Summary
Summary
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 (3)
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
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.