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Rinascere: Alcol, intossicazione e storie di guarigione
La letteratura e la musica ci hanno abituato a pensare che non ci sia nulla di speciale nelle storie sul recupero da una dipendenza: non sono eccezionali quanto le avventure estreme e spericolate vissute durante una sbornia, non sono sagge quanto il genio creativo alimentato dall'alcol, celebrato dalla critica e acclamato dal pubblico.
Anche nella storia sul recupero di una giovane ragazza americana, a prima vista, non c'è nulla di speciale, eccezionale o saggio: una studentessa che viaggia attraverso il paese per laurearsi a Harvard, frequentare uno dei migliori master di scrittura creativa degli Stati Uniti e ottenere il dottorato in letteratura a Yale; un'alcolista con disturbi alimentari che si mantiene lavorando in una pasticceria mentre scrive un romanzo e prova a convivere con lo struggente bisogno di sentirsi unica agli occhi dei familiari, dei colleghi, degli amici, del fidanzato.
Quando quella ragazza partecipa alla prima riunione degli Alcolisti Anonimi nel seminterrato di una chiesa impregnato dell'odore di biscotti e caffè, capisce che non ci sono modi affascinanti per raccontare il tema del recupero. Gli sconosciuti seduti accanto a lei hanno vissuto le sue stesse esperienze e hanno provato le sue stesse emozioni: la sbornia, il furore, la sete, la vergogna, la ricaduta, l'astinenza. Il programma dei dodici passi si trasforma, così, in un cammino condiviso e comunitario per fare i conti con le proprie debolezze e imparare a essere sempre più presenti a se stessi. E si tratta di un cammino che diventa speciale, eccezionale e saggio proprio perché già vissuto, perciò utile e prezioso per chiunque trovi il coraggio di intraprenderlo. Ecco perché, quando Leslie Jamison ha deciso di pubblicare la sua storia, ha scelto di scrivere usando la prima persona plurale, facendosi accompagnare da un coro di voci segnate dalla dipendenza e dal tentativo - non sempre a lieto fine - di raggiungere la sobrietà: persone ordinarie come motociclisti, madri single, avvocati e giornalisti, ma anche noti scrittori e artisti come Raymond Carver, Billie Holiday, Amy Winehouse, Stephen King e David Foster Wallace.
Espressiva commistione tra un memoir e un saggio di critica letteraria, Rinascere rivela quanto sia difficile, commovente e delicato scavare dentro se stessi senza pretendere di trovare una risposta, ma soltanto la consapevolezza che ogni dipendenza può essere vinta andando avanti «un giorno alla volta».
611 pages, Kindle Edition
First published April 3, 2018
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April 18, 2018
This was an interesting book, and one I enjoyed. It is a memoir of the author’s addiction and coming to sobriety alongside a cultural history of writers and addiction. The breath of Jamison’s knowledge on this subject is impressive if, at times, overwhelming. She lovingly details several writers famous for their drinking, and the creative work that rose from that drinking or was stymied. She also looks at some of the sociopolitical implications of addiction, and there are some interesting ways in which she identifies her subject position/privilege and recognizes that her privilege allows her to have an addiction story that people with less privilege would never be granted. "My skin is the right color to permit my intoxication," she writes. And it’s good that she does this because she writes about attending the Iowa Writers Workshop and Yale and traveling the world and a fully funded education and a loving relationships/family and writing successes paired with writing failures. Certainly, she is also grappling with the problems we all deal with, and with the challenges of addiction, but the suffering feels gilded. That’s not a fair thing to say but I suspect many readers will have that reaction. The writing is beautiful. There are descriptive phrases that are simply breathtaking. The prose is dense but very readable. At times the book is kind of a hot mess but... I couldn’t put the book down. The mess works. And more than that, I was genuinely moved by how accurately Jamison captures the experience of addiction, the hallows we all try to fill with one thing or another. Highly recommend.
October 8, 2020
When Leslie Jamison was nine and her father was forty-nine, she asked him why people drank. He told her that drinking was dangerous. Not for everyone, he said, “but it was dangerous for us.” Two close relatives were alcoholics—his father and his sister, Phyllis— and, as Jamison later points out, genetics do contribute to alcoholism. Her father was right to warn her. It’s too bad she didn’t heed his words.
As a child, Jamison was shy, self-conscious, and perpetually worried about saying the wrong thing. Her parents divorced when she was eleven, but their life together had not been particularly dysfunctional. Jamison was aware that their love for her was based on her meeting certain conditions. Being intelligent, for example. Later, as a young woman, she had an inordinately difficult time adjusting to life at Harvard. Lonely, distressed, and often tearful, she made frequent phone calls home and eventually developed an eating disorder. Her father’s response to her anorexia was to provide her with academic papers on the subject.
Jamison had her first drink of alcohol at a family function when she was thirteen. Her first blackout occurred at Harvard. But the real problems began when, at the age of 21, she attended the famous Iowa Writers’ Workshop for her MFA, where the myths about drinking “ran like subterranean rivers beneath the drinking we were doing.” The list of famous alcoholic writers who’d lived, taught, and had storied misadventures in the city included Raymond Carver, John Cheever, Dennis Johnson, and Richard Yates.
Jamison got more than a master’s degree in Iowa, and she imbibed more than liquor. She succumbed to a mythology fetishizing the relationship between “drunken dysfunction” and genius—supposedly embodied in legendary writer-addicts. While attending school in Iowa, Jamison began to drink daily. The drinking escalated after the second poet boyfriend she met there left her. Demanding intensity from everything, she regularly engaged in drunken sex with many men as a way of “purging”, “siphoning off” excess feeling, and “putting it somewhere else.”
Jamison travelled to many locations over the next few years: California, Nicaragua, New Haven, and Bolivia. She had a second stay in both Iowa and New Haven and lived with two different men. Her most significant relationship was consistently the one she had with the bottle. She provides exhaustive, repetitive details about her alcohol abuse, ensuring that readers suffer along with her. I don’t know if this was intended or not. Jamison eventually turned to AA, where the rituals, fellowship, and stories of others began to challenge her intense self-absorption, the alcoholic constriction of her life, and her sense that her suffering made her exceptional.
Overall, this book is a very mixed bag. Literary critique and memoir are the main components, but cultural, sociological, historical, and political analysis are also included. There are interviews, thumbnail sketches of a few former alcoholics and addicts, reports on two facilities (one a prison for addicts; the other, a volunteer-run, now-defunct rehab centre), and, finally, an examination of AA—its founders, meetings, tenets and cliches.
At one point, Jamison mentions that this book is her doctoral dissertation. There is no discussion about how—or indeed if—the original manuscript was revised and modified for wider readership. While the rambling, graphic, and sometimes sordid memoir sections certainly don’t seem like the stuff of a conventional dissertation, the parts devoted to tedious critical analysis of the literature of addiction certainly do. I admit to being confused about two things: (1) how the book in its current form could have passed muster as an academic paper, and (2) the intended audience for the thing. I am uncertain about the interest or value of the literary material to a more general readership. I found Jamison’s literary “close analysis” an absolute chore to read. A sort of sinking feeling would come over me every time I saw Jean Rhys’s, John Berryman’s, or Charles Jackson’s name ahead. This isn’t only because I had read none of the novels, poems, and short stories Jamison considered in her doctoral research, but also because I can’t ever imagine wanting to.
For me, the most valuable chapter of Jamison’s book is the one entitled “Blame”, in which the author confronts the cognitive dissonance in America’s perception of the addict as both victim and criminal. She cites a number of experts in her examination of the ways in which racism fuelled what was first Richard Nixon’s (1971) and later Ronald Reagan’s (1982) War on Drugs. It is an illuminating discussion, and the endnotes are also worthwhile. Jamison considers the arbitrary assignment of some drugs to the legal, socially acceptable category and others to the illicit pile. Readers may be interested to learn, as I was, that the illicit drugs aren’t always the most problematic. After heroin and cocaine, tobacco (nicotine) is the most addictive. It is followed (in order of greatest likelihood to produce dependency) by barbiturates, alcohol, benzodiazepines, amphetamines, cannabis, and ecstasy.
Early in The Recovering , the author proposes that she is going to write a different kind of memoir, focusing not on herself as a special or “interesting” person, but on the individual as a member of a larger community in which all share a common story. Does she succeed in this project of writing a new kind of “symphonic” memoir? To some extent. Many voices are certainly heard, but they are not skillfully or harmoniously woven together. The book feels disjointed.
Did I “enjoy” The Recovering ? (Can readers actually enjoy a confessional work that documents extreme chemical dependency?) No. I wish I could have felt moved by the material or that I had gained insight into the psychological and other factors that predispose a person to use substances repeatedly and uncontrollably. I really did grow weary of the endless drinking scenes, including those depicting sexual encounters. I wasn’t too keen on the profanity either.
My main complaint is that the book is too bloody long. Half the length might’ve made it tolerable. There is some fine material here, but it is lost in the occasionally maudlin excess: too many sentences embroidered with figurative language, too many descriptions of meals, too many similar drinking scenes and drunken arguments. I wish an editor had been honest with Jamison, told her to cut the text down to a reasonable size. A leaner book would have been a more powerful one.
I know I will NEVER read Jamison again. One encounter with her was more than enough.
As a child, Jamison was shy, self-conscious, and perpetually worried about saying the wrong thing. Her parents divorced when she was eleven, but their life together had not been particularly dysfunctional. Jamison was aware that their love for her was based on her meeting certain conditions. Being intelligent, for example. Later, as a young woman, she had an inordinately difficult time adjusting to life at Harvard. Lonely, distressed, and often tearful, she made frequent phone calls home and eventually developed an eating disorder. Her father’s response to her anorexia was to provide her with academic papers on the subject.
Jamison had her first drink of alcohol at a family function when she was thirteen. Her first blackout occurred at Harvard. But the real problems began when, at the age of 21, she attended the famous Iowa Writers’ Workshop for her MFA, where the myths about drinking “ran like subterranean rivers beneath the drinking we were doing.” The list of famous alcoholic writers who’d lived, taught, and had storied misadventures in the city included Raymond Carver, John Cheever, Dennis Johnson, and Richard Yates.
Jamison got more than a master’s degree in Iowa, and she imbibed more than liquor. She succumbed to a mythology fetishizing the relationship between “drunken dysfunction” and genius—supposedly embodied in legendary writer-addicts. While attending school in Iowa, Jamison began to drink daily. The drinking escalated after the second poet boyfriend she met there left her. Demanding intensity from everything, she regularly engaged in drunken sex with many men as a way of “purging”, “siphoning off” excess feeling, and “putting it somewhere else.”
Jamison travelled to many locations over the next few years: California, Nicaragua, New Haven, and Bolivia. She had a second stay in both Iowa and New Haven and lived with two different men. Her most significant relationship was consistently the one she had with the bottle. She provides exhaustive, repetitive details about her alcohol abuse, ensuring that readers suffer along with her. I don’t know if this was intended or not. Jamison eventually turned to AA, where the rituals, fellowship, and stories of others began to challenge her intense self-absorption, the alcoholic constriction of her life, and her sense that her suffering made her exceptional.
