshed-out qualifications by Augusten Burroughs (“Dry”), Mary Karr (“Lit”), Nikki Sixx (“The Heroin Diaries”), Eric Clapton (“Clapton: The Autobiography”), Nic Sheff (“Tweak”) and James Frey (“A Million Little Pieces,” fabricated, in part, though it was), as well as hundreds of other blurry, cautionary tales of debauchery and redemption. Somewhere, their patron saint — Augustine of Hippo, whose “Confessions” inaugurated the sinner-cum-saint format in A.D. 398 — is smiling. With precious few exceptions, like Thomas De Quincey’s “Confessions of an English Opium-Eater” in 1822 and Lillian Roth’s “I’ll Cry Tomorrow” in 1954, the form barely existed 20 years ago.