Member Reviews

An intense writer, Jamison writes vividly of her own addition and recovery process while also widening the lens to include how other writers, addicts and families have been affected by the disease of alcoholism. Sometimes gritty, sometimes scholarly, but always interesting and memorable.

Was this review helpful?

A very engaging albeit somewhat meandering book. Leslie Jamison has been an all-time favorite of mine since The Empathy Exams and I look forward to seeing what she does next.

Was this review helpful?

Here's the first paragraph of my Kenyon Review piece:

Through a compelling amalgam of literary criticism, memoir, and cultural criticism, in The Recovering (April 2018) Leslie Jamison traces the alcoholism and subsequent recovery attempts of several famous writers, including herself. Jamison describes what she’s up to as “speculative autobiography—trying to find a map for what my own sober creativity might look like.” I’d like to make a motion to add this to the list of terms, such as Maggie Nelson’s self-proclaimed “auto-theory,” for some of the hybrid and vibrant work being done by women creative nonfiction writers today. Works such as Kate Zambreno’s Heroines (2012) and Book of Mutter (2017) and Nelson’s Bluets (2009) and The Argonauts (2015), for instance, bring the personal into ingenious dialogue with the theoretical and political. These book often defy definition, being described as everything form lyric essay and memoir to, as Sheila Heti does with Heroines, “composite creature: part memoir, part criticism, part fiction, part feminist tract or call to arms or self-help manual or biography or work of literary history.” The innovative results of these composite creatures doesn’t stop critics from sending many of these women’s books to bed without supper for being supposedly wounded and self-focused.

Was this review helpful?

This is a book that should be read by anyone dealing or know someone dealing with recovery. This book will help me look at things differently than I have. Thank you to the author for this personal book. Thanks to Netgalley, the author and the publisher for the arc of this book in return for my honest review. Receiving the book in this manner had no bearing on this review.

Was this review helpful?

I was so excited about this one, having loved the author's previous work, but I found the grim subject matter unbearably difficult to read.

Was this review helpful?

On paper, Leslie Jamison had the kind of life every young author dreams of: Ivy League education, Iowa Writers’ Workshop, a Yaddo retreat and a published novel — all before age 30.

But more than anything else, she wanted to drink. She is 34 now and has been sober for more than six years. Her new book, “The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath” (out April 3, Little, Brown), is her candid attempt to grapple with not only her own addictions, but those of both the famous and the non-famous.

amNewYork spoke with the Brooklynite about the book and how sobriety changed her creativity.

These are issues you’ve been living and wrestling with your whole life. What made you decide to sit down and write this book?

Well, in a way the book had a few different beginnings. When I first got sober I started to write some pieces of personal narrative, which I think was my attempt to reckon with this new reality that I was finding myself inside of and . . . pretty overwhelmed by. . . . And at a certain point that kind of process of writing down pieces of my personal story also started to include this whole research component where as part of my doctoral dissertation at Yale I started to look into the lives of other artists and writers who’d gotten sober to see what sobriety had done for their creativity. . . . So I think it was really the process of getting sober that kind of catalyzed the curiosities and desires that gave rise to the book.

How was your creativity affected by sobriety?

I think in the long run there definitely was a sense of relief and excitement in the ways that my creativity, I think, only got deeper, more surprising or expansive, in sobriety. . . . [It] started to include different modes than it had before, particularly interviewing and reporting and engaging with other people’s lives. . . . The book itself is kind of the, it is the project it’s seeking, right? It’s like the thing I wrote in sobriety as part of this quest to figure out whether writing was possible in sobriety.

This is an intensely personal and revealing book. It must have been very difficult at times.

Yes, there were certainly many ways in which it was. For me, because the process of writing personal narrative is not like a one-pass kind of deal, it’s revising and revisiting and redrafting. I think in that way that both makes it more difficult and in a certain way easier. It makes it more difficult insofar as I keep trying to find the more complicated, messier version of the truth that lies underneath. . . . But at the same time that also means that it really becomes an artistic process of shaping narrative — trying to find keen, complicated insight. And in that sense it’s not that I forget that it’s my own life or that things that I’ve lived entirely lose their emotional charge, but it’s just that it becomes a process of turning those things into stories rather than simply reviewing them or something like that.