Overall, this book is a very mixed bag. Literary critique and memoir are the main components, but cultural, sociological, historical, and political analysis are also included. There are interviews, thumbnail sketches of a few former alcoholics and addicts, reports on two facilities (one a prison for addicts; the other, a volunteer-run, now-defunct rehab centre), and, finally, an examination of AA—its founders, meetings, tenets and cliches.
At one point, Jamison mentions that this book is her doctoral dissertation. There is no discussion about how—or indeed if—the original manuscript was revised and modified for wider readership. While the rambling, graphic, and sometimes sordid memoir sections certainly don’t seem like the stuff of a conventional dissertation, the parts devoted to tedious critical analysis of the literature of addiction certainly do. I admit to being confused about two things: (1) how the book in its current form could have passed muster as an academic paper, and (2) the intended audience for the thing. I am uncertain about the interest or value of the literary material to a more general readership. I found Jamison’s literary “close analysis” an absolute chore to read. A sort of sinking feeling would come over me every time I saw Jean Rhys’s, John Berryman’s, or Charles Jackson’s name ahead. This isn’t only because I had read none of the novels, poems, and short stories Jamison considered in her doctoral research, but also because I can’t ever imagine wanting to.
For me, the most valuable chapter of Jamison’s book is the one entitled “Blame”, in which the author confronts the cognitive dissonance in America’s perception of the addict as both victim and criminal. She cites a number of experts in her examination of the ways in which racism fuelled what was first Richard Nixon’s (1971) and later Ronald Reagan’s (1982) War on Drugs. It is an illuminating discussion, and the endnotes are also worthwhile. Jamison considers the arbitrary assignment of some drugs to the legal, socially acceptable category and others to the illicit pile. Readers may be interested to learn, as I was, that the illicit drugs aren’t always the most problematic. After heroin and cocaine, tobacco (nicotine) is the most addictive. It is followed (in order of greatest likelihood to produce dependency) by barbiturates, alcohol, benzodiazepines, amphetamines, cannabis, and ecstasy.
Early in The Recovering , the author proposes that she is going to write a different kind of memoir, focusing not on herself as a special or “interesting” person, but on the individual as a member of a larger community in which all share a common story. Does she succeed in this project of writing a new kind of “symphonic” memoir? To some extent. Many voices are certainly heard, but they are not skillfully or harmoniously woven together. The book feels disjointed.
Did I “enjoy” The Recovering ? (Can readers actually enjoy a confessional work that documents extreme chemical dependency?) No. I wish I could have felt moved by the material or that I had gained insight into the psychological and other factors that predispose a person to use substances repeatedly and uncontrollably. I really did grow weary of the endless drinking scenes, including those depicting sexual encounters. I wasn’t too keen on the profanity either.
My main complaint is that the book is too bloody long. Half the length might’ve made it tolerable. There is some fine material here, but it is lost in the occasionally maudlin excess: too many sentences embroidered with figurative language, too many descriptions of meals, too many similar drinking scenes and drunken arguments. I wish an editor had been honest with Jamison, told her to cut the text down to a reasonable size. A leaner book would have been a more powerful one.
I know I will NEVER read Jamison again. One encounter with her was more than enough.
July 11, 2018
Audiobook....read by the author Leslie Jamison. ( I liked Leslie’s voice & I’m guessing the physical book would be useful to own for some readers)
First off ... I’m not an alcoholic. I don’t even drink. But.... maybe if I did I’d look as gorgeous as author Leslie Jaminson? Can I just say - she is ‘stunningly beautiful’....
Geee - GORGEOUS! Harvard Grad...Phd from Yale, writer, graduate from the Iowa’s writing workshop....
and oh yeah - in her spare time .....alcoholic/with a history of an eating disorder.
There were times I was bored ....( could be me — The Page-Turning Mystery Thriller book I was reading was fighting for my attention)....
But....this is an excellent - well written- well researched book - I WAS INTERESTED MORE OFTEN THAN BORED ....,but being honest - nothing about craving alcohol is on my radar- of- experience.
Candy? Yep....I used to love it more than life itself. But ....no longer ( I’m now a no fun reasonable sugar eater.....as in Less is better)....
.......but I could use AA meetings to get me to follow an autoimmune diet like little Ms. Perfect. I’m afraid I’m a Paleo-failure.
Is it sinful that I eat dairy and gluten.....but have ulcers in my mouth? Maybe there is a twelve step program for Paleo- no sugar- no dairy - no gluten- little grains - no fun diets for people like me? - people who are addicted to *NO* RULES about eating? EVEN IF WE WOULD BECOME MORE HEALTHY? Bone broth? Every day like my sister? Sounds awful — and who wants to spend time making it? Yep...I have a new type of addiction....( to eating and living in our modern world filled with everything bad for our health)
This book is not a normal memoir- ( Leslie’s addiction, relapse, the sensation of being drunk, AA meetings, her love life, research, quotes from other Genius Addicts & history is the heart of the ‘story’), but the context for this book is much bigger than ‘her story’.....SHE IS UP TO SOMETHING IMPORTANT —-AA OFFICIALS might learn a few things useful!!! She’s out to spill the beans that AA is not all- get-all!
She talks about ‘meaningful’ healing ... and radically restructuring treatment. Alcoholic anonymous being too limiting. I AGREE!
In the Author’s Notes she talks about the medical medications along with AA meetings that are proven more effective than AA alone. Plus ‘other’ choices.
The book structure is appealing for this topic: works nicely. Each chapters is titled with a theme for that chapter:
Wonder: first time drinking buzz stories
Abandon: Freshman year at Harvard - lonely - starving herself - drinking
Blame: ONE OF MY FAVORITE CHAPTERS ... in this section she talks about whether or not alcoholism is an illness, or a crime. America can’t seem to decide on the label... and it’s constantly changing depending on the situation. Some people get pity… Other people get blamed. Male drunks are thrilling, white females are bad moms, blacks are punished, celebrities get fancy recovery resorts. Lots more in this section about the laws of drunk driving - drugs - etc.
Lack: Leslie was at Yale working on her PHD ..... but she began to have new rules about her drinking.
Shame.... oh yes....cheating on your lover always contributes to a great night’s sleep
THIS IS WHEN DRINKING FELT GOOD.....A very honest chapter about how drinking was way more fun then not.
Surrender....don’t expect me to share everything ...’surrender’.....use your imagination
Thirst .... not for soda pop.
Return: Leslie went seven months of being sober. The man she was in love with believed she could drink differently this time because she convinced him. She was a mature adult - A dignified woman who could drink socially now! Ha....see how that works!
Confession: interesting karma & a car crash chapter
Humbling: I liked this section about WHY TELL OUR STORIES ( I love people’s stories - makes me feel normal)
Chorus — writers will like this. A wonderful fairytale with 4 different endings in this section is so good - I listened twice. You can choose your favorite ending to the story.
Salvage: 2nd chance. Nice!
Reckoning ok......These later chapters are some of the best.
Homecoming ......A great story about a man and his two lives - sober and drunk
Authors Notes: EXCELLENT ....good information- useful for anyone who knows anyone who has struggled with addictions.
THERE ARE 100 ways to SKIN A CAT....... yikes .....but who would want to skin one?
THERE ARE MANY PATHS TO HEALING ..... yes! I believe that too!
THIS IS A *SHORT* REVIEW FOR A BOOK ALMOST 600 pages long ....
It reads FAST!!!!! Too long of a review? ...’sorry’!
Cheers - with Mango Juice to my friends!
First off ... I’m not an alcoholic. I don’t even drink. But.... maybe if I did I’d look as gorgeous as author Leslie Jaminson? Can I just say - she is ‘stunningly beautiful’....
Geee - GORGEOUS! Harvard Grad...Phd from Yale, writer, graduate from the Iowa’s writing workshop....
and oh yeah - in her spare time .....alcoholic/with a history of an eating disorder.
There were times I was bored ....( could be me — The Page-Turning Mystery Thriller book I was reading was fighting for my attention)....
But....this is an excellent - well written- well researched book - I WAS INTERESTED MORE OFTEN THAN BORED ....,but being honest - nothing about craving alcohol is on my radar- of- experience.
Candy? Yep....I used to love it more than life itself. But ....no longer ( I’m now a no fun reasonable sugar eater.....as in Less is better)....
.......but I could use AA meetings to get me to follow an autoimmune diet like little Ms. Perfect. I’m afraid I’m a Paleo-failure.
Is it sinful that I eat dairy and gluten.....but have ulcers in my mouth? Maybe there is a twelve step program for Paleo- no sugar- no dairy - no gluten- little grains - no fun diets for people like me? - people who are addicted to *NO* RULES about eating? EVEN IF WE WOULD BECOME MORE HEALTHY? Bone broth? Every day like my sister? Sounds awful — and who wants to spend time making it? Yep...I have a new type of addiction....( to eating and living in our modern world filled with everything bad for our health)
This book is not a normal memoir- ( Leslie’s addiction, relapse, the sensation of being drunk, AA meetings, her love life, research, quotes from other Genius Addicts & history is the heart of the ‘story’), but the context for this book is much bigger than ‘her story’.....SHE IS UP TO SOMETHING IMPORTANT —-AA OFFICIALS might learn a few things useful!!! She’s out to spill the beans that AA is not all- get-all!
She talks about ‘meaningful’ healing ... and radically restructuring treatment. Alcoholic anonymous being too limiting. I AGREE!
In the Author’s Notes she talks about the medical medications along with AA meetings that are proven more effective than AA alone. Plus ‘other’ choices.
The book structure is appealing for this topic: works nicely. Each chapters is titled with a theme for that chapter:
Wonder: first time drinking buzz stories
Abandon: Freshman year at Harvard - lonely - starving herself - drinking
Blame: ONE OF MY FAVORITE CHAPTERS ... in this section she talks about whether or not alcoholism is an illness, or a crime. America can’t seem to decide on the label... and it’s constantly changing depending on the situation. Some people get pity… Other people get blamed. Male drunks are thrilling, white females are bad moms, blacks are punished, celebrities get fancy recovery resorts. Lots more in this section about the laws of drunk driving - drugs - etc.
Lack: Leslie was at Yale working on her PHD ..... but she began to have new rules about her drinking.
Shame.... oh yes....cheating on your lover always contributes to a great night’s sleep
THIS IS WHEN DRINKING FELT GOOD.....A very honest chapter about how drinking was way more fun then not.
Surrender....don’t expect me to share everything ...’surrender’.....use your imagination
Thirst .... not for soda pop.
Return: Leslie went seven months of being sober. The man she was in love with believed she could drink differently this time because she convinced him. She was a mature adult - A dignified woman who could drink socially now! Ha....see how that works!
Confession: interesting karma & a car crash chapter
Humbling: I liked this section about WHY TELL OUR STORIES ( I love people’s stories - makes me feel normal)
Chorus — writers will like this. A wonderful fairytale with 4 different endings in this section is so good - I listened twice. You can choose your favorite ending to the story.
