I once attended a screening of The Lost Weekend, the film version of Charles Jackson's 1944 novel about an alcoholic, where the audience fell captive to a college campus projectionist. Around two-thirds of the way through, it became clear that something was off with the movie -- the protagonist was about to take a stumble, but didn't he fall down a stairwell a few minutes ago? The film stopped, the house lights came on, and the projectionist apologized for mixing up the reels. We all carried on like it didn't matter, because it didn't: Until the film's pat, upbeat redemption arc at the very end, the film was all drunken despair anyway.The Recovering, Leslie Jamison deliberately shuffles the reels of the familiar recovery narrative, even while acknowledging the futility of doing so. An alcoholic in recovery herself, she opens her story announcing that she's "wary of the tedious architecture and tawdry self- congratulation of a redemption story." Every good writer instinctually wants to explode clichés and familiar tropes, and there's much about The Recovering that's inventive: its careful braiding of memoir and literary criticism, its close observation of addiction and creativity, its comprehensive grasp of the way alcoholism provokes scapegoating, solipsism, fear, shame, and solitude. And yet the redemption story won't be blown up, behaving as if it were encased in twenty feet of concrete. Familiar as it may be, the redemption story is what helps save her. There may be nothing new to say about the AA meeting in the church basement -- indeed, its central virtue is its familiarity. But the power of the book is in Jamison's openness about how conflicted the redemption story makes her anyway, enchanted and skeptical and back again.I'm sorry I crashed your car into a wall . You say you'll fix it. Then you do." Those sentences are among the simplest in the book, and the simplicity is hard fought for, because she's invested in the notion that words and stories are relevant to recovery. Interpolated into her own story are the stories of other artists who struggled with drinking, and how it shaped their art. In poet John Berryman she sees "the sweet boozy whiff of tangle and rupture." In Jean Rhys she sees a writer who wasn't allowed to see herself "as a rogue genius, like the drunk male writers of her generation. She was always forced to understand herself as a failed mother instead." Even a rather straightforward work like The Lost Weekend offers something telling in what it doesn't do: Jackson "refused the idea of drinking as metaphysical portal. In the novel, alcoholism isn't particularly meaningful, it just is." The Recovering is nearly 500 pages and has such as intense and clarified energy, such a bone-deep compulsion to work out recovery's paradoxes, that you feel she could go on for twice as long. (And I would happily read that book.) And yet, in the same way that all those literary writers' experiences matter, the drunkalogs she hears in meetings matter, because they become part of a more basic story. "The paradox of recovery stories, I was learning, was that you were supposed to relinquish your ego by authoring a story in which you also starred," she says.The Recovering, but her experience is rooted in those of countless others. They make meaning not because they're unique, but because they're shared; they live in their telling. Mark Athitakis is a writer, editor, critic, and blogger who’s spent more than a dozen years in journalism. His work has appeared in The New York Times Book Review, Washington Post Book World, Chicago Sun-Times, Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Washington City Paper, and many other publications. He is currently a member of the Board of Directors of the National Book Critics Circle.
Reviewer: Mark Athitakis
The Barnes & Noble Review
…the second half [of The Recovery ] is close to magnificent, and genuinely moving. This is that rare addiction memoir that gets better after sobriety takes hold. Jamison…is a powerful describer of the kind of community she enters with A.A. meetings. She evokes the church basements and Styrofoam cups of coffee and day-old pastries as well as any writer since David Foster Wallace.
The New York Times - Dwight Garner
Jamison's questing immersion in intoxication and sobriety is exceptional in its vivid, courageous, hypnotic telling; brilliant in its subtlety of perception, interpretation, and compassion; and capacious in its scholarship, scale, concern, and mission.
The Recovering opens our eyes...This book should be required reading—simultaneously informative and chilling, it details the devastation of alcoholism as Jamison bares all, her story the tale of many who sit humbly in circles in 12-Step rooms. Readers will wish the best for this brave soul.
This book is a beautiful mess and well worth reading.”
New York Times bestselling author Roxane Gay
Jamison is a notably lyrical writer, but what really shines is her curious, generous, sensitive mind... It's a rich and powerful chorus.