Why was it so important for you to include the people who went through the former Seneca House rehab center in Maryland?

I really wanted the Seneca stories to function like the stories you might hear in a recovery meeting. In that sense it felt important to me that there be voices and stories from people who were not famous or well-known or successful or professional storytellers, but who were storytellers in the way that everybody in recovery becomes a storyteller because you are asked to narrate . . . your own life.

Who did you write this for?

There is something really paradoxical about addiction — why do you keep pursuing this thing that is harming you, destroying you, perverting you? . . . I wanted to write a book that was illuminating something about the lived experience of that paradox and also illuminating some of the possibilities, like what telling the story of that experience might look like and what getting better from that experience might look like. . . . I also really hope that there are parts of this book that speak to pretty much anyone in terms of, what does it mean to long for something that harms you? What does it mean to not be able to stay away from a person who’s harmful to you? So . . . my hope is that there are truths in the book that aren’t just explicitly addiction related.

Was this review helpful?

Beautifully written and intensely personal, this book is a tribute to the hard work of those in recovery. I found myself invested in the author’s story but that interest waned when she reported on the recovery of others. Still a worthy read, just a commitment.

Was this review helpful?

Part memoir & part literary criticism, Jamison combines the story of her own alcoholism with a deep dive into the classics of alcoholism. A great book for writers, recovering addicts, lovers of literature and people who live with or love an alcoholic.

Was this review helpful?

Leslie Jamison’s The Recovering is an excellent non-fiction work that is a meld of literary analysis, history of addiction, and, finally, memoir. It seems that Jamison is arguing that the “perfect” addiction and recovery memoir has been written (again and again), so she takes a different bent and instead cobbles together a memoir that brings many voices together instead.

This is a multi-faceted work that delves into addiction and recovery in many ways. The bulk of the work focuses on Jamison's own drunkalog and recovery, but is interwoven with the experiences of various artists illustrated through their writing. Within this work, she examines the myth of the intoxicated creative genius vs. the creativity that exists in sobriety. Also, she discusses societal forces that have led to alcoholism being considered a disease, whereas drug addiction is treated as a different and punishable beast (spoiler: these differences lie in systemic racism and white supremacy). Although a large inspiration for Jamison is her experiences with AA, she acknowledges in her Author Note that there are many paths to sobriety and that there is no "one size fits all." (If only there were....)

Thanks to NetGalley and Little, Brown and Company for the opportunity to read an advance copy in exchange for an honest review.

Was this review helpful?

The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath by Leslie Jamison had a lot of good things about it, although I had a lot of questions at the same time. It’s part memoir, part discussion of addiction in literature and society, and Jamison moves back and forth between the two throughout the book...

https://ofbooksandbikes.com/2018/07/01/the-recovering-by-leslie-jamison/

Was this review helpful?

A personal look at one woman’s relationship with controlled substances. It explores the allure and mystique of alcohol not only through her story, but that of famous authors and her fellow AA members.

Was this review helpful?

This was an honest and beautifully written book. At times it felt like it was trying too hard to be "that beautifully written recovery book".

Was this review helpful?

It seems like the reviews for this book are all over the place. Some people hate it and others love it. I think that's because what Jamison attempted to do was much more ambitious than just writing a memoir about her recovery or a book about addiction. Jamison blends literary criticism, personal narrative, social analysis, and a brief overview of the history of recovery programs all in one book. And while I can see how this blend could just not work for some people, I found it pretty brilliant.

Was this review helpful?

When Leslie Jamison was nine and her father was forty-nine, she asked him why people drank. That day he told her that drinking was dangerous. It wasn’t dangerous 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, but she earned praise for her cleverness. Though her parents divorced when she was eleven, her family life was not particularly dysfunctional. She was, however, aware of love being based on certain conditions. Intelligence appeared to be one of them. Later, Jamison had an unusually difficult time when she went off to Harvard. Lonely, deeply 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 photocopy over a hundred pages of academic papers on the subject for her to read.

