Will I love The Recovering?

Before I knew Leslie Jamison as one of my favorite contemporary essayists and spotted bylines in the New Yorker, she wrote this memoir/cultural biography of alcoholism, which, if you’ve ever read books about alcoholism, is different and bold and brave and shining like a new dime different than all of them. 

Jamison and I are both veterans of 12-step programs. And most of our tribe has read enough memoirs of addiction and seen enough movies of the same to last us about 3 lifetimes. But Ms. Jamison goes one very important step further, telling the stories of famous authors she… show more.

Leslie Jamison’s memoir rocked my world, and I think it’s because of her treatment of the drama associated with addiction.

She digs deep into her addict-psyche, specifically her tendency to both create and seek “the unhinged sparks of luminous chaos.” The source of this special brand of electricity can be a dirty martini or cheating on a boyfriend (the term “love-grope” is inspired).

But this is a book about recovery, and Jamison travels from glorifying the angst of her drunk writer heroes to the realization that she and legends like Raymond Carver and Dennis Johnson actually write better sober, and… show more.