Taking a different approach to well-worn territory, Jamison looks at the ongoing struggle that comes after one hits rock bottom.”
A remarkable feat ...Jamison is a bracingly smart writer; her sentences wind and snake, at turns breathless and tense...Instead of solving the mystery of why she drank, she does something worthier, digging underneath the big emptiness that lives inside every addict to find something profound.
Such is Jamison's command of metaphor and assonance that she could rivet a reader with a treatise on toast. We perhaps have no writer better on the subject of psychic suffering and its consolations.
The New Yorker Gary Greenberg
Leslie Jamison has done a magnificent job of rescuing an age-old social problem from the clichés that surround it, and making us see it anew for the cruel assault on the human spirit that it really is.
author of Fierce Attachments and The OddWoman and Vivian Gornick
The Recovering is full to the brim with beauty. Billie Holiday, Amy Winehouse, and David Foster Wallace: The skill and admiration with which she illuminates these complicated lives shows how Jamison herself is touched by the same brand of genius, for better or for worse.
Using a blend of memoir, investigative reporting, and literary criticism, Jamison deftly tells a new narrative about recovery, the history of recovery, the criminalization of addiction, and more.”
An honest and important book…Vivid writing and required reading.”
#1 New York Times bestselling author Stephen King
Leslie Jamison's forthcoming 544-page door-stopper, The Recovering , promises the same blend of memoir, reportage, and cultural history as her excellent 2014 collection of essays, The Empathy Exams . In The Recovering , Jamison details the ups and downs of her own struggles with alcohol. Looking to famous alcoholic writers, Jamison additionally battles her fear of the boredom of sobriety, describing it with arresting, brutal honesty. This is so much more than an "addiction memoir
it is the work of a singular voice at the top of her game.
Thrilling...Dynamic... Jamison has proven herself to be both a fierce intellectual and an extreme empath...She's written a singular, extraordinarily insightful memoir of addiction, one which she might insist is altogether ordinary. That a reader might recognize herself in these pages, familiar as they are, is, of course, part of their power.
Masterful...beautifully honest ...Essential reading...The most comprehensive study of the relationship between writing and alcohol that I have read, or know about...The prose is clean and clear and a pleasure to read, utterly without pretension. Although the subject is dark, Jamison has managed to write an often very funny page turner...In short, The Recovering is terrific , and if you're interested in the relationship between artists and addiction, you must read it.
Part memoir and part reportage, this fascinating book… breaks down how society has long romanticized both addiction and sobriety. "
Instead of solving the mystery of why she drank, she does something worthier, digging underneath the big emptiness that lives inside every addict to find something profound.”
The Recovering is a typically adroit offering from Leslie Jamison, who has been deservedly compared to Joan Didion. The work and lives of Jean Rhys, John Berryman, William Burroughs, Marguerite Duras, and many others are featured in fascinating detail, but the thread drawing them all together is that it is told from the perspective of a former alcoholic. Now recovered, Jamison dissects the fetishization of 'whiskey and ink': the romanticization of the 'old, mythic drunks' such as Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner . . . The book is a compelling work made possible by Jamison's formidable knowledge . . . but the real subject of The Recovering , its driving force, is Jamison herself. This is a memoir of alcoholism deftly mediated through the lives of others, where trauma and abjection (and, equally, seduction) are patched together with collective experience to produce a nuanced, tender portrait of life with and after alcohol.
Leslie Jamison's The Recovering is a definitive investigation of both the romance of intoxication and the possibilities for recovery. Whether interviewing veterans of a communal rehab house, digging through the archives of alcoholic writers, or examining her own motives and thoughts, Jamison shows ways of living alongside contradictions without diminishing their confusion and pain. Graceful, forensic, and intimate, The Recovering sets a new bar in addiction studies. It is a courageous and brilliant example of what nonfiction writing can do.
author of I Love Dick Chris Kraus
Jamison tells the story of use and misuse, of falling apart and putting herself back together…She tells my story and the story of so many others who have found themselves compelled to use substances as a salve and found they couldn’t stop.”