Salvage: 2nd chance. Nice!
Reckoning ok......These later chapters are some of the best.
Homecoming ......A great story about a man and his two lives - sober and drunk
Authors Notes: EXCELLENT ....good information- useful for anyone who knows anyone who has struggled with addictions.
THERE ARE 100 ways to SKIN A CAT....... yikes .....but who would want to skin one?
THERE ARE MANY PATHS TO HEALING ..... yes! I believe that too!
THIS IS A *SHORT* REVIEW FOR A BOOK ALMOST 600 pages long ....
It reads FAST!!!!! Too long of a review? ...’sorry’!
Cheers - with Mango Juice to my friends!
May 4, 2018
3.5 stars
Let me start by sharing that I consider Leslie Jamison a brilliant, brilliant writer. The Recovering is an intelligent, thorough book about addiction that includes cultural history, literary criticism, journalistic reportage, and memoir. Jamison asks thought-provoking questions and explores complex topics with a fresh, sharp eye for nuance, such as: whether our stories need to be unique for them to matter, the extent we all go to fill our lives with some meaning or comfort, and the role of addiction in creative people's artistic process. She integrates her intellectual insight with an empathy and kindness so important for someone writing about addiction. I also appreciated how she acknowledged her privilege, recognizing that as a white woman, she has a platform to share her journey and the color of her skin will protect her from a lot of judgement, whereas more marginalized people do not have that same armor or access to resources.
The back and forth between memoir and literary analysis just did not work for me. Again, I consider Jamison such a literary star, and I hope others enjoy this book. But the transitions from other's stories to her own felt jarring to me. I wanted to stay more within her narrative and feel connected to her story without interruptions, or, at least more connections between these writers' stories and her own. I feel like the literary analysis distanced us from Jamison, especially for people who may already find it hard to connect with her based on her elite academic credentials. I wanted more of the integration of memoir and analysis and reportage I read in The Empathy Exams , her stunning first essay collection.
Overall, I liked The Recovering and would recommend it to those who know what they're getting themselves into and want to try it anyway. I applaud Jamison for her author's note - which shows how she takes the topic of addiction very seriously - as well as her courage and compassion in sharing her own story in a society that still highly stigmatizes addiction. I'd be curious to read and think more about her addiction to romance, a topic I wrote about on my own blog, as her journey with Dave paralleled her addiction to alcohol in such a consistent way. I look forward to reading her next book.
Let me start by sharing that I consider Leslie Jamison a brilliant, brilliant writer. The Recovering is an intelligent, thorough book about addiction that includes cultural history, literary criticism, journalistic reportage, and memoir. Jamison asks thought-provoking questions and explores complex topics with a fresh, sharp eye for nuance, such as: whether our stories need to be unique for them to matter, the extent we all go to fill our lives with some meaning or comfort, and the role of addiction in creative people's artistic process. She integrates her intellectual insight with an empathy and kindness so important for someone writing about addiction. I also appreciated how she acknowledged her privilege, recognizing that as a white woman, she has a platform to share her journey and the color of her skin will protect her from a lot of judgement, whereas more marginalized people do not have that same armor or access to resources.
The back and forth between memoir and literary analysis just did not work for me. Again, I consider Jamison such a literary star, and I hope others enjoy this book. But the transitions from other's stories to her own felt jarring to me. I wanted to stay more within her narrative and feel connected to her story without interruptions, or, at least more connections between these writers' stories and her own. I feel like the literary analysis distanced us from Jamison, especially for people who may already find it hard to connect with her based on her elite academic credentials. I wanted more of the integration of memoir and analysis and reportage I read in The Empathy Exams , her stunning first essay collection.
Overall, I liked The Recovering and would recommend it to those who know what they're getting themselves into and want to try it anyway. I applaud Jamison for her author's note - which shows how she takes the topic of addiction very seriously - as well as her courage and compassion in sharing her own story in a society that still highly stigmatizes addiction. I'd be curious to read and think more about her addiction to romance, a topic I wrote about on my own blog, as her journey with Dave paralleled her addiction to alcohol in such a consistent way. I look forward to reading her next book.
April 14, 2018
I'm a recovering addict who was looking forward to this book, but found it infuriating, exploitative,narcissistic, and bougie. While Jamison's writing is lyrical, descriptive, and beautiful; her story lacks credibility. She insists that she wants to write a different kind of recovery story and has the audacity to compare her life to real addicts like Billie Holiday and Charles Jackson. Jamison amplifies normal college binge drinking experiences for dramatic purposes. She carefully catalogues her fancy drinking and cheese trays in Italy and Chile and at Yale, Harvard, Iowa. She makes her typical college girl drinking more dramatic to try to relate to drunken heroes. Jamison writes, "Cliches were one of the hardest parts of my early days in recovery. I cringed their singing cadences." What?! Most really addicts and alcoholics are having physical withdrawals, DTs, puking their brains out, in prison, detox, or rehab. Jamison practiced writing her recovery "speech" on note cards before AA meetings because she wanted to have 'the best story."
She says she is an alcoholic and elevates herself above working class people at meetings and people who actually have real addictions unlike her. Treating meetings like some sort of writing workshop or experiment. A Slate Review echoed my very same sentiments. "Recovery demands humility, but how can a 500 page book be anything but an assertion of ego?"
As Slate said: "Nevertheless, through the scrim of this litany of ordeals, the alert reader can detect another possible and very different index, one made of features that Jamison chooses not to emphasize: “had a cool, accomplished, loving mom,” “Harvard undergrad,” “Iowa Writers’ Workshop at age 21,” “summer in Italy,” “Ph.D. from Yale,” “published first novel at age 27.” And even though the time period recounted in The Recovering does not include them, an informed reader could add a few more highlights: “New York Times best-seller at age 31” (2014’s The Empathy Exams) and “director of the nonfiction program at Columbia University’s School of the Arts.”
Overall, I guess the book just made me angry because I felt that Jamison is not an alcoholic or addict, saw that the topic was "hot" or "popular," and she exploited others just to get stories for her book. She practically admits that is why she went to her first meeting. I don't even like to go to meetings because people like her ruin it. Us rock bottom people that actually lost things to drinking and don't have 4 elite college degrees or best sellers don't need people like her eavesdropping and swooping in to try to fit in because she's bored with her life. Don't read this book. Read Lidia Yuknavitch. Read Mary Karr. Read Melissa Febos or Nick flynn. They are real addicts.
She says she is an alcoholic and elevates herself above working class people at meetings and people who actually have real addictions unlike her. Treating meetings like some sort of writing workshop or experiment. A Slate Review echoed my very same sentiments. "Recovery demands humility, but how can a 500 page book be anything but an assertion of ego?"
As Slate said: "Nevertheless, through the scrim of this litany of ordeals, the alert reader can detect another possible and very different index, one made of features that Jamison chooses not to emphasize: “had a cool, accomplished, loving mom,” “Harvard undergrad,” “Iowa Writers’ Workshop at age 21,” “summer in Italy,” “Ph.D. from Yale,” “published first novel at age 27.” And even though the time period recounted in The Recovering does not include them, an informed reader could add a few more highlights: “New York Times best-seller at age 31” (2014’s The Empathy Exams) and “director of the nonfiction program at Columbia University’s School of the Arts.”
Overall, I guess the book just made me angry because I felt that Jamison is not an alcoholic or addict, saw that the topic was "hot" or "popular," and she exploited others just to get stories for her book. She practically admits that is why she went to her first meeting. I don't even like to go to meetings because people like her ruin it. Us rock bottom people that actually lost things to drinking and don't have 4 elite college degrees or best sellers don't need people like her eavesdropping and swooping in to try to fit in because she's bored with her life. Don't read this book. Read Lidia Yuknavitch. Read Mary Karr. Read Melissa Febos or Nick flynn. They are real addicts.
September 1, 2018
This is the best description of alcoholism that I have ever read. I like to joke that I have "an addiction to addiction memoirs," but despite having read a lot of such works, Leslie Jamison managed to surprise me with her marvelous book The Recovering.
Part personal story and part research, I loved how Leslie blended her own tale of drunkenness with the stories of other writers and artists who struggled with alcohol and drug addiction. She discusses their lives, their books and poems and music, all woven together in way that becomes something both tragic and beautiful, the art of the struggle.
I listened to this book on audio, wonderfully narrated by Leslie herself, and it felt like having one long, great conversation with a close friend. Leslie is a gorgeous writer, with lovely phrasing and descriptions. She's the kind of character you root for, loving them in spite of their flaws and mistakes, hoping they will triumph in the end.
Highly recommended to anyone who likes addition memoirs or books about writers.
Opening Passage
"The first time I ever felt it — the buzz — I was almost thirteen. I didn't vomit or black out or even embarrass myself. I just loved it. I loved the crackle of champagne, its hot pine needles down my throat. We were celebrating my brother's college graduation, and I wore a long muslin dress that made me feel like a child, until I felt something else: initiated, aglow. The whole world stood accused: You never told me it felt this good."
Part personal story and part research, I loved how Leslie blended her own tale of drunkenness with the stories of other writers and artists who struggled with alcohol and drug addiction. She discusses their lives, their books and poems and music, all woven together in way that becomes something both tragic and beautiful, the art of the struggle.
I listened to this book on audio, wonderfully narrated by Leslie herself, and it felt like having one long, great conversation with a close friend. Leslie is a gorgeous writer, with lovely phrasing and descriptions. She's the kind of character you root for, loving them in spite of their flaws and mistakes, hoping they will triumph in the end.
Highly recommended to anyone who likes addition memoirs or books about writers.
Opening Passage
"The first time I ever felt it — the buzz — I was almost thirteen. I didn't vomit or black out or even embarrass myself. I just loved it. I loved the crackle of champagne, its hot pine needles down my throat. We were celebrating my brother's college graduation, and I wore a long muslin dress that made me feel like a child, until I felt something else: initiated, aglow. The whole world stood accused: You never told me it felt this good."
May 27, 2018
Mommas, don’t let your dissertations grow up to be memoirs.
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I just spent most of the afternoon writing a review of this that Goodreads did not save, so please excuse me while I go rip up some trees by their roots.
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I just spent most of the afternoon writing a review of this that Goodreads did not save, so please excuse me while I go rip up some trees by their roots.
June 29, 2018
[4.5 stars]
This is such an important book and one that meant a lot to me for various reasons. I appreciate Jamison's candidness—she's very, very open in this book which can be difficult to read. But it's an admirable and accomplished analysis of addiction. It's so much more than a memoir. She looks at other people with addictions, whether artists and writers or just people she meets at AA or in her daily life, and explores different topics that come with coping from this illness: thirst, blame, shame, surrender, confession, etc. It's very thorough and well-researched but never loses its humanity in exploring this extremely human topic. On a surface-level, too, Jamison is just a fantastic writer and I will read anything she writes.
