The Language of the Heart: A Cultural History of the Recovery Movement from Alcoholics Anonymous to Oprah Winfrey

by Trysh Travis

In The Language of the Heart Trysh Travis explores the rich cultural history of Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) and its offshoots and the larger "recovery movement" that has grown out of them. Moving from AA's beginnings in the mid-1930s as a men's fellowship that met in church basements to the thoroughly commercialized addiction treatment centers of today, Travis chronicles the development of recovery and examines its relationship to the broad American tradition of self-help, highlighting the roles that gender, mysticism, and print culture have played in that development.

Travis draws on hitherto unexamined materials from AA's archives as well as a variety of popular recovery literatures. Her analysis traces AA's embrace of the concept of addiction as disease, the rise of feminist sobriety discourse and the codependence theories of the 1970s and 80s, and Oprah Winfrey's turn-of-the-millennium popularization of metaphysical healing. What unites these varied cultures of recovery, Travis argues, is their desire to offer spiritual solutions to problems of gender and power.

Treating self-help seekers as individuals whose intellectual and aesthetic traditions are worth excavating, The Language of the Heart is the first book to attend to the evolution and variation found within the recovery movement and to treat recovery with the attention to detail that its complexity requires.

Genres: Nonfiction

357 pages, Hardcover

First published December 11, 2009

Reviews

[Randle]

For the Mind and Heart

Informative and educational report on key aspects of the self-help and recovery movement engendered by the 12 Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous.

[Ray A.]

An ideological treatment of AA and the recovery movement revolving mostly around identity politics, such as class, race, ethnicity, gender, and sexual orientation, with heavy emphasis on New Thought religion and spirituality.

[Jewel]

It was a great read about the the recovery movement from an outsider.