Erin Khar Books in Order

Erin Khar grew up in Los Angeles, where, from the outside, her childhood looked orderly. She got strong grades, rode horses, and moved easily among friends. Behind that picture, though, she was carrying depression, anxiety, and pain she didn’t yet have words for.

At eight, she took a painkiller from a family medicine cabinet. By thirteen, she was using heroin. Her addiction would shape the next fifteen years of her life, alongside periods of treatment, relapse, secrecy, relationships, and the hard work of staying alive.

Her later writing doesn’t treat addiction as a simple cautionary tale.

After getting sober and becoming a mother, Khar spent time learning the ordinary routines that can feel enormous after chaos: paying bills, cooking meals, showing up. She worked as a wardrobe stylist, started a clothing line called Love, Jetsy, and later worked as a production coordinator in television promotions. When the clothing business closed in 2009, she found herself asking what she wanted to do next.

The answer, slowly, was writing. Khar returned to school at the New School, began a blog, and started an advice column called Ask Erin. She moved into freelance work in 2011, and the column became a regular place for readers to bring questions about relationships, mental health, parenting, consent, addiction, and the messy parts of everyday life.

She had been collecting material for years in journals, notes, emails, and other personal records. That habit gave her a way to look back with care and specificity when she began writing Strung Out. Published in 2020, the memoir starts with a question from her young son about whether she had ever used drugs. It becomes a clear-eyed account of her childhood, addiction, recovery, and the shame that so often keeps people from asking for help.

It is also a book about trying to understand why relief can become a trap.

Khar’s work often returns to recovery, trauma, motherhood, self-forgiveness, and the way public ideas about addiction can leave people isolated. She writes from lived experience, but keeps the focus on complicated human choices rather than easy labels. Her essays have appeared in a wide range of magazines and publications, and she has continued to write Ask Erin as her advice work has evolved.

Before Strung Out, her story “Last House at the End of the Street” received a 2012 Eric Hoffer Editor’s Choice Prize and appeared in the anthology Best New Writing 2012. She later received a Walter E. Dakin fellowship from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. Her next major project is a debut novel, Still a Suspect, announced for publication in 2028.

Khar lives in New York City. When she isn’t writing, she has said she’s probably watching Beverly Hills, 90210.

That small detail fits her work. Even in difficult subjects, she makes room for pop culture, humor, daily life, and the imperfect business of becoming someone who can tell the truth.