Book Trailer Video
The Book
Streetlight Chronicles — Book Overview
Streetlight Chronicles offers a modern, street-level rendering of the Twelve Steps through personal journal entries that reflect how recovery is actually lived—unevenly, repetitively, and over time. Rather than instructing or interpreting the recovery process, the book documents how the steps are encountered, resisted, misunderstood, and slowly integrated through real-life experience.
Written in a restrained, observational voice, Streetlight Chronicles resists the tidy resolution and motivational framing common to recovery memoirs. It does not sanitize relapse, accelerate insight, or impose clarity where none exists. Instead, it captures the lived rhythm of recovery—contradiction, hesitation, repetition, and surrender—creating emotional accuracy for readers who often disengage from prescriptive or clinical narratives.
The book functions less as a memoir of redemption than as a cultural document, grounded in lived authority rather than explanation. Its journal-driven structure allows readers to recognize themselves without being instructed, persuaded, or reassured.
By remaining inside experience rather than analysis, Streetlight Chronicles speaks to readers across recovery, mental health, and contemporary literary nonfiction audiences—particularly those skeptical of institutional language but responsive to honesty and restraint. The result is a work designed not for quick consumption, but for return, reflection, and long-term relevance.
Author
David Hanley is the author of Streetlight Chronicles: A Gutter Story in Twelve Steps, a work of narrative nonfiction grounded in lived recovery experience. Writing in a restrained, street-level voice, Hanley explores addiction, survival, and moral reckoning without instruction or motivational framing. His work focuses on recognition over explanation, offering readers an unfiltered account of recovery as it is actually lived—unevenly, quietly, and over time.
David Hanley is the author of Streetlight Chronicles: A Gutter Story in Twelve Steps, a work of narrative nonfiction that documents recovery through lived experience rather than instruction or advocacy. Written in a restrained, journal-driven voice, his work resists tidy redemption arcs and motivational framing, focusing instead on the repetition, contradiction, and moral reckoning that define recovery in real life.
Hanley’s writing sits at the intersection of literary nonfiction, cultural reflection, and lived recovery authority. His work explores addiction, masculinity, faith, and survival without clinical abstraction or institutional language, allowing readers to recognize themselves without being told what to do or who to become.
In addition to his writing, Hanley is the founder of Streetlight Studios, a media and storytelling platform grounded in narrative truth and lived credibility. His work is designed to be returned to rather than consumed once, offering long-form relevance across literary, recovery, and cultural audiences.
PODCAST
StreetTalk creates a public space for real, unscripted conversations about recovery, identity, and lived experience. Through podcasting and street journalism, it surfaces voices that are often excluded from formal clinical or institutional narratives. The platform prioritizes authenticity over expertise, dialogue over instruction, and presence over performance, allowing recovery to be explored as a cultural and human experience rather than a clinical abstraction.
Status: Forthcoming