This is such an important book and one that meant a lot to me for various reasons. I appreciate Jamison's candidness—she's very, very open in this book which can be difficult to read. But it's an admirable and accomplished analysis of addiction. It's so much more than a memoir. She looks at other people with addictions, whether artists and writers or just people she meets at AA or in her daily life, and explores different topics that come with coping from this illness: thirst, blame, shame, surrender, confession, etc. It's very thorough and well-researched but never loses its humanity in exploring this extremely human topic. On a surface-level, too, Jamison is just a fantastic writer and I will read anything she writes.
February 17, 2019
One night I told Jack that I sometimes drove out to the truck stop in the middle of the night and worked in the vinyl booths by the supply shop, overlooking all those chrome hubcaps in the aisles. "You just got a hundred times more interesting," he said, and I tried to divide myself by a hundred, right there in front of him, to figure out what I'd been before.
Why’d I even want to read this? I couldn’t stand Jamison’s much-lauded The Empathy Exams, and that feeling hasn’t changed—if anything, I like it even less in retrospect than I did at the time. I guess I was curious about The Recovering, but curiosity is a pretty meager fuel to power a reader through 450+ pages. Fortunately, it turned out The Recovering had a lot of fuel of its own.
In recovery, I found a community that resisted what I’d always been told about stories—that they had to be unique—suggesting instead that a story was most useful when it wasn’t unique at all, when it understood itself as something that had been lived before and would be lived again.
When Jamison said this right up front, I knew that she was attempting to disarm the reader who might be skeptical of yet another addiction memoir. But the fact that I knew what she was doing didn’t make me resist; just the opposite, in fact. “Okay, Leslie Jamison,” I thought, “you’ve done me the courtesy of acknowledging what I’m thinking, and I will do you the courtesy of trying to keep my mind open.” But again, even if I’d gone in with a mind firmly closed, the book itself would have forced it open. Simply put, I was stunned by The Recovering.
A 1976 AA pamphlet called “Do You Think You’re Different?” opens with an admission of delusion: “Many of us thought we were special.” The plural subject already holds the argument: Even the belief in singularity is common.
The Recovering is a highly personal memoir of Jamison’s battle with alcoholism, and also an exploration of the ways creativity and alcoholism feed each other and sabotage each other. It begins in Iowa City, where Jamison is attending the graduate writer’s workshop and where she reckons with the ghosts of past addicts: Raymond Carver, Denis Johnson, and John Berryman, among others. Some of these stories, of writers afraid they will actually lose their creative genius if they lose their pain; of writers attempting to convince themselves that they have much in common with other addicts regardless of background, and sometimes succeeding and sometimes failing spectacularly, are poignant and often heartbreaking. These stories also serve as an entry point for Jamison to talk about the larger issues of alcoholism and recovery: blame and shame; mental illness; race, class, and gender differences; the use of punishment for addictive behaviors; the various types of help available, particularly AA; the many ways that moving out of your isolation can help you.
All of this was interesting and illuminating, but Jamison’s own story, one of raw vulnerability and brave honesty, is the captivating thread that holds it all together. So many addiction memoirs strive to be melodramatic and miss the day-to-day grind that makes alcoholism not a wild embrace of life but a deadening retreat from it. When Jamison presents her dissertation topic, on creativity and recovery, a professor mentions the (by now cliched) idea that creativity and addiction are undeniably linked: “What about the relationship between addiction and creativity? Don’t certain obsessions also produce experiment and variation?” Jamison dutifully notes this down, but thinks to herself:
Addiction is just the same fucking thing over and over again. Thinking of addiction in terms of generative variation is the luxury of someone who hasn’t spent years telling the same lies to liquor-store clerks.
Jamison, with her family of academics, MFA from Iowa and (eventually) PhD from Yale, is a highly privileged individual, something she acknowledges. But oddly, this didn’t detract from my sympathy for her. If anything, it made me admire more how willing she was to break down the walls she’d erected between herself and others, how she embraced the ethos of not being special in order to truly get better.
As others have noted, the recovery aspect of the book is at least as profound and moving as the addiction aspect. I rooted for Jamison every step of the way, and with the level of insight and ruthless self-examination she presents here, she made that aspect of the book easy. I looked through The Recovering yesterday and found pages and pages with quotes I wanted to include in this review—more than I could ever really use here. I had goosebumps when I closed it. So I would suggest you give this book a try. The difference between this book and her previous one is that in The Empathy Exams, it’s exasperatingly obvious that Jamison is writing about things she doesn’t really know anything about. I can see now how she was circling around her real topic, not yet ready to dive in. In The Recovering she dives in, saying what she’s really meant to say all along, and the willing reader is rewarded for diving in with her. I’m so happy this all worked out, for us as readers, and for Jamison as a person who has learned to live in the world without destroying herself. If anyone needs proof that artists can do their best work sober, The Recovering is its own best evidence.
Why’d I even want to read this? I couldn’t stand Jamison’s much-lauded The Empathy Exams, and that feeling hasn’t changed—if anything, I like it even less in retrospect than I did at the time. I guess I was curious about The Recovering, but curiosity is a pretty meager fuel to power a reader through 450+ pages. Fortunately, it turned out The Recovering had a lot of fuel of its own.
In recovery, I found a community that resisted what I’d always been told about stories—that they had to be unique—suggesting instead that a story was most useful when it wasn’t unique at all, when it understood itself as something that had been lived before and would be lived again.
When Jamison said this right up front, I knew that she was attempting to disarm the reader who might be skeptical of yet another addiction memoir. But the fact that I knew what she was doing didn’t make me resist; just the opposite, in fact. “Okay, Leslie Jamison,” I thought, “you’ve done me the courtesy of acknowledging what I’m thinking, and I will do you the courtesy of trying to keep my mind open.” But again, even if I’d gone in with a mind firmly closed, the book itself would have forced it open. Simply put, I was stunned by The Recovering.
A 1976 AA pamphlet called “Do You Think You’re Different?” opens with an admission of delusion: “Many of us thought we were special.” The plural subject already holds the argument: Even the belief in singularity is common.
The Recovering is a highly personal memoir of Jamison’s battle with alcoholism, and also an exploration of the ways creativity and alcoholism feed each other and sabotage each other. It begins in Iowa City, where Jamison is attending the graduate writer’s workshop and where she reckons with the ghosts of past addicts: Raymond Carver, Denis Johnson, and John Berryman, among others. Some of these stories, of writers afraid they will actually lose their creative genius if they lose their pain; of writers attempting to convince themselves that they have much in common with other addicts regardless of background, and sometimes succeeding and sometimes failing spectacularly, are poignant and often heartbreaking. These stories also serve as an entry point for Jamison to talk about the larger issues of alcoholism and recovery: blame and shame; mental illness; race, class, and gender differences; the use of punishment for addictive behaviors; the various types of help available, particularly AA; the many ways that moving out of your isolation can help you.
All of this was interesting and illuminating, but Jamison’s own story, one of raw vulnerability and brave honesty, is the captivating thread that holds it all together. So many addiction memoirs strive to be melodramatic and miss the day-to-day grind that makes alcoholism not a wild embrace of life but a deadening retreat from it. When Jamison presents her dissertation topic, on creativity and recovery, a professor mentions the (by now cliched) idea that creativity and addiction are undeniably linked: “What about the relationship between addiction and creativity? Don’t certain obsessions also produce experiment and variation?” Jamison dutifully notes this down, but thinks to herself:
Addiction is just the same fucking thing over and over again. Thinking of addiction in terms of generative variation is the luxury of someone who hasn’t spent years telling the same lies to liquor-store clerks.
Jamison, with her family of academics, MFA from Iowa and (eventually) PhD from Yale, is a highly privileged individual, something she acknowledges. But oddly, this didn’t detract from my sympathy for her. If anything, it made me admire more how willing she was to break down the walls she’d erected between herself and others, how she embraced the ethos of not being special in order to truly get better.
As others have noted, the recovery aspect of the book is at least as profound and moving as the addiction aspect. I rooted for Jamison every step of the way, and with the level of insight and ruthless self-examination she presents here, she made that aspect of the book easy. I looked through The Recovering yesterday and found pages and pages with quotes I wanted to include in this review—more than I could ever really use here. I had goosebumps when I closed it. So I would suggest you give this book a try. The difference between this book and her previous one is that in The Empathy Exams, it’s exasperatingly obvious that Jamison is writing about things she doesn’t really know anything about. I can see now how she was circling around her real topic, not yet ready to dive in. In The Recovering she dives in, saying what she’s really meant to say all along, and the willing reader is rewarded for diving in with her. I’m so happy this all worked out, for us as readers, and for Jamison as a person who has learned to live in the world without destroying herself. If anyone needs proof that artists can do their best work sober, The Recovering is its own best evidence.
June 6, 2018
This here is 500+ pages of the incredible Leslie Jamison "reinventing the recovery memoir."
I have the unbelievably luxurious privilege of not being an addict, never really having even brushed up against addiction, so I can't fully account for how deeply moving I find recovery stories. But I do, I do, I am so incredibly in awe of them -- their urgency, their base devastation, the way the cut through all the clutter to thrum around one. single. need. that is stronger than anything, and then somehow break free and soar above it.... Just incredible.
This book could vaguely be classified as one part recovery memoir, one part master's thesis, one part historical / cultural analysis of the addict as victim vs. the addict as criminal, and one part survey of addiction throughout the entirety of popular culture. Leslie slides seamlessly between 1920s political strategy, obscure 1950s novels, and pop songs of yesterday, never missing a beat or dropping a logistical stitch. She is as deeply knowledegable about David Foster Wallace as Amy Winehouse as Richard Nixon's drug czar as the parasitic worm that burrowed into her heel in South America.
And I loved it so much it's hard to believe. I couldn't read it fast enough and I couldn't read it slowly enough -- its churn and thrall, its deft switches and spins, Leslie's nimble weaving together of so many disparate yet somehow perfectly connected threads, my despair and astonishment equally keening. It's kind of embarrassing how many phrases I underlined, how many sentences and even entire paragraphs, the pages littered with brackets and margin stars. It was surreal reading it on the subway, in parks, in line at the deli, tearing up, closing my eyes to savor, her words so thunderous, louder in my head than the music in my headphones, so loud I often didn't even notice I was listening to my favorite song until it was nearly over.
I gasped audibly when I turned to the last page before the authors note -- partly out of real surprise, since there were so many pages left (hundreds upon hundreds of notes) but also partly from legitimate dismay, because I couldn't believe it was done and I wouldn't somehow be able to just keep reading it forever.
I have the unbelievably luxurious privilege of not being an addict, never really having even brushed up against addiction, so I can't fully account for how deeply moving I find recovery stories. But I do, I do, I am so incredibly in awe of them -- their urgency, their base devastation, the way the cut through all the clutter to thrum around one. single. need. that is stronger than anything, and then somehow break free and soar above it.... Just incredible.
This book could vaguely be classified as one part recovery memoir, one part master's thesis, one part historical / cultural analysis of the addict as victim vs. the addict as criminal, and one part survey of addiction throughout the entirety of popular culture. Leslie slides seamlessly between 1920s political strategy, obscure 1950s novels, and pop songs of yesterday, never missing a beat or dropping a logistical stitch. She is as deeply knowledegable about David Foster Wallace as Amy Winehouse as Richard Nixon's drug czar as the parasitic worm that burrowed into her heel in South America.
