The recovering : intoxication and its aftermath

From the New York Times bestselling author of The Empathy Exams comes this transformative work showing that sometimes the recovery is more gripping than the addiction.

With its deeply personal and seamless blend of memoir, cultural history, literary criticism, and reportage, The Recovering turns our understanding of the traditional addiction narrative on its head, demonstrating that the story of recovery can be every bit as electrifying as the train wreck itself. Leslie Jamison deftly excavates the stories we tell about addiction -- both her own and others' -- and examines what we want these stories to do and what happens when they fail us. All the while, she offers a fascinating look at the larger history of the recovery movement, and at the complicated bearing that race and class have on our understanding of who is criminal and who is ill.

At the heart of the book is Jamison's ongoing conversation with literary and artistic geniuses whose lives and works were shaped by alcoholism and substance dependence, including John Berryman, Jean Rhys, Billie Holiday, Raymond Carver, Denis Johnson, and David Foster Wallace, as well as brilliant lesser-known figures such as George Cain, lost to obscurity but newly illuminated here. Through its unvarnished relation of Jamison's own ordeals, The Recovering also becomes a book about a different kind of dependency: the way our desires can make us all, as she puts it, "broken spigots of need." It's about the particular loneliness of the human experience-the craving for love that both devours us and shapes who we are.

For her striking language and piercing observations, Jamison has been compared to such iconic writers as Joan Didion and Susan Sontag, yet her utterly singular voice also offers something new. With enormous empathy and wisdom, Jamison has given us nothing less than the story of addiction and recovery in America writ large, a definitive and revelatory account that will resonate for years to come.

Author Notes

Leslie Jamison was born in Washington D.C. in 1983. She has worked as a baker, an office temp, an innkeeper, a tutor, and a medical actor. She is the author of The Gin Closet and The Empathy Exams: Essays. She is currently finishing a doctoral dissertation at Yale University about addiction narratives.

(Bowker Author Biography)

Reviews (6)

Publisher's Weekly Review

Jamison easily captures the intimate feel of her writing style in the audiobook edition of her gripping memoir about her struggles with addiction. She enmeshes listeners in her early adulthood and the endless forms of agonizing pain-and blissful pleasure-that she experienced via drugs and alcohol. Jamison smoothly intersperses her personal anecdotes with words from so-called drunk prophets John Berryman, Jean Rhys, Raymond Carver, Billie Holiday, Elizabeth Bishop, Denis Johnson, and others. She wants to dispel the long-held beliefs that addiction cannot be broken, and that misery, booze, and drugs are the engines of the creative process. Jamison transports listeners into her Alcoholic Anonymous sessions, where she learns to escape her self-absorption, listen to and sympathize with others, tolerate boredom, and treasure the consolation of shared experiences. It's doubtful that another narrator could have engaged listeners so deeply in such a difficult and timeless issue. A Little, Brown hardcover. (Apr.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Booklist Review

*Starred Review* In this exacting memoir and multifaceted inquiry into addiction and recovery, Jamison reveals that while she was at Harvard and the Iowa Writers' Workshop and writing her novel, The Gin Closet (2010), she was, in phases, cutting herself, coping with anorexia, and drinking heavily. She worked on her highly lauded essay collection, The Empathy Exams (2014), while attending a doctoral program at Yale and battling to stay sober. Jamison observes, My childhood was easier than most, and I ended up drinking anyway, a conundrum somewhat explained by a parsing of her family history. Her belief that she had to earn affection and love by being interesting induced her to seek the unfettering, the bliss, the risk, and the escape alcohol delivers. Writing with galvanizing specificity and mesmerizing fluidity, Jamison recounts her constant preoccupation with alcohol; her numerous crazy, dangerous, bad drunks; her blackouts and hangovers. She exhaustively documents her fraught relationships with men, gradually disclosing how her drinking fostered a distorted and isolating sense of self. As she commits herself to AA, she explores the complications and paradoxes of recovery, including the way stories of addiction are told.Within this relentless work of self-scrutiny, Jamison also conducts a meticulously researched, richly nuanced, and sensitive inquiry into the lives of now-legendary alcoholic writers, and keenly critiques the romanticized whisky-and-ink mythology of the tormented, hard-drinking literary genius. She contrasts the reverence for such white male writers as John Berryman and Raymond Carver, whom she portrays deeply, with the ways chemically dependent women writers, such as Jean Rhys, another focus, were maligned or pitied. Widening the lens and adding race to the mix, she protests the brutal criminalization of addiction that destroyed Billie Holiday. She then compares the lives of famous addicts with those of the diverse people she meets at the many recovery meetings she attends, encounters that alter her life and her writing.With her thorough dissection of The Lost Weekend (1944), Charles R. Jackson's now-classic autobiographical novel of alcoholism, and reclamation of George Cain's autobiographical novel of addiction and African American life, Blueschild Baby (1970), Jamison's encompassing investigation makes an excellent pairing with Olivia Laing's The Trip to Echo Spring: On Writers and Drinking (2014). Jamison's questing immersion in intoxication and sobriety is exceptional in its vivid, courageous, hypnotic telling; brilliant in its subtlety of perception, interpretation, and compassion; and capacious in its scholarship, scale, concern, and mission.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2018 Booklist

