The Barnes & Noble Review
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.
In her superb book on alcoholism, 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.
The struggle is worth pursuing, because while there may be one redemption story, it's one that shifts often at its margins. The day after the second time she went sober, Jamison crashes a friend's car. "If I was going to stop drinking, I was supposed to discover a spectacular new version of myself, or at least recover the presence of mind not to accelerate into a concrete wall," she writes. "But sobriety didn't work like that. It works like this: You go to work. You call your friend. You say, 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."
And so on, including David Foster Wallace, George Cain, Malcolm Lowry, and Raymond Carver. Jamison seeks a common thread between these writers, their drinking, their recovery, and their creativity. (The book began as a dissertation on the topic.) But such threads prove elusive. A sober Charles Jackson wrote an unpublished second novel of impenetrable doggerel. Carver's literary career had an infamously redemptive second act after he quit drinking, but he also used cocaine during his "sober" years. So what kind of sobriety are we thinking of, exactly? "My dissertation was reckoning with a question I hoped might bridge these worlds, examining authors who'd tried to get sober and exploring how recovery had become part of their creative lives," she writes. "It wasn't criticism as autobiography, exactly, so much as speculative autobiography -- trying to find a map for what my own sober creativity might look like." Ultimately, though, what she finds isn't a model so much as an accrual of usable evidence to consider. Many writers had tried sobriety. Some had succeeded. She could try and succeed too.
Jamison is an adherent of Alcoholics Anonymous, which she acknowledges isn't the sole proven path to sobriety. (Though that acknowledgment may be too brief to please some readers.) She's less focused, though, on the Higher Power than with the we in Step One, those who find themselves helpless over alcohol. For Jamison, the communal aspect of meetings, the sharing of "drunkalogs," is what helps. The urge for sharing makes sense, since so many of the agonizing anecdotes she shares about herself involve moments when she is isolated and unprotected: walking home drunk one night and getting punched in the face; another night when she was raped; many other nights drinking alone or going to parties and chasing isolation. "I got so drunk I had to lock myself in our bedroom and slap myself -- hard, across the cheek -- to get myself undrunk again. It didn't work." Her boyfriend throughout the period is a poet whose flirtatious personality stokes her jealousy, but without any actual infidelity to point to, her jealousy is a projection of an unresolved loneliness.
Is it too easy to connect those fears to her drinking? Is it too simplistic to call the fellowship she finds in church basements a balm to those fears? The book's very bulk answers the question: 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.
She's the star of 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 New York Times - Dwight Garner
…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.
Publishers Weekly - Audio
03/26/2018
Jamison easily captures the intimate feel of her writing style in the audiobook edition of her gripping memoir about her struggles with addiction. She enmeshes listeners in her early adulthood and the endless forms of agonizing pain—and blissful pleasure—that she experienced via drugs and alcohol. Jamison smoothly intersperses her personal anecdotes with words from so-called drunk prophets John Berryman, Jean Rhys, Raymond Carver, Billie Holiday, Elizabeth Bishop, Denis Johnson, and others. She wants to dispel the long-held beliefs that addiction cannot be broken, and that misery, booze, and drugs are the engines of the creative process. Jamison transports listeners into her Alcoholic Anonymous sessions, where she learns to escape her self-absorption, listen to and sympathize with others, tolerate boredom, and treasure the consolation of shared experiences. It’s doubtful that another narrator could have engaged listeners so deeply in such a difficult and timeless issue. A Little, Brown hardcover. (Apr.)
Publishers Weekly
★ 11/13/2017
The crawl back up to sobriety is as engrossing as the downward spiral in this unsparing and luminous autobiographical study of alcoholism. Novelist and essayist Jamison (The Empathy Exams) recounts her booze-sodden 20s, which she spent bouncing between Yale and the University of Iowa Writer’s Workshop—a time when she resorted to drinking because it blocked out her insecurities about herself and her relationships. Jamison’s recovery, with backsliding, is a grim affair as she fights a constant craving for alcohol. She joins Alcoholics Anonymous in her mid-20s, and while she finds the prosaic honesty and camaraderie at her AA meetings to be revelatory, she still dreads sobriety as “a string of empty evenings, a life lit by the sallow fluorescence of church-basement bromides rather than the glow of dive-bar neon signs.” Intertwined with her narrative are shrewd profiles of alcoholic writers—including John Berryman, Raymond Carver, The Lost Weekend writer Charles Jackson, and Jean Rhys—that probe the fraught link between drinking (and not drinking) and literary creativity. The dark humor, evocative prose, and clear-eyed, heartfelt insights Jamison deploys here only underscore her reputation as a writer of fearsome talent. (Apr.)