And I loved it so much it's hard to believe. I couldn't read it fast enough and I couldn't read it slowly enough -- its churn and thrall, its deft switches and spins, Leslie's nimble weaving together of so many disparate yet somehow perfectly connected threads, my despair and astonishment equally keening. It's kind of embarrassing how many phrases I underlined, how many sentences and even entire paragraphs, the pages littered with brackets and margin stars. It was surreal reading it on the subway, in parks, in line at the deli, tearing up, closing my eyes to savor, her words so thunderous, louder in my head than the music in my headphones, so loud I often didn't even notice I was listening to my favorite song until it was nearly over.
I gasped audibly when I turned to the last page before the authors note -- partly out of real surprise, since there were so many pages left (hundreds upon hundreds of notes) but also partly from legitimate dismay, because I couldn't believe it was done and I wouldn't somehow be able to just keep reading it forever.
April 2, 2021
Re-upping this one just to say that as of today, 4/2/2021, I haven't had a drink in six years.
"Dave said he trusted my judgement: If I thought I had to stop, I should stop. But he was careful not to tell me what to do, and I read this care as a sign that I wasn't a real alcoholic. This was a relief. It meant I would be able to start drinking again, maybe after a few weeks, without having to convince him it was okay. By stopping for a while, I would prove - to him, and to myself - that I didn't need it, which would justify starting again. I drank again after three days."
"Every time I was talking to someone then about anything that wasn't drinking, I felt like I was lying. But I was overwhelmed by that preemptive grief whenever I tried to imagine life as a procession of sober nights - blank, bland, unrelenting: Dave and me sitting at our kitchen table, drinking fucking tea, trying to think of things to talk about."
"Nights turned into endless calculations: How many glasses of wine has each person at this table had? What's the most of anyone? How much can I take, of what's left, without taking too much? How many people can I pour for, and how much can I pour for them, and still have enough left to pour for myself?"
"Everything made me think about booze. Empty shower caddies for sale at the student store made me imagine the hypothetical undergrads who would someday use them to get ready for their sorority parties, and I envied all the drinking they'd get to do, still smelling faintly of vanilla body scrub. When I thought of my nephew in San Francisco, at the other end of I-80, I imagined all the drinking he'd get to do someday. He was just over a year old. . . . I watched Leaving Las Vegas and felt envious of Nicolas Cage because he got to drink as much as he wanted."
This book is amazing. I feel like it was written specifically about me. I was using little slips of paper to mark all of the pages with incredibly-resonant-to-me-personally lines and realized quickly that I had a slip on almost every single page. My only qualm is that I wish Jamison had included more about medication-assisted treatment than the author's note at the end. Her personal experience is with AA, but given all of the other ground she covers, I wish she'd added more voices of people who used medication either alone or in conjunction with a 12-step program or other therapy to get sober. 'Twas an article in the April 2015 issue of The Atlantic discussing the failure of 12-step programs and rehab and speaking specifically about drug therapy which prompted me, after many, many attempts to stop drinking, none of which lasted more than 11 days, to finally approach my doctor. I steadfastly stand by the fact that using naltrexone saved my life and I wish we could talk more as a society about about medication-assisted treatments.
"Dave said he trusted my judgement: If I thought I had to stop, I should stop. But he was careful not to tell me what to do, and I read this care as a sign that I wasn't a real alcoholic. This was a relief. It meant I would be able to start drinking again, maybe after a few weeks, without having to convince him it was okay. By stopping for a while, I would prove - to him, and to myself - that I didn't need it, which would justify starting again. I drank again after three days."
"Every time I was talking to someone then about anything that wasn't drinking, I felt like I was lying. But I was overwhelmed by that preemptive grief whenever I tried to imagine life as a procession of sober nights - blank, bland, unrelenting: Dave and me sitting at our kitchen table, drinking fucking tea, trying to think of things to talk about."
"Nights turned into endless calculations: How many glasses of wine has each person at this table had? What's the most of anyone? How much can I take, of what's left, without taking too much? How many people can I pour for, and how much can I pour for them, and still have enough left to pour for myself?"
"Everything made me think about booze. Empty shower caddies for sale at the student store made me imagine the hypothetical undergrads who would someday use them to get ready for their sorority parties, and I envied all the drinking they'd get to do, still smelling faintly of vanilla body scrub. When I thought of my nephew in San Francisco, at the other end of I-80, I imagined all the drinking he'd get to do someday. He was just over a year old. . . . I watched Leaving Las Vegas and felt envious of Nicolas Cage because he got to drink as much as he wanted."
This book is amazing. I feel like it was written specifically about me. I was using little slips of paper to mark all of the pages with incredibly-resonant-to-me-personally lines and realized quickly that I had a slip on almost every single page. My only qualm is that I wish Jamison had included more about medication-assisted treatment than the author's note at the end. Her personal experience is with AA, but given all of the other ground she covers, I wish she'd added more voices of people who used medication either alone or in conjunction with a 12-step program or other therapy to get sober. 'Twas an article in the April 2015 issue of The Atlantic discussing the failure of 12-step programs and rehab and speaking specifically about drug therapy which prompted me, after many, many attempts to stop drinking, none of which lasted more than 11 days, to finally approach my doctor. I steadfastly stand by the fact that using naltrexone saved my life and I wish we could talk more as a society about about medication-assisted treatments.
December 23, 2017
whatever beauty comes from pain can't usually be traded back for happiness.leslie jamison's new book, the recovering: intoxication and its aftermath, straddles several genres at once, coalescing to form a candid, incisive, empathetic, and magnificently composed work about addiction and recovery. with her own personal tale of alcoholism, relapse, and ultimate recovery as narrative anchor, jamison explores the lives of fellow writers for whom addiction was a constant battle (carver, berryman, rhys, etc.), reports on the long history of addiction treatment (especially alcoholics anonymous), and considers a culture increasingly encumbered by addiction (and its pervasive, devastating consequences).
as evidenced in her wonderful essay collection, the empathy exams, jamison's writing is frequently breathtaking to behold. her gifted prose coupled with curiosity, reflection, and a deep humanity lend the recovering an emotionality both resonant and affecting. jamison's personal struggles are often difficult (and sad) to read about from a remove, though she lays bare head and heart alike in contending with her alcoholism and all it had wrought. wrenching at times, the recovering is a sobering account of addiction – and jamison's bravery in so eloquently, so disarmingly relating her tale within the context of so many other battles (whether won or lost) renders her memoir humbling and unforgettable.
but this was something that kept happening in sobriety, understanding that everyone—your boss, your bank teller, your baker, even your partner—was waking up every fucking day and dealing with shit you couldn't even imagine.
August 6, 2018
My feelings about Leslie Jamison's The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath are sprawling and messy, deeply personal and intensely curious, just like this book. I couldn't put it down and I couldn't wait for it to end so I could begin breathing again. I read it in search of answers, I read it to be angry, to feel morally superior, to have a reason for my outrage. I read it to feel empathy.
The Recovering is an exploration of the mythology of addiction and creativity-that the latter depends on the depth of the former, that the two are inextricably linked. By weaving the narrative of her own addictions with those of famous artists, mostly male authors writing in the booze genre (e.g. Raymond Carver, Denis Johnson, David Foster Wallace, John Cheever), Jamison delivers an encyclopedic memoir of a literary alcoholic.
Because the nature of memoir is to reveal yourself in all your raw truthiness, I feel okay making a personal criticism. It's awfully hard to grasp the depth of pain and despair of an uber-privileged young white woman educated at Harvard and Yale, launched as a writer at the celebrated Iowa Writers' Workshop in her early twenties, achieving significant professional and creative success before age thirty. . . relatively stable childhood, loving family . . . perhaps the expectations of success were so high that her early eating disorders, the episodes of cutting, combined with a hereditary predisposition toward addiction, tipped her toward the bottle. Perhaps a highly intelligent mind sought the extreme as a way to counter boredom, to take the edge off racing thoughts that sliced through contentment and complacency. Some people cliff dive. Others snort coke. That's an over-simplification, but I believe Jamison sought to round out the thinness and occasional flippancy of her own story with a multitude of famous and forgotten addicts. She shares not only the research of tortured artists (Billy Holiday, Amy Winehouse), but the stories gleaned from her AA-meeting comrades-the mothers and husbands and sorority girls who wobbled from blackout to blackout, and rode the rollercoaster of recovery and relapse. She also includes an intelligent and thoughtful examination of U.S. drug enforcement policy and the modern history of addiction treatment, from the post-Prohibition vilification of Americans of color that constitutes the systemic racism on which this country is built, to the cult-like nature of 12-step programs.
The greatest compliments I've received about my novel The Crows of Beara have been from readers whose lives are touched by addiction. I wrote my character Annie and her struggles with alcoholism with great trepidation. I sought to portray her and her journey in all honesty and depth, knowing that I had not walked that same road; my observations and encounters with loved ones and friends informed my writing. Having read The Recovering, I marvel. It seems there was a hand guiding mine, a force that knew I had to get it right. And now, partnered to a man who spent many agonizing years trying to free someone he loved from her own prison of addiction, I seek understanding and forgiveness.
Leslie Jamison pulled herself out of destruction and into recovery in fairly short order, a high-functioning alcoholic who was buffered from the physical and economic ravages of addiction by her youth, support systems, luck and privilege. Her gift is an extraordinary ability with words that brings us the stories of others not so fortunate, so that we may learn and empathize, and see that the creative life need not be romanticized and held afloat by what remains at the bottom of a bottle.
The Recovering is an exploration of the mythology of addiction and creativity-that the latter depends on the depth of the former, that the two are inextricably linked. By weaving the narrative of her own addictions with those of famous artists, mostly male authors writing in the booze genre (e.g. Raymond Carver, Denis Johnson, David Foster Wallace, John Cheever), Jamison delivers an encyclopedic memoir of a literary alcoholic.
Because the nature of memoir is to reveal yourself in all your raw truthiness, I feel okay making a personal criticism. It's awfully hard to grasp the depth of pain and despair of an uber-privileged young white woman educated at Harvard and Yale, launched as a writer at the celebrated Iowa Writers' Workshop in her early twenties, achieving significant professional and creative success before age thirty. . . relatively stable childhood, loving family . . . perhaps the expectations of success were so high that her early eating disorders, the episodes of cutting, combined with a hereditary predisposition toward addiction, tipped her toward the bottle. Perhaps a highly intelligent mind sought the extreme as a way to counter boredom, to take the edge off racing thoughts that sliced through contentment and complacency. Some people cliff dive. Others snort coke. That's an over-simplification, but I believe Jamison sought to round out the thinness and occasional flippancy of her own story with a multitude of famous and forgotten addicts. She shares not only the research of tortured artists (Billy Holiday, Amy Winehouse), but the stories gleaned from her AA-meeting comrades-the mothers and husbands and sorority girls who wobbled from blackout to blackout, and rode the rollercoaster of recovery and relapse. She also includes an intelligent and thoughtful examination of U.S. drug enforcement policy and the modern history of addiction treatment, from the post-Prohibition vilification of Americans of color that constitutes the systemic racism on which this country is built, to the cult-like nature of 12-step programs.