New York Review of Books Review

THE RECOVERING: Intoxication and Its Aftermath, by Leslie Jamison. (Back Bay/Little, Brown, $18.99.) Jamison, adding to a large group of addiction memoirs, maps her own recovery while considering the relationship between creativity and substance abuse. The emotional firepower of the book comes in its second half, after she has embraced sobriety; our critic, Dwight Garner, called this section "close to magnificent, and genuinely moving." LOVE AND RUIN, by Paula McLain. (Ballantine, $17.) McLain's latest novel, about the marriage between the journalist Martha Gellhorn and Ernest Hemingway, takes up the question that vexed (and probably doomed) their relationship: Why must a woman choose between her career and what her husband wants her to be? McLain drew on primary sources to develop her fiery protagonist. A WORLD WITHOUT 'WHOM': The Essential Guide to Language in the BuzzFeed Age, by Emmy J. Favilla. (Bloomsbury, $18.) The BuzzFeed copy chief discusses her plan to codify language in a digital era, balancing a need for logic with flexibility to account for how people actually talk. Along with a look at the rules she devised, the book offers a guide to the quandaries we face as the way we communicate online reshapes language itself. MADNESS IS BETTER THAN DEFEAT, by Ned Beauman. (Vintage, $17.) Emboldened by "fungal clairvoyance" after inhaling mold in an old temple, a C.I.A. agent tells the story of a fateful meeting in the Honduran jungle in 1938. The novel's twists and turns touch on everything from colonialism to conspiracy theories. Our reviewer, Helene Stapinski, called the story "a kitchen-sink sendup of spy novels, 1930s Hollywood and screwball newspaper comedies, with a pinch of Pynchon thrown in for fun." ENLIGHTENMENT NOW: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress, by Steven Pinker. (Penguin, $18.) Pinker sets out to persuade pessimists - people disturbed by today's threats like climate change and the rise of authoritarian populism across the globe - of one thing: that life has never been better, both in the West and in developing countries. The Harvard psychologist marshals an impressive array of data to back up his claim. ETERNAL LIFE, by Dara Horn. (Norton, $15.95.) When readers meet Rachel, she's a suburban great-grandmother in the 21st century. But that life is only the latest in a string of reincarnations, the consequences of a promise she made in Roman-occupied Jerusalem some 2,000 years earlier. Horn's elegant novel explores how Rachel's immortality impedes her ability to be fully, truly alive.

Guardian Review

From Stephen King's The Shining to Billy Holiday's memoir, the novelist picks five books that offer solace, if not salvation The literary accounts of drinking that have meant the most to me aren't the ones whose stories are lit in neon, full of sprawling hijinks and outrageous blunders, but the ones that capture how lonely it can become. They aren't chronicles of the way many people can drink, but stories that have made me feel less alone in the way I used to drink: desperately, repetitively, often gracelessly, delivered constantly back into the dingy storeroom of the self. Perhaps a deepening awareness of this kind of drinking is part of why more young people are choosing not to drink at all. These books are often dark, but there is something generous in their honesty - never promising salvation, just some solace. The grimly self-destructive antiheroine of Jean Rhys 's Good Morning, Midnight holes herself up in a Paris apartment with "the bright idea of drinking herself to death", and the novel is clear-eyed about the numbing claustrophobia of drinking. It's also canny about the spectacle of drunk weeping - the way no one wants to be bothered by a melodramatic lush - and it's surprisingly funny: people keep offering this woman coffee and cocoa, but she knows what she wants. James Welch's novel Winter in the Blood is set on the Fort Belknap Indian Reservation in central Montana, and its atmosphere is humid with booze: a woman's teeth gone green from crème de menthe, a purple teddy bear on a bar stool, the wine-stained butterflies on a dress. The novel comes at trauma with the spare, lyric voice of a narrator whose understatement testifies to what Louise Erdrich calls "the modesty of his despair". It's an exploration of the ways we can feel far away from our own lives - how memory can feel more immediate than the present, or how, as the narrator puts it: "I was as distant from myself as a hawk from the moon." Billie Holiday 's memoir, Lady Sings the Blues, is a searing account of her life as a brilliant artist, a heroin addict, simultaneously worshipped as a siren of sorrow and persecuted by a legal system structured by systemic racism. Booze runs like a glimmering ribbon through these pages - she even makes moonshine from potato peelings while incarcerated - but Holiday emerges as a figure far more nuanced and human than her mythic image. In one memorable scene, she cooks red beans and hamburger meat - out of cans, heated with steno fuel - for the entire staff of her London hotel. It was only after I'd done a lot of drinking -and eventually got sober - that I realised how much Stephen King's horror classic The Shining, a novel that seems to be about a man's breakdown in a haunted hotel, is actually about drinking. The protagonist is a dry drunk who relapses (either physically or spiritually, it's never entirely clear) when a ghost-bartender serves him a long row of whiskey shots at the deserted bar; and the novel explores what happens when longing isn't reckoned with, only suppressed; how anger and nostalgia can combine forces in toxic ways. After nearly eight years sober, I read Kaveh Akbar 's poetry collection Calling a Wolf a Wolf, and it was like a bright flash of lightning illuminating the landscape of craving. The poems are full of savage, funny, tender articulations of thirst - indeed, articulating thirst is one of their core projects. "If I called a wolf a wolf," the speaker thinks, "I might dull its fangs." The nerve-endings of these poems are open to despair, delight and bafflement all at once: "Some people don't even want to drink,/ aren't tempted by the pools of liquor / all around them. This seems / a selfishness. God loves the hungry / more than the full." - Leslie Jamison.