From the Publisher
"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."—David Canfield, Entertainment Weekly (A)
"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."—Sophie Gilbert, The Atlantic
"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."—Clancy Martin, Bookforum
"Magnificent and genuinely moving. This is that rare addiction memoir that gets better after sobriety takes hold."—Dwight Garner, New York Times
"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."—Sam Lansky, Time
"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."—Priscilla Gilman, Boston Globe
"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."—Gary Greenberg, The New Yorker
"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."—David L. Ulin, Los Angeles Times
"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."—Melanie Thernstrom, New York Times Book Review
"Wonderful...wholly original...it shines."—Matt McCarthy, USA Today
"Thoughtful, fiercely honest, and intimate, The Recovering is a must-read that is Jamison at her best."—Jarry Lee, Buzzfeed
"Precise and heartfelt...The Recovering is a magnificent achievement."—Scott F. Parker, Minneapolis Star-Tribune
"Jamison writes about personal experiences in a way that feels universal...Her vulnerability and determination are present on every page."—Maris Kreizman, Esquire
"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."—Nora Caplan-Bricker, Washington Post
"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."—The Economist
"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."—Alexis Burling, San Francisco Chronicle
"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."—Beth Kephart, Chicago Tribune
"Poignant...Taut and immediate."—Sophia Nguyen, Village Voice
"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."—Boris Kachka, New York
"A beautiful behemoth."—Jaime Green, GQ
"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."—Roxane Gay, New York Times bestselling author of Bad Feminist
"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."—Annalisa Quinn, NPR
"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."—Lucy Watson, Prospect
"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."—Christina Ledbetter, Associated Press
"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
"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."—Jeva Lange, The Week
"Breaks the addiction-lit mold."—Sloane Crosley, Vanity Fair
"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."—Kate Christensen, Wall Street Journal
Kirkus Reviews
★ 2018-01-22
An alcoholic's confessional of life from buzzed adolescence to blitzed adulthood and the fellowship of recovery.Educator, essayist, and novelist Jamison's (The Empathy Exams: Essays, 2014, etc.) introduction to the alluring crackle of alcohol occurred innocently in her early teens, but her messy descent into full-blown addiction began years later with her first blackout. In her early 20s she began drinking daily to blunt chronic shyness and ease relationship woes while getting her master's degree at the Iowa Writers' Workshop. There, the author found "drunken dysfunction appealing" and identified with accomplished writers whose creative genius managed to function notably beneath the blurry haze of intoxication, something she dubs the "whiskey-and-ink mythology." Throughout, the author references historical literary greats who were alcoholics, including Elizabeth Bishop, John Berryman, Raymond Carver, Jean Rhys, and Charles Jackson among others. Jamison examines the transformative patterns of addiction and how these authors, within their own bodies of work, attempted to "make some sense of the sadness that consumed" them. Saturated with unbridled honesty, her riveting chronicle expectedly slopes downward, as the author notes how she once believed that "passing out was no longer the price but the point." After an abortion and persistent heart arrhythmias, Jamison eventually spiraled into the bleak desolation of rock-bottom alcoholism. Her ensuing heartbreaking attempts at rehabilitation ebbed and flowed. She relapsed after desperately missing the sensation of being drunk ("like having a candle lit inside you"), yet she also acknowledged that sobriety would be the only way to rediscover happiness and remain alive. Attending meetings, sharing her stories, and working the steps of Alcoholics Anonymous ushered the author into a new sober reality. Throughout Jamison's somber yet earnestly revelatory narrative, she remains cogent and true to her dual commitment to sobriety and to author a unique memoir "that was honest about the grit and bliss and tedium of learning to live this way—in chorus, without the numbing privacy of getting drunk."The bracing, unflinching, and beautifully resonant history of a writer's addiction and hard-won reclamation.