The greatest compliments I've received about my novel The Crows of Beara have been from readers whose lives are touched by addiction. I wrote my character Annie and her struggles with alcoholism with great trepidation. I sought to portray her and her journey in all honesty and depth, knowing that I had not walked that same road; my observations and encounters with loved ones and friends informed my writing. Having read The Recovering, I marvel. It seems there was a hand guiding mine, a force that knew I had to get it right. And now, partnered to a man who spent many agonizing years trying to free someone he loved from her own prison of addiction, I seek understanding and forgiveness.
Leslie Jamison pulled herself out of destruction and into recovery in fairly short order, a high-functioning alcoholic who was buffered from the physical and economic ravages of addiction by her youth, support systems, luck and privilege. Her gift is an extraordinary ability with words that brings us the stories of others not so fortunate, so that we may learn and empathize, and see that the creative life need not be romanticized and held afloat by what remains at the bottom of a bottle.
April 25, 2018
Leslie Jamison’s captivating and exceptionally written book, The Recovering, is part addiction memoir and part rumination on the impact addiction plays on creating art. It’s a hybrid like a Cockapoo, or Taco Bell’s French Toast Chalupa. In between retellings of sneaking drinks and sad drunken debacles, Jamison worries that her recovery may signal the end of her creativity and artistic talent.
I was struck by how much The Recovering was like the 14th most populous city in America: Columbus, Ohio. Both are sprawling, Jamison’s book finishing at over 530 pages while the capital of Ohio sits on over 223 square miles (encompassing 10 counties). The pages of The Recovery flow by quicker than the reflecting waters of the Olentangy River. There are moments in this book that delighted me more than a Bacon Deluxe Double hamburger with Frosty from Wendy’s (founded by Dave Thomas in you-know-where). And there are moments that made me contemplate established societal attitudes, not unlike the eye-opening lessons on wildlife taught by famed Columbus zoo director Jack Hanna during his live animal demonstrations on Good Morning America. Jamison dissects the stance that drunken male authors seem brilliant and wild, full of the pain of the world, while drunk women writers are seen mainly as sloppy and undisciplined. She writes of the general views our country has historically held of addiction –some say it is a disease while others feel it is a weakness and blame the addicted. And she goes into the systemic racial bias of addictions—white cocaine addicts are to be treated as unwell patients while crack addicts (like the crack mothers of the 1980’s, seen mainly as dangerously irresponsible black women) are to be treated with disdain and extensive jail sentences.
Jamison deftly leaps from her own story of addiction to these weightier themes with the dexterity of Olympic gymnast Simone Biles (yes, another daughter of Columbus). Her tales move the reader to experience emotions not felt since watching old Miami Vice television episodes back in the late ‘80’s, encountering the massive acting chops of Columbus’s own Phillip Michal Thomas.
Underlying everything is Jamison’s very real fear that her recovery from alcohol will somehow halt her creativity and she will not be able to write anymore. However, if The Recovery is any indication, she has nothing to worry about. Her book is as stirring as the Midwestern music of Rascal Flatts, and she has cooked up a dish that even Columbusite Guy Fieri would exclaim belongs in Flavortown.
I was struck by how much The Recovering was like the 14th most populous city in America: Columbus, Ohio. Both are sprawling, Jamison’s book finishing at over 530 pages while the capital of Ohio sits on over 223 square miles (encompassing 10 counties). The pages of The Recovery flow by quicker than the reflecting waters of the Olentangy River. There are moments in this book that delighted me more than a Bacon Deluxe Double hamburger with Frosty from Wendy’s (founded by Dave Thomas in you-know-where). And there are moments that made me contemplate established societal attitudes, not unlike the eye-opening lessons on wildlife taught by famed Columbus zoo director Jack Hanna during his live animal demonstrations on Good Morning America. Jamison dissects the stance that drunken male authors seem brilliant and wild, full of the pain of the world, while drunk women writers are seen mainly as sloppy and undisciplined. She writes of the general views our country has historically held of addiction –some say it is a disease while others feel it is a weakness and blame the addicted. And she goes into the systemic racial bias of addictions—white cocaine addicts are to be treated as unwell patients while crack addicts (like the crack mothers of the 1980’s, seen mainly as dangerously irresponsible black women) are to be treated with disdain and extensive jail sentences.
Jamison deftly leaps from her own story of addiction to these weightier themes with the dexterity of Olympic gymnast Simone Biles (yes, another daughter of Columbus). Her tales move the reader to experience emotions not felt since watching old Miami Vice television episodes back in the late ‘80’s, encountering the massive acting chops of Columbus’s own Phillip Michal Thomas.
Underlying everything is Jamison’s very real fear that her recovery from alcohol will somehow halt her creativity and she will not be able to write anymore. However, if The Recovery is any indication, she has nothing to worry about. Her book is as stirring as the Midwestern music of Rascal Flatts, and she has cooked up a dish that even Columbusite Guy Fieri would exclaim belongs in Flavortown.
April 30, 2019
This is ridiculously, indulgently long, a cross between a memoir and PhD-level research into alcoholism and recovery in 20th-century literature. I wasn’t particularly interested in Jamison’s own trajectory, but rather in the themes she discusses: the history of American law enforcement regarding drugs; Iowa City (where she studied) and its legendary drunks: Carver, Cheever and Denis Johnson (I’ve just started reading Jesus’ Son); the tawdry reputation of female drunks like Jean Rhys; and the co-occurrence of anorexia (as in Caroline Knapp’s Drinking: A Love Story) and cutting. Jamison acknowledges that she’s not doing this on her own; the pattern of relapse and recovery is a universal one, and she takes comfort in knowing that so many have gone through it before her. I enjoyed the writing, and at half the length would have happily read the whole thing.
August 13, 2017
Leslie Jamison is a master. Nobody thinks like her, nobody writes like her. I don't know how she manages to tell her story perfectly braided with the stories of others—regular others who have recovered from alcohol addiction and famous writers. This book is funny and a gut punch. Everyone can relate because it asks the question: why do we desire things that are so destructive?
April 7, 2018
This is one of the most beautiful and compelling and true books I can remember reading. So full of insights and glistening wisdom that I found myself underlining for the first time in years.
Read this if you ever felt there was a “leak sprung inside [you].” Read this if you have struggled with addiction. Read this if you have struggled at all. Read this if you are human.
Read this if you ever felt there was a “leak sprung inside [you].” Read this if you have struggled with addiction. Read this if you have struggled at all. Read this if you are human.
April 22, 2018
I feel super conflicted about my reading experience with this one. I was so captivated by the first third--like with all of Empathy Exams, I just wanted to bury my face and soak in Jamison's ideas and connections. By the middle of the book, I'd lost the thread and had to force myself to press on. As I tried to pinpoint what was dragging the narrative down for me, I felt the author preemptively running circles around my latent arguments (e.g. "you're only bored by this section because literary culture idolizes the breakdown and ignores generative recovery narratives!"...and yet bored I was). I agree with assessments that this book would be vastly better with a shorter page count, but I'm still totally on board for whatever Jamison wants to make me read next
October 24, 2018
Highly recommended.
May 16, 2018
Jamison acknowledges that recovery stories are nothing new, really—but worth bearing witness to in their sameness. Certainly I always enjoy reading the myriad ways that people muck up their lives with substances or whatever it is they choose to abuse. (Because we all do it to some extent, right?)
Maybe my voracity for this type of material, in fact, left not that much new about it. Odd that Jamison thought it necessary to repeat the narrative of Billie Holliday/Harry Anslinger/Rat Park/Tent City, all available (and done better) in Johann Hari's Chasing the Scream, a book she references.
BUT to complete the compliment sandwich, I did love the biographical info of Charles Jackson, Jean Rhys and Denis Johnson (+ David Foster Wallace, Malcolm Lowry, James Baldwin, F. Scott Fitzgerald and others to a lesser extent.) And hopefully the author's honesty about her back-and-forth feelings about sobriety will help others with theirs—but who ever knows? This is about the best we humans know to do but people still go out there and mess stuff up over and over. That's a lesson in itself for sure.
How can I leave this review without quoting the weirdest thing I've read in a long time though??
I present the saga of Leslie Jamison's copulation-fatigued skeleton.
“[Dave] told me I should take calcium supplements so my bones didn’t break when he fucked me.”
Mentioned as if at random at first.
“The station was empty at midnight, echoing and dim, but as the escalator rose, I could see Dave sitting cross-legged on a blanket he’d laid across the marble floor, spread with fruit and cheese, a piece of cake, dark chocolate broken into triangles. “I made you a picnic,” he said. He handed me a tiny bowl of pale vitamins. “For your bones.”"
As a romantic gesture at a picnic?
"He’d told me I should take vitamins so my bones didn’t break when he fucked me."
In a list of considerate/interesting things he did.
As far as I can tell she has no specific bone-related ailments (Dave: "I could help you out with that wink wink, take your vitamins first though.") So, like, imagine if a guy said that to you, if you didn't run for the door, at best you'd be like "Uh thanks?" then silently, "That was weird." Would you think about it time and again as a textbook example of "considerate"?! Either they're made for each other or chivalry is dead.
Maybe my voracity for this type of material, in fact, left not that much new about it. Odd that Jamison thought it necessary to repeat the narrative of Billie Holliday/Harry Anslinger/Rat Park/Tent City, all available (and done better) in Johann Hari's Chasing the Scream, a book she references.
BUT to complete the compliment sandwich, I did love the biographical info of Charles Jackson, Jean Rhys and Denis Johnson (+ David Foster Wallace, Malcolm Lowry, James Baldwin, F. Scott Fitzgerald and others to a lesser extent.) And hopefully the author's honesty about her back-and-forth feelings about sobriety will help others with theirs—but who ever knows? This is about the best we humans know to do but people still go out there and mess stuff up over and over. That's a lesson in itself for sure.
How can I leave this review without quoting the weirdest thing I've read in a long time though??
I present the saga of Leslie Jamison's copulation-fatigued skeleton.
“[Dave] told me I should take calcium supplements so my bones didn’t break when he fucked me.”
Mentioned as if at random at first.
“The station was empty at midnight, echoing and dim, but as the escalator rose, I could see Dave sitting cross-legged on a blanket he’d laid across the marble floor, spread with fruit and cheese, a piece of cake, dark chocolate broken into triangles. “I made you a picnic,” he said. He handed me a tiny bowl of pale vitamins. “For your bones.”"
As a romantic gesture at a picnic?
"He’d told me I should take vitamins so my bones didn’t break when he fucked me."
In a list of considerate/interesting things he did.
