Seconds and Inches

“I wear a sash like a beauty queen,” writes Carly Israel, “except mine reads Broken.”

A child of alcoholics and grandchild of Holocaust survivors, Israel felt pressured to deny that anything was wrong at home. To the outside world she was an overachieving, straight-A student, but the reality included substance abuse starting at age nine, an eating disorder, exercising to the point of injury, and eventually, in college, a suicide attempt.

The process of getting sober meant realizing how much...