Like Mary Karr's Lit or Caroline Knapp's Drinking: A Love Story , Jamison's perceptive and generous-hearted new book is uncompromising on the ugliness of addiction, yet tenderly hopeful that people can heal...Jamison is a writer of exacting grace ...Her prose reaches a new register in conveying the rawness of early sobriety...She captures with fullness the feeling of growing up and growing into oneself.
Washington Post Nora Caplan-Bricker
The sheer immensity of the book is noteworthy . . . The Recovering is a magisterial survey of recovery literature and a beautifully written memoir in its own right.
Symphonic ...Beautiful and moving ...Jamison writes with poignancy and compassion of hard-won triumphs, hers and others'. She is honest and observant, at times lyrical, about her experiences in AA, what the group gives its members, but also what they lose when they get sober. She writes about the sense of of fellowship in meetings viscerally, like a churchgoer describing a powerful service...The Recovering is an exhaustive and definitive Big Book.
Wall Street Journal Kate Christensen
‘Reason for addiction: To avoid monotony of living,’ reads the intake form of a man named Robert Burnes, at one time a patient at the Narcotics Farm in Lexington, Kentucky…Burnes’ presence highlights one of the brilliant, and unexpected, moves in The Recovering : Jamison’s decision to make room for other voices, other experiences.”
Riveting ...Jamison orchestrates a multi-voiced, universal song of lack, shame, surrender, uncertain and unsentimental redemption...It is a pleasure and feels like a social duty to report that Jamison's book shines sunlight on these creepy, crepuscular enchantments. Wisdom floods the scene, and genius never flees. Quite on its own terms, The Recovering is a beautifully told example of the considered and self-aware becoming art.
Boston Globe Priscilla Gilman
Poignant...Taut and immediate.
Village Voice Sophia Nguyen
A staggering investigation into cultural assumptions about addicts, and a necessary critique of a literary scene that idolizes the drunken genius. . . . In her essay collection, The Empathy Exams , Jamison more than proved herself as an incisive witness to the complicated, messy lives people lead. Her blend of reportage and personal insight, in the tradition of Joan Didion, is on full display here. . . . Empathetic and unflinching, The Recovering offers a refreshing antidote to narratives that would marry substance abuse to creativity.
Shelf Awareness Dave Wheeler
Magnificent and genuinely moving. This is that rare addiction memoir that gets better after sobriety takes hold.
New York Times Dwight Garner
Wholly original…By the end of this wonderful book, we discover that the author has indeed become someone different: She’s sober, successful, and happy.”
USA Today (3½ out of 4 stars)
Breaks the addiction-lit mold.
Vanity Fair Sloane Crosley
This is a poignant, heartfelt, deeply brave masterpiece that opens up an important conversation, and Jamison writes so eloquently about such a difficult topic.”
Jamison writes about personal experiences in a way that feels universal...Her vulnerability and determination are present on every page.
The breadth of Jamison's knowledge on this subject is extensive and there beautifully written moments throughout coupled with interesting insights about the sociopolitical implications of addiction and how privilege can shape the experience of addiction. This book is a beautiful mess and well worth reading.
Wonderful...wholly original...it shines.
A sprawling, compelling, fiercely ambitious book ...Its publication represents the most significant new addition to the canon in more than a decade...Jamison's writing throughout is spectacularly evocative and sensuous...She thinks with elegant precision, cutting through the whiskey-soaked myths...Jamison is interested in something else: the possibility that sobriety can form its own kind of legend, no less electric, and more generative in the end.
The Atlantic Sophie Gilbert
With intricate detail and multilayered storytelling, The Recovering lays bare the myths surrounding artists and addiction . . . Jamison's exploration of how culture impacts the direction that addiction takes people is, while not new, framed in a nuanced context, giving new breath and voice to an old problem . . . This book reads like a fine poem. Encompassing depth adorned with eloquence and a marriage of memoir and research, the message is important and should serve to shatter our romanticism of the altered artist's contributions. Jamison digs deeply into the mythical cloud billowing around writers and what's in their glass, proving sobriety is a creative force to be lauded.
Associated Press Christina Ledbetter
There’s something profound at work here, a truth about how we grow into ourselves that rings achingly wise and burrows painfully deep.”