As far as I can tell she has no specific bone-related ailments (Dave: "I could help you out with that wink wink, take your vitamins first though.") So, like, imagine if a guy said that to you, if you didn't run for the door, at best you'd be like "Uh thanks?" then silently, "That was weird." Would you think about it time and again as a textbook example of "considerate"?! Either they're made for each other or chivalry is dead.
March 1, 2019
Author Leslie Jamison has written an excellent book on alcohol addiction. Her unflinchingly honest portrayal tells of her various misguided attempts to fill the emptiness she felt within. She connects the dots between her battle with anorexia while she was in college, her onset of alcoholism in early adulthood, and her tremendous wish or need to be desired and loved which led to the compromising situations she often found herself in. Her parents divorced when she was 11 years old, and her father’s love often felt out of reach. Since childhood, she felt insecure and as if she must prove herself with her words at the dinner table, and as if she must earn the love and attention of her successful family members. Leslie feels pressured to prove her worthiness to be in attendance at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her young age makes her feel lacking in the painful life experiences which she feels might supply her with writing material. Alcohol serves for her as an entrance to the club of several celebrated alcoholic writers whose writing Leslie believed was alcohol-fueled, or aided by drinking, a common misconception about alcohol and writing. She details her experiences with A.A., her recovery and temporary relapse. Included in her book are other writers’ struggles with alcohol addiction and their attempts at recovery, in addition to her own story.
I very much enjoyed both her writing style and her excellent narration on the audiobook.
I very much enjoyed both her writing style and her excellent narration on the audiobook.
April 26, 2018
I was in the middle of this book when I read a few critical reviews of it as being bloated and self-indulgent and privileged etc. I liked it a lot. I have no personal issues with drugs or alcohol or addiction to them, but Jamison's book is not just about getting drunk and going to AA. It's about wanting and hunger and the stories we tell about our lives. I really enjoy an honest and well-written memoir and I found this one to be a really easy and warm read like a good conversation with a smart friend. There were definitely times where I rolled my eyes or I felt like she was just trying to do literary show-offy type allusions, but what friend aren't you slightly annoyed at as she sits on your couch and tells you her life for hours? Because I'm a reader of fiction and poetry, I especially liked her analysis of writers and writings about alcoholism and recovery. I liked that she was constantly talking to the reader about her fears that this memoir is Boring! (like the dude in AA that kept shouting that at her). It wasn't. It was interesting.
June 18, 2018
I normally stay far away from recovery memoirs, having lived one myself and heard thousands more through the years. This book, though, promised to turn "the traditional addiction narrative on its head, demonstrating that the story of recovery can be every bit as electrifying as the train wreck itself." My ears perked up and I took note. The blurb goes on to say (from the publisher):
That interested me tremendously. I find it endlessly interesting that so many artists are sure their art is linked with their particular dysfunction -- be it mental illness, substance abuse or misogyny. And I know of some writers and other artists who have done their best work only after clearing away the wreckage of addiction (Denis Johnson, Mary Karr, David Foster Wallace, Raymond Carver to name just a few...) Jamison's theory and examples seemed (from the blurbs) to be about how the stories we tell ourselves about addiction and recovery are, in fact, part of both solution and problem. I've read enough about the hard-drinking writer. I wanted to hear about the writers who got clean and sober and continued or gone on to great success. I didn't want another quit-lit book. I wanted something deeper and more interesting. What I got was mostly (but not all) another literary drunkalog, and this ain't Tender Is the Night, Where I'm Calling From: New and Selected Stories, A Moveable Feast or any of the other rather brilliant drunkalogs we have to choose from.
Lofty, eh? It promises not just another quit-lit recovery memoir, but something that will alter the landscape.
So I was mighty upset when, for the entire first half of the 544-page book, we get precious little that differs from any number of other recovery memoirs, even while she explicitly states in the text that she will not be writing "just another recovery memoir." The language in this "drunk half" is practically caressed, not just massaged. Every bartender's eyes or hair rates several adjectives, every drink is served with multiple metaphors. Everything is so damned beautiful. It felt -- a lot -- like the glorification of alcoholism and the behavior that comes with it. Eventually, on her own because it seems nobody else really noticed her problem, she will get sober, relapse and start over. It's here that the tone begins to change, but we're more than halfway through 544 pages at that point. In other words, she devoted a massive amount of pages to the glorious drunken Leslie and her oh-so-uniquely artistic pain.
At one point she says outright that she has trouble writing without putting herself in the story, and that's clear. She makes mention of the famous writers at Iowa with her, but only in passing because we're busy learning what she likes to drink, how much of it, when and how... Once she decides to get sober, she will fail and there will be a bit more longing for drinking/scheming etc, but the shine has gone, as anyone who has relapsed could tell you in faw fewer words. It's after this point that the book starts to be unique. She is an excellent journalist, and I wish she'd excised her own story from this book entirely.
Her drinking is written in far greater detail than her recovery. She seems to take an emotional step back the minute she gets sober. I could feel fear at her vulnerability and recovery the minute it stopped being a drunkalog. Once sobriety starts, Jamison introduces journalism, statistics and experts, so we get no "other side of the coin" to the first half of the tome -- there is no honest portrayal of Jamison sober. It's obscured by her fact-finding missions and critical readings. This is where the other writers step in to give an assist.
Honestly it felt a bit like she used their stories of relapse and recovery to mask her own fear that she isn't qualified to write about her own recovery. Perhaps, like any smart addict, she has a fear of relapse. If you write a book called "The Recovering" you probably hope not to have to start counting days sober again after the publication date. Instead of saying that outright, though, she shows us other writers who did exactly that. The irony is that her sponsor tells her at one point that this is her problem in life -- it seems to also be a problem in her writing.
Jamison leads a charmed life, drunk of not. She is in prestigious writing programs and residences throughout the entire time chronicled book, and she's publishing too. High-functioning isn't even close to the right word. That doesn't change her pain or disqualify her sobriety, but it's worth a mention. She says nada about insurance or paying for medical care. When she does make mention of money, it's to do things most of us will only dream of - travel, foreign research, time just to write in exotic or beautiful locales. One could imagine she saw this note coming, since she shields herself from her privilege by mentioning it a few times.
But between all of that extraneous and rather privileged "just another recovery memoir," there are very interesting themes and excellent journalism. She has a great hypothesis that's buried a bit deeply, but it goes something like we are all subject to being seduced by the stories we tell ourselves and it might be good, if scary and different, to tell ourselves healthy stories rather than unhealthy ones. Artists don't have to write with their own blood, and if they do, they'll eventually bleed out. She has an excellent critical eye for reading others' writing and pulling support for her story out of their words. Those parts are extremely compelling, and I really wish that the majority of the massive amount of pages had gone to that.
One final thing. While she makes mention of the big names who were known to drink, some of these writers also seem to have suffered from comorbid disorders, and that is never discussed. I can't say, nor can Leslie Jamison or for that matter, her relative, author and psychologist, Kay Redfield Jamison, whether many of these suicides were caused by one specific illness - be it alcoholism or an affective disorder. I do wish these rather large topics weren't skipped. They're important, even if they don't fit neatly within the narrative built here.
What I would hope is that the personal story be completely excised next time and the researching, critical eye step in. Her best work is when she empathizes with the writing of others and explains it from the standpoint of one who has felt those feelings and lived to tell.
All the while, she offers a fascinating look at the larger history of the recovery movement, and at the literary and artistic geniuses whose lives and works were shaped by alcoholism and substance dependence, including John Berryman, Jean Rhys, Raymond Carver, Billie Holiday, David Foster Wallace, and Denis Johnson, as well as brilliant figures lost to obscurity but newly illuminated here.
That interested me tremendously. I find it endlessly interesting that so many artists are sure their art is linked with their particular dysfunction -- be it mental illness, substance abuse or misogyny. And I know of some writers and other artists who have done their best work only after clearing away the wreckage of addiction (Denis Johnson, Mary Karr, David Foster Wallace, Raymond Carver to name just a few...) Jamison's theory and examples seemed (from the blurbs) to be about how the stories we tell ourselves about addiction and recovery are, in fact, part of both solution and problem. I've read enough about the hard-drinking writer. I wanted to hear about the writers who got clean and sober and continued or gone on to great success. I didn't want another quit-lit book. I wanted something deeper and more interesting. What I got was mostly (but not all) another literary drunkalog, and this ain't Tender Is the Night, Where I'm Calling From: New and Selected Stories, A Moveable Feast or any of the other rather brilliant drunkalogs we have to choose from.
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.
Lofty, eh? It promises not just another quit-lit recovery memoir, but something that will alter the landscape.
So I was mighty upset when, for the entire first half of the 544-page book, we get precious little that differs from any number of other recovery memoirs, even while she explicitly states in the text that she will not be writing "just another recovery memoir." The language in this "drunk half" is practically caressed, not just massaged. Every bartender's eyes or hair rates several adjectives, every drink is served with multiple metaphors. Everything is so damned beautiful. It felt -- a lot -- like the glorification of alcoholism and the behavior that comes with it. Eventually, on her own because it seems nobody else really noticed her problem, she will get sober, relapse and start over. It's here that the tone begins to change, but we're more than halfway through 544 pages at that point. In other words, she devoted a massive amount of pages to the glorious drunken Leslie and her oh-so-uniquely artistic pain.
At one point she says outright that she has trouble writing without putting herself in the story, and that's clear. She makes mention of the famous writers at Iowa with her, but only in passing because we're busy learning what she likes to drink, how much of it, when and how... Once she decides to get sober, she will fail and there will be a bit more longing for drinking/scheming etc, but the shine has gone, as anyone who has relapsed could tell you in faw fewer words. It's after this point that the book starts to be unique. She is an excellent journalist, and I wish she'd excised her own story from this book entirely.
Her drinking is written in far greater detail than her recovery. She seems to take an emotional step back the minute she gets sober. I could feel fear at her vulnerability and recovery the minute it stopped being a drunkalog. Once sobriety starts, Jamison introduces journalism, statistics and experts, so we get no "other side of the coin" to the first half of the tome -- there is no honest portrayal of Jamison sober. It's obscured by her fact-finding missions and critical readings. This is where the other writers step in to give an assist.
Honestly it felt a bit like she used their stories of relapse and recovery to mask her own fear that she isn't qualified to write about her own recovery. Perhaps, like any smart addict, she has a fear of relapse. If you write a book called "The Recovering" you probably hope not to have to start counting days sober again after the publication date. Instead of saying that outright, though, she shows us other writers who did exactly that. The irony is that her sponsor tells her at one point that this is her problem in life -- it seems to also be a problem in her writing.
Jamison leads a charmed life, drunk of not. She is in prestigious writing programs and residences throughout the entire time chronicled book, and she's publishing too. High-functioning isn't even close to the right word. That doesn't change her pain or disqualify her sobriety, but it's worth a mention. She says nada about insurance or paying for medical care. When she does make mention of money, it's to do things most of us will only dream of - travel, foreign research, time just to write in exotic or beautiful locales. One could imagine she saw this note coming, since she shields herself from her privilege by mentioning it a few times.
