The literary accounts of drinking that have meant the most to me aren’t the ones whose stories are lit in neon, full of sprawling hijinks and outrageous blunders, but the ones that capture how lonely it can become. They aren’t chronicles of the way many people can drink, but stories that have made me feel less alone in the way I used to drink: desperately, repetitively, often gracelessly, delivered constantly back into the dingy storeroom of the self. Perhaps a deepening awareness of this kind of drinking is part of why more young people are choosing not to drink at all. These books are often dark, but there is something generous in their honesty – never promising salvation, just some solace.

The grimly self-destructive antiheroine of Jean Rhys’s Good Morning, Midnight holes herself up in a Paris apartment with “the bright idea of drinking herself to death”, and the novel is clear-eyed about the numbing claustrophobia of drinking. It’s also canny about the spectacle of drunk weeping – the way no one wants to be bothered by a melodramatic lush – and it’s surprisingly funny: people keep offering this woman coffee and cocoa, but she knows what she wants.

James Welch’s novel Winter in the Blood is set on the Fort Belknap Indian Reservation in central Montana, and its atmosphere is humid with booze: a woman’s teeth gone green from crème de menthe, a purple teddy bear on a bar stool, the wine-stained butterflies on a dress. The novel comes at trauma with the spare, lyric voice of a narrator whose understatement testifies to what Louise Erdrich calls “the modesty of his despair”. It’s an exploration of the ways we can feel far away from our own lives – how memory can feel more immediate than the present, or how, as the narrator puts it: “I was as distant from myself as a hawk from the moon.”

Siren of sorrow … Billie Holiday. Photograph: Michael Ochs Archives

Billie Holiday’s memoir, Lady Sings the Blues, is a searing account of her life as a brilliant artist, a heroin addict, simultaneously worshipped as a siren of sorrow and persecuted by a legal system structured by systemic racism. Booze runs like a glimmering ribbon through these pages – she even makes moonshine from potato peelings while incarcerated – but Holiday emerges as a figure far more nuanced and human than her mythic image. In one memorable scene, she cooks red beans and hamburger meat – out of cans, heated with steno fuel – for the entire staff of her London hotel.

It was only after I’d done a lot of drinking –and eventually got sober – that I realised how much Stephen King’s horror classic The Shining, a novel that seems to be about a man’s breakdown in a haunted hotel, is actually about drinking. The protagonist is a dry drunk who relapses (either physically or spiritually, it’s never entirely clear) when a ghost-bartender serves him a long row of whiskey shots at the deserted bar; and the novel explores what happens when longing isn’t reckoned with, only suppressed; how anger and nostalgia can combine forces in toxic ways.

After nearly eight years sober, I read Kaveh Akbar’s poetry collection Calling a Wolf a Wolf, and it was like a bright flash of lightning illuminating the landscape of craving. The poems are full of savage, funny, tender articulations of thirst – indeed, articulating thirst is one of their core projects. “If I called a wolf a wolf,” the speaker thinks, “I might dull its fangs.” The nerve-endings of these poems are open to despair, delight and bafflement all at once: “Some people don’t even want to drink,/ aren’t tempted by the pools of liquor / all around them. This seems / a selfishness. God loves the hungry / more than the full.”

The Recovering by Leslie Jamison is published by Granta. To order a copy for £17.20 (RRP £20) go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.