Gritty...Raw...Thought-provoking and distinct ...Fascinating in ways you might not expect...The Recovering ventures beyond the cliché and the ordinary to remind us once again of both the fallibility and resiliency of the human condition.
San Francisco Chronicle Alexis Burling
Jamison is preternaturally canny . . . She provides unexpected perceptions and expertly distilled research . . . The Recovering bursts with insight on how we scramble together our identities, told in a voice that manages by some literary legerdemain to be both winsomely idiosyncratic and resoundingly collective . . . The book is a story of the long, painful, resistant, and unoriginal road to getting—and staying—sober as much as it is a narrative of addiction. But it also conveys the 'sinuous, glimmering energy of recovery.' . . . Along the way, it mutates from one gifted and successful young woman's tale into a larger inquiry into how we seek to heal ourselves . . . Part confession, part literary criticism, part cultural analysis, part musing, and part hard-edged reporting, The Recovering creates its own grainy context, defying all the usual tropes of addiction memoirs . . . Jamison has written an extraordinary document of self-reckoning that will make you think and rethink the trajectory of your own life in its 'mundane realities' as well as its 'cinematic epic mode.' This is a book about one of us, all of us, and the yearnings that take us to dark as well as light-filled places.
The New Republic Daphne Merkin
The Recovering is beautifully written, brutally honest, formidably intelligent, emotionally powerful, and absolutely fascinating. Leslie Jamison captured my attention in the very first sentence and didn't let it go for a second until—with reluctance—I finished the very last. Addiction literature has just welcomed a new classic.
National Book Critics Circle Awardwinner and New Y Anne Fadiman
As engaging as it is thoughtful . Jamison proves both an insightful guide to decades of literature by and about addicts, and a self-aware chronicler of her own struggle with alcoholism...In The Recovering , she has written a movingly humble book, filled to the brim with lessons learned the hard way.
Jamison writes plainly but vividly, again, about pain and redemption.”
A beautiful behemoth.
Leslie Jamison, the accomplished scholar and venerated essayist, has written a great book . . . She dazzles us with her feats of scholarship . . . The sheer immensity of the book is noteworthy . . . The Recovering is a magisterial survey of recovery literature and a beautifully written memoir in its own right.
Huffington Post Garrett Kamps
Precise and heartfelt...The Recovering is a magnificent achievement.
Minneapolis Star-Tribune Scott F. Parker
Using a blend of memoir, investigative reporting, and literary criticism, Jamison deftly tells a new narrative about recovery, the history of recovery, the criminalization of addiction, and more.
Jamison[‘s] new book, which blends her memoir of recovery with cultural history, can only add to her growing literary reputation.”
Leslie Jamison has written an honest and important book. It will be important to recovering alcoholics who wonder if there really is life after booze, and I think it will be important to writers and critics, because she weaves her story of recovery into those of other artists (mostly writers, but also Billie Holiday and Amy Winehouse) who also made the jump from soused to sober. And some who didn't. The most important thematic thread may be its insistence that the talented artist who needs booze or drugs to support his work and withstand his own vision does not, in fact, exist. It's important to debunk what Todd Rundgren called 'the ever popular tortured artist effect.' All in all, vivid writing and required reading.
Fascinating...energetic, colorful, fun, buzzy, affecting, and spot-on ...Emotional, as well as factual, honesty is the sine qua non of a memoir. Yet this kind of deep honesty—the merciless self-examination and exposure that Jamison displays—is increasingly rare.
New York Times Book Review Melanie Thernstrom
The book offers a pleasing corrective to the ideal of the drunken seer-poet, swilling gin in the hope that it might bring them one woozy step closer to the tragedy and poetry of life. It also proceeds with accessible lyricism and disarming frankness, a style that serves as an extension of the book's message that sobriety hardly means the end of poetry, of the clarifying intoxification of language." Ted Scheinman , Pacific Standard
Deeply honest...At the heart of this poignant work is an insightful exploration of the loneliness and pain that fuels addiction.
"[Jamison] takes her blend of the personal, reportorial, and scholarly to expansive new lengths and depths with a discursive examination of addictions…Her case studies, as well as the power of addiction as metaphor, that really make it stand out.”