Jamison had her first drink of alcohol at 13 at the party held to celebrate her brother’s college graduation. Her first alcoholic blackout occurred at Harvard. But the real problems began when, at the age of 21, she moved to Iowa City to attend 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 an entire mythology fetishizing the relationship between “drunken dysfunction” and genius—supposedly embodied in legendary writer-addicts. While attending the Writers’ Workshop, Jamison began to drink on a daily basis. The drinking escalated when the second poet boyfriend she had met there left her. Demanding intensity from everything in her life, she subsequently engaged in frequent drunk sex with many men as a way of “purging”, “siphoning off” excess feeling, and “putting it somewhere else.” Jamison would travel to many locations over the next few years: California, Nicaragua, New Haven, and Bolivia. She would have a second stay in both Iowa and New Haven and live with two different men. Her most significant relationship, the one that took precedence over all others, was always the one she had with the bottle. For me, the many details the author provides about her experiences felt repetitive: a blurry cycle of drinking, regretting, and repeating. Eventually, she would turn to AA, where the rituals , the fellowship, and the stories of others would begin to challenge her self-absorption, the alcoholic constriction of her life, and her sense of her suffering as being somehow exceptional.

Overall, Jameson’s book is rather a mixed bag. Literary critique and memoir components make up the greater part of it. However, there are also sections of cultural, sociological, historical, and political analysis. These sections include strands of interviews, thumbnail sketches of a few former alcoholics and addicts, reportage 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 personal memoir segments certainly don’t seem like the stuff of a conventional dissertation, the sections devoted to the often 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 book. I am uncertain about the interest or value of the literary material to a more general readership. I have some familiarity with academia and graduate-school seminars (which I don’t remember with fondness); Jamison’s literary “close analysis” reminded me of them. A sort of sinking feeling would come upon me every time I saw Jean Rhys’s, John Berryman’s, or Charles—<i><b>The Long Weekend</i></b>—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 the fields of sociology, criminology, and neuroscience—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 very worthwhile. Jamison also discusses the quite 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 <i><b>The Recovering</i></b>, the author proposes that she is going to write a different kind of memoir, focusing not on herself as a special or “interesting” individual, 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 generally skillfully or harmoniously woven together. The book feels quite disjointed overall. Did I “enjoy” <i><b>The Recovering</i></b>? (Can such a word even be used about a confessional work that documents extreme chemical dependency?) No. I wish I could have felt more moved by the material or that I had gained greater insight into the psychological and other factors that predispose a person to use substances repeatedly and uncontrollably. As well, I quickly grew weary of the endless descriptions of Jamison’s drinking and felt distanced by the author’s decision to use profanity in her descriptions of drunken sexual encounters and intimate relations with boyfriends. I understand and can accept swearing as an expression of strong emotion, especially anger or frustration, but strong emotion doesn’t seem to be present here. My chief reservation about Jamison’s book is related to its length. The book absolutely needed to be shorter—by a third at least, and perhaps by as much as a half. There is a lot of fine material here, but it gets lost in the excess: too many sentences embroidered with figurative language, too many descriptions of meals, and too many similar episodes of drinking and arguments. I wish a good editor had worked with Jamison to cut the text down to a reasonable size. A leaner book would have been a more powerful one.


Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for providing me with an advance review copy of this book.

Rating: 2.5 stars

Was this review helpful?

There were times in the beginning of Jamison's memoir where I felt like I was getting way too much information about her romantic relationships, and then, as the memoir progressed, I realized how attached she was both to these men and booze and understood the dependency connection. I've never read better comments about "The Infinite Jest" as I did in this book. Damn, I should have read 50 pages a day with a highlighter in hand. Instead, at times, I had reading blackouts, wondering if I had read the pages I just turned . The anecdotes of other writers and musicians and their recovery, or lack of recovery, were intriguing also. Reading on a Kindle, when I did reach the end, I was surprised, partly because we see that percentage of how far along we are, and partly, because eve though she mentions how she's writing this book not just for herself, but for her friends from AA, when we finally did reach the end, the end seemed abrupt. Then again, it also felt like this book is hot off the press, and not much real time has lapsed since that final chapter. The immediacy is incredibly compelling. Impressive memoir!

Was this review helpful?