Self-esteem in literature

Waking Up is an addiction novel that traces the decline of twentysomething Rabbit Reynolds. Rabbit has found a strategy for coping with her intense loneliness---anesthetic alcoholism. The novel is about her desperate need for approval, validation, and external measures of self-worth, and the ways in which that need manifests itself in substance abuse, self-mutilation, and hollow relationships. Waking Up opens with Rabbit's lowest point, then goes back in time to follow her descent and, finally, her first steps toward recovery.