Addiction, Capitalism, Spirituality, and Recovery Narratives.

Alongside her creative non-fiction and fiction, Charlotte Northall writes criticism and essays. She holds a PhD in Creative and Critical Writing titled Writing as Spiritual Practice: Beyond Dominant Narratives, which explores addiction as a spiritual and developmental condition shaped by late-stage capitalism.

Drawing on lived experience of addiction and recovery, as well as several years working as a peer-support outreach worker, the research examines how memoir can both reproduce and resist dominant recovery narratives. It argues for writing as a spiritual and political practice capable of unsettling ideological frameworks that commodify suffering and reinforce neoliberal understandings of the self.

Engaging interdisciplinary perspectives across trauma studies, cultural theory and mysticism — including the work of Simone Weil, Carl Jung, Taisen Deshimaru, Gabor Maté, Bruce Alexander and Mark Fisher — the project situates addiction within a broader cultural and economic landscape. It critiques the limitations of biomedical and behavioural models, suggesting that compulsive behaviour may be more fully understood through experiences of attachment disruption, trauma, disconnection and spiritual hunger.

The research also examines addiction memoir as a genre, challenging the dominance of redemptive narrative structures aligned with ideals of self-mastery and moral progress. Instead, it proposes memoir as a site of spiritual attention and political resistance, capable of articulating forms of experience that remain unassimilated by dominant ideology.