About the book
My Journey To Having Had
The Impossible Becomes Possible
My Journey to Having Had is a memoir of addiction and recovery. It opens in the Jewish neighborhood of Squirrel Hill in Pittsburgh, follows a young man from his first injection at Penn State in 1968 through thirteen years of active addiction, and arrives at a six-day delirium tremens nightmare that ended in complete surrender.
From there it is the story of what happened next: a long-term recovery house in Youngstown, Ohio; a fresh start in Miami; and a hand in building Narcotics Anonymous in South Florida when there were only two meetings in the whole region.
My Journey To Having Had
What does “having had” mean?
For anyone who has sat in a twelve-step meeting, it carries a powerful meaning. The Twelfth
Step begins, “Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps…” — a phrase that
points to the heart of recovery itself: transformation. Phil first met the steps in 1973, when AA
brought a meeting into the detox unit where he was staying. Over the next seven years he
struggled to understand them, confused by the word “God” and unable to see the difference
between religion and spirituality.
WH AT MAKES IT DI STINCTIVE
Not a book you finish once
Poems before stories
Each chapter opens
with short recovery
poems, with a larger
collection near the end.
God incidences
The stories are built
around moments that
look like coincidence
and turn out to be
something larger.
Parables to return to
Collected parables and
stories make it a book
for a hard day.
A verifiable author
More than forty-six
years in recovery. Most
recovery books tell you
it works; this one shows
you the man it worked
on.
“I used to think God tested me to see if I would become defiant — I’ve learned it’s life that tests me to see if on God I am reliant.”
WHO IT ’ S FOR
Who should read it
People in recovery, those who love them, and anyone who struggles with the concepts Phil
once struggled with — especially readers unfamiliar with twelve-step recovery, or wary of the
word “God.” His hope: “your life will be better after reading about mine.”