The aim of this study was to gain an understanding about how people with a former alcohol abuse expresses and gives meaning to feelings of guilt and shame in autobiographical books. In particular the purpose of the study was to find out how the authors writes about feelings of guilt and shame, whether it was expressed explicitly or implicitly, and which meaning the authors gives to feelings of guilt and shame and how these feelings are related to each other. We randomly selected 8 autobiographical books by using different criterias. The foundation of this study was social constructionism, which is also a foundation for one of our analysis methods: discourse analyse. This analysis method was used for the analysis of the expressions that were made in an explicit way. The second analysis method we used for our results was a hermeneutic orientation, which was used for the expressions phrased in an implicit way. The main result of this study was that the authors expressed feelings of guilt and shame in different ways. It occurred both as explicit and implicit expressions and sometimes they described these feelings as if it was two feelings that intertwined and were very alike. Our conclusion is that these feelings are of significance for people with an alcohol abuse and that the authors gave these feelings a negative tenor.