But between all of that extraneous and rather privileged "just another recovery memoir," there are very interesting themes and excellent journalism. She has a great hypothesis that's buried a bit deeply, but it goes something like we are all subject to being seduced by the stories we tell ourselves and it might be good, if scary and different, to tell ourselves healthy stories rather than unhealthy ones. Artists don't have to write with their own blood, and if they do, they'll eventually bleed out. She has an excellent critical eye for reading others' writing and pulling support for her story out of their words. Those parts are extremely compelling, and I really wish that the majority of the massive amount of pages had gone to that.
One final thing. While she makes mention of the big names who were known to drink, some of these writers also seem to have suffered from comorbid disorders, and that is never discussed. I can't say, nor can Leslie Jamison or for that matter, her relative, author and psychologist, Kay Redfield Jamison, whether many of these suicides were caused by one specific illness - be it alcoholism or an affective disorder. I do wish these rather large topics weren't skipped. They're important, even if they don't fit neatly within the narrative built here.
What I would hope is that the personal story be completely excised next time and the researching, critical eye step in. Her best work is when she empathizes with the writing of others and explains it from the standpoint of one who has felt those feelings and lived to tell.
October 1, 2019
Wow. This book took me a very long time to read — almost a year. It’s long, and dense, and although I was never bored reading it, it was a struggle at times. I cried a lot, about Jamison’s story, and the stories she told from ordinary people at AA meetings, and the deep reporting she did, which was often heartbreaking.
You can tell that this was, at least partially, drawn from a dissertation, because her depth of knowledge about the subject of addiction, particularly about alcoholism and writers, is dizzying. This book so clearly represents years and years worth of work.
I loved Jamison’s writing style, though at times it felt unnecessary, like does every single thing have to be described in such a hauntingly beautiful way? But that’s hardly a flaw. I was also pleasantly surprised by little hints of humor and feminist rage that came through in moments.
Although this is very clearly about the experience of one specific (very privileged and also specifically lucky) person, I really appreciated her reckonings with how her whiteness and (relative) wealth made her experience with addiction so very different from most such experiences. She really delved into incarceration, the war on drugs, the treatment of addicts of color, in a way that I didn’t expect and really appreciated.
You can tell that this was, at least partially, drawn from a dissertation, because her depth of knowledge about the subject of addiction, particularly about alcoholism and writers, is dizzying. This book so clearly represents years and years worth of work.
I loved Jamison’s writing style, though at times it felt unnecessary, like does every single thing have to be described in such a hauntingly beautiful way? But that’s hardly a flaw. I was also pleasantly surprised by little hints of humor and feminist rage that came through in moments.
Although this is very clearly about the experience of one specific (very privileged and also specifically lucky) person, I really appreciated her reckonings with how her whiteness and (relative) wealth made her experience with addiction so very different from most such experiences. She really delved into incarceration, the war on drugs, the treatment of addicts of color, in a way that I didn’t expect and really appreciated.
August 15, 2018
I should start by confessing my love of addiction memoirs. I read so many each year and am completely drawn to them. At this point I did not think it possible that anything could be added to the genre. But little did I know Leslie Jamison was working on this truly extraordinary book with a reader just like me in mind. Jamison’s approach is meta, self aware, complex and brilliant. Her exploration of drunk male writers and the romancing of intoxication through history as well as her stocktake of her own privilege sets a new bar for writing about addiction. Her intellect is on full show throughout the book and this is exactly the sort of non-fiction I want to read: penetrating, nuanced, urgent, comprehensive.
October 18, 2018
I feel like I say this everything I'm not blown away by a memoir.. BUT
I just hate reviewing memoirs. Its so stressful. I always fee like I'm saying "I'm not a fan of this woman's life." And that's just... not accurate. I'm just not a fan of this story.
This was one that I just couldn't connect with. Its fine, I just found it to be slow in the middle and overall repetitive.
I just hate reviewing memoirs. Its so stressful. I always fee like I'm saying "I'm not a fan of this woman's life." And that's just... not accurate. I'm just not a fan of this story.
This was one that I just couldn't connect with. Its fine, I just found it to be slow in the middle and overall repetitive.
May 22, 2018
I loved the parts about Leslie's own addiction and recovery, but be warned there is A LOT of content around other authors and their addictions. It often felt like talking just for the sake of talking...a little all over the place.
May 13, 2022
Goes off the rails occasionally but that’s forgivable for how excellent the rest of it is. I didn’t get the impression that I’d like her writing from what I’d read about her essays but wow, how wrong.
October 4, 2024
This took me a very long time to read because, I have to be honest here, I found Jamison exhausting. Toward the end she acknowledges that someone's observation that she is emotionally abusive may be true (it is true, but she isn't quite that full-throated in her acknowledgment) and I felt somewhat emotionally abused just reading about a lot of this. I had to walk away several times and come back. That said, it was worth the abuse for me. Most of it was excellent and eye-opening.
Jamison is a prodigiously skilled writer who can fully evoke feelings, conversations, and scenes to give the reader a present sense experience. When she focuses on alcohol and writers, including in part Raymond Carver, Jean Rhys, John Berryman, Charles Jackson, Denis Johnson, and David Foster Wallace, her observations are fascinating and the portraits she draws are nuanced and vulnerable. I learned a lot about process that changed my thinking about art, She also wrote a lot about 12-step recovery and the work on addiction recovery by Gabor Mate. I learned a lot from this as well. I think we all know the trappings, the cliches, the structure of 12-step recovery which has all been covered ad nauseum in popular culture, but Jamison digs down into why the cliches and consistency, the acknowledgment that we are all alike in most ways make this route to recovery work for many (not all, and she is clear this is not the only route and that it does not work for all.)
Why did I take a star? I thought Jamison spent way way way too much time on her own journeys, both the journey as a drunk and the damage she wrought (including a lot of damage to herself) and her journey in sobriety. A lot of this was duplicative, and even more of it did nothing to illuminate her thesis. I get frustrated when reviewers bitch about memoirs being self-indulgent because they are MEMOIRS and so by definition they are self-indulgent. And yet here I am about to complain about Jamison's self-indulgence. Too much of this book consists of lengthy detailed recountings of events that are clearly just Jamison trying to lessen her guilt and shame by shining light on the ugliness and selfishness of her actions. Self-flagellation serves no one but the flagellated. I don't think any reader needs the litany, and to the extent it is enjoyed I expect the enjoyment stems from prurience or competition. (People like to believe they are the most pathetic screw-ups in the house. At least there is one race they can win.) I get that brand of sharing is the heart and soul of 12-step process, but it is not the heart and soul of good writing. The issue is compounded by the fact that this is only in part a memoir. There is a bigger story Jamison is trying to tell and her memememe approach lessens the impact of more important messaging.
I read Jamison's newest and I DNF'd because she was telling the most boring story with this same level of memememe. Even in that book though, her writing rose above that noise often enough that I knew I wanted to try reading her other work. I am very glad I did that. This was extremely worthwhile and I expect it will stay with me.
Jamison is a prodigiously skilled writer who can fully evoke feelings, conversations, and scenes to give the reader a present sense experience. When she focuses on alcohol and writers, including in part Raymond Carver, Jean Rhys, John Berryman, Charles Jackson, Denis Johnson, and David Foster Wallace, her observations are fascinating and the portraits she draws are nuanced and vulnerable. I learned a lot about process that changed my thinking about art, She also wrote a lot about 12-step recovery and the work on addiction recovery by Gabor Mate. I learned a lot from this as well. I think we all know the trappings, the cliches, the structure of 12-step recovery which has all been covered ad nauseum in popular culture, but Jamison digs down into why the cliches and consistency, the acknowledgment that we are all alike in most ways make this route to recovery work for many (not all, and she is clear this is not the only route and that it does not work for all.)
Why did I take a star? I thought Jamison spent way way way too much time on her own journeys, both the journey as a drunk and the damage she wrought (including a lot of damage to herself) and her journey in sobriety. A lot of this was duplicative, and even more of it did nothing to illuminate her thesis. I get frustrated when reviewers bitch about memoirs being self-indulgent because they are MEMOIRS and so by definition they are self-indulgent. And yet here I am about to complain about Jamison's self-indulgence. Too much of this book consists of lengthy detailed recountings of events that are clearly just Jamison trying to lessen her guilt and shame by shining light on the ugliness and selfishness of her actions. Self-flagellation serves no one but the flagellated. I don't think any reader needs the litany, and to the extent it is enjoyed I expect the enjoyment stems from prurience or competition. (People like to believe they are the most pathetic screw-ups in the house. At least there is one race they can win.) I get that brand of sharing is the heart and soul of 12-step process, but it is not the heart and soul of good writing. The issue is compounded by the fact that this is only in part a memoir. There is a bigger story Jamison is trying to tell and her memememe approach lessens the impact of more important messaging.
I read Jamison's newest and I DNF'd because she was telling the most boring story with this same level of memememe. Even in that book though, her writing rose above that noise often enough that I knew I wanted to try reading her other work. I am very glad I did that. This was extremely worthwhile and I expect it will stay with me.
February 11, 2024
Recovery reminded me that storytelling was ultimately about community, not self-deception. Recovery didn’t say: We tell ourselves stories in order to live. It said: We tell others our stories in order to help them live, too.
I'll admit my reticence going into this one - a book billed as a memoir clicking in at over 500 pages made me question the author's intentions and editorial decision-making. Yet, I trusted that the same essayist that wrote 52Blue (my intro to Jamison years ago) and The Empathy Exams could land this one too. Thankfully, yes: Trust and believe.
This one worked well because Jamison structured the book not only with her personal storytelling and struggles with addiction, but more specifically on alcohol addiction in 20th-century literature, and related cultural histories of Alcoholics Anonymous, Iowa City, and the larger themes of recovery. Jamison dives deep into the lives and works of Jean Rhys, Denis Johnson, Billie Holiday, Raymond Carver, Marguerite Duras, David Foster Wallace, John Berryman, Charles Jackson, and others, noting their struggles with alcoholism, and the way each of the artists/writers looks at addiction and recovery in their own work.
4.5/5*
It's complex, often messy, long, non-linear, and strikingly humane and affirming.
Quite a beautiful book.
I'll admit my reticence going into this one - a book billed as a memoir clicking in at over 500 pages made me question the author's intentions and editorial decision-making. Yet, I trusted that the same essayist that wrote 52Blue (my intro to Jamison years ago) and The Empathy Exams could land this one too. Thankfully, yes: Trust and believe.
This one worked well because Jamison structured the book not only with her personal storytelling and struggles with addiction, but more specifically on alcohol addiction in 20th-century literature, and related cultural histories of Alcoholics Anonymous, Iowa City, and the larger themes of recovery. Jamison dives deep into the lives and works of Jean Rhys, Denis Johnson, Billie Holiday, Raymond Carver, Marguerite Duras, David Foster Wallace, John Berryman, Charles Jackson, and others, noting their struggles with alcoholism, and the way each of the artists/writers looks at addiction and recovery in their own work.
4.5/5*
It's complex, often messy, long, non-linear, and strikingly humane and affirming.
Quite a beautiful book.
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