Stunning... Her language manages somehow to be simultaneously lush and piercing. It is richly imaged, delighting the senses with its descriptive texture.
Los Angeles Review of Books
The Recovering follows the story of Jamison's alcoholism in lush, almost caressing detail...For the most part, Jamison's story was the only one I cared about, not because her drunkalog, as she calls it, is different from or better than anyone else's, but because she was so fully there, in her own thronged and fraught mind, illuminating it from the inside. She worries that that kind of interiority suggests a fatal selfishness. But the promise of books is that we are bound up and implicated in other people's lives, even if they have nothing to do with us. Her story is ours now—what a gift.
An astounding triumph... A recovery memoir like no other...Jamison is a writer of prodigious ambition...Here, she's a bare-it-all memoirist, an astute critic, and a diligent archivist all in one. The book knows no bounds, building in depth and vitality with each passing concern...There's something profound at work here, a truth about how we grow into ourselves that rings achingly wise and burrows painfully deep.
Entertainment Weekly (A) David Canfield
The breadth of Jamison's knowledge on this subject is impressive . . . The writing is beautiful. There are descriptive phrases that are simply breathtaking . . . I couldn't put the book down . . . More than that, I was genuinely moved by how accurately Jamison captures the experience of addiction, the hollows we all try to fill with one thing or another.
New York Times bestselling author of Bad Feminist Roxane Gay
Uninterested in telling her own story as if it occurs in a vacuum, [Jamison] draws together several others’, as well as their contributing social forces…The result is a staggering investigation into cultural assumptions about addicts and a necessary critique of a literary scene that idolizes the drunken genius.”
Brilliant ...We are aware, most fundamentally, of Jamison's urgency. This, of course, is as it should be, for sheis writing to survive...The Recovering leaves us with the sense of a writer intent on holding nothing back.
Los Angeles Times David L. Ulin
You don't need to be an addict to be enthralled by The Recovering. This book is for anyone interested in a dazzlingly brilliant, uncommonly compassionate, and often hilarious study of human nature. Leslie Jamison's work will definitely make you feel smarter—I'd like to borrow her brain to pick a fight with a couple of people—but The Recovering also reads like a gripping mystery as written by a subversive and deeply passionate philosopher. Her writing is unexpected, profound, and perverse—in short, a thrill to read. Best of all, for a writer so gifted at locating the excruciating commonalities of isolation, Jamison manages this greatest feat of magic: when I read her words, I come away feeling less alone.
author of New York Times bestseller Dear Mr. You Mary-Louise Parker
As a reader of this most consuming book, I celebrate Jamison's deep openheartedness, deliberate unselfishness, immaculate, inculcating vision, and her language— oh, her language...For her intelligence, her compassion, her capaciousness, her search, her deep reading, her precise language, Jamison must be honored here.
Chicago Tribune Beth Kephart
Thoughtful, fiercely honest, and intimate, The Recovering is a must-read that is Jamison at her best.
Clever, bold, and earnest . . . The Recovering makes for bracing reading . . . Jamison writes wonderfully well about the bad old days, beginning with the very early drinking when she felt 'giddy from a sense of trespass.' . . . The Recovering is an impressive work: difficult, strong, and strange, both comprehensive and impressionistic, with much to say about how we live, how we yearn, and how we might do both differently.
The Spectator (UK) Susie Boyt
A latter-day Susan Sontag ...the author of the genre-changing collection The Empathy Exams takes her blend of the personal, reportorial, and scholarly to expansive new lengths and depths...it's the uniqueness of her case studies, as well as the power of addiction as metaphor, that really make it stand out.
Jamison is one of the most insightful, introspective, and compassionate authors I have ever encountered, and all of those qualities make her writing about love as sage, biting, and incisive as her writing on addiction...The Recovering proved the secret superpower of memoir as a genre: that someone's darkest secrets and most shameful, hidden thoughts and insecurities can be exactly the thing that someone else needs to read.
Smart, introspective, and honest; a deeply human book that sheds light on something often kept in the dark.”
★ 2018-01-22