Kirkus Review

An alcoholic's confessional of life from buzzed adolescence to blitzed adulthood and the fellowship of recovery.Educator, essayist, and novelist Jamison's (The Empathy Exams: Essays, 2014, etc.) introduction to the alluring crackle of alcohol occurred innocently in her early teens, but her messy descent into full-blown addiction began years later with her first blackout. In her early 20s she began drinking daily to blunt chronic shyness and ease relationship woes while getting her master's degree at the Iowa Writers' Workshop. There, the author found "drunken dysfunction appealing" and identified with accomplished writers whose creative genius managed to function notably beneath the blurry haze of intoxication, something she dubs the "whiskey-and-ink mythology." Throughout, the author references historical literary greats who were alcoholics, including Elizabeth Bishop, John Berryman, Raymond Carver, Jean Rhys, and Charles Jackson among others. Jamison examines the transformative patterns of addiction and how these authors, within their own bodies of work, attempted to "make some sense of the sadness that consumed" them. Saturated with unbridled honesty, her riveting chronicle expectedly slopes downward, as the author notes how she once believed that "passing out was no longer the price but the point." After an abortion and persistent heart arrhythmias, Jamison eventually spiraled into the bleak desolation of rock-bottom alcoholism. Her ensuing heartbreaking attempts at rehabilitation ebbed and flowed. She relapsed after desperately missing the sensation of being drunk ("like having a candle lit inside you"), yet she also acknowledged that sobriety would be the only way to rediscover happiness and remain alive. Attending meetings, sharing her stories, and working the steps of Alcoholics Anonymous ushered the author into a new sober reality. Throughout Jamison's somber yet earnestly revelatory narrative, she remains cogent and true to her dual commitment to sobriety and to author a unique memoir "that was honest about the grit and bliss and tedium of learning to live this wayin chorus, without the numbing privacy of getting drunk."The bracing, unflinching, and beautifully resonant history of a writer's addiction and hard-won reclamation. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Library Journal Review

In this candid and frequently poignant book, Jamison (The Empathy Exams) discusses her addiction to alcohol. Her student years at Harvard, Yale, and the Iowa Writers' Workshop were marked with accomplishments but also with heavy bouts of drinking that culminated in her attending AA meetings. Jamison is frank in describing her alcohol dependence and her attempts to stay sober. While recounting her own struggles, she interweaves the addiction battles of famous people, citing correspondence and often unpublished manuscripts to reveal the torment and creativity alcohol produced in such writers as Raymond Carver, David Foster Wallace, and Jean Rhys. Jamison visits abandoned rehabilitation centers and a Narco farm to understand how addiction was addressed in the past. She also provides a history of AA and America's misguided war on addiction starting with the first drug czar, Harry Anslinger, whose treatment of addicts as criminals continues to influence government policy. Jamison feared that her quest for sobriety story would be too ordinary before realizing that it could still be useful to others. This brilliant work is the product of that realization. VERDICT An account of addiction and a story of redemption that will appeal to many readers interested in literature, psychology, and social work. [See Prepub Alert, 10/22/17.]-Erica Swenson -Danowitz, Delaware Cty. Community Coll. Lib., Media, PA © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

I Wonder	p. 3
II Abandon	p. 37
III Blame	p. 59
IV Lack	p. 105
V Shame	p. 129
VI Surrender	p. 189
VII Thirst	p. 229
VIII Return	p. 247
IX Confession	p. 271
X Humbling	p. 291
XI Chorus	p. 317
XII Salvage	p. 341
XIII Reckoning	p. 391
XIV Homecoming	p. 433
Author's Note	p. 449
Acknowledgments	p. 453
Notes	p. 461
Bibliography	p. 513
Index	p. 521

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