The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath. By Leslie Jamison. Little, Brown; 452 pages; $30. Granta Books; £20
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WHEN Leslie Jamison told people she was writing a book about addiction, their eyes glazed over. “Oh, that book, they seemed to say, I’ve already read that book.” They had a point, she concedes. With their tired tropes about spiralling downwards and the “tawdry self-congratulation” of recovery, such stories defy originality. More troublingly, tales of falling apart are usually more interesting than those of pulling it together. This insight threatened Ms Jamison’s aspirations to get and stay sober. If accounts of drying out are dull, does sobriety come at the expense of art?
“The Recovering” offers ample evidence to the contrary. A blend of memoir, literary criticism and social history, it is as engaging as it is thoughtful. Ms 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.
This is a coming-of-age story, in a way, as she ultimately learns to trade the mythology of the drunken genius (“Whisky and Ink, Whisky and Ink” ran the headline of a profile of John Berryman in 1967) for the monotony of the anecdotes delivered in Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. It is an exchange she makes reluctantly. The University of Iowa’s writing programme was, she found, haunted by boozy legends such as Berryman, Raymond Carver and John Cheever. Their drunkenness was part of their mystique, as if there was “a shimmering link between drinking and darkness, between drinking and knowing.”
It was hard not to get swept up in this romance, even if “female drunks rarely got to strike the same rogue silhouettes as male ones”. As Ms Jamison notes, the old intoxicated icons are all men. For literary women, such as Marguerite Duras and Jean Rhys, drinking was seen as weak, melodramatic or self-indulgent. She also acknowledges that, as a “nice upper-middle-class white girl”, her relationship to the bottle could be seen as merely a cause for concern. In America, which “has never been able to decide whether addicts are victims or criminals”, addicts of colour are far more likely to be punished.
By her early 20s Ms Jamison’s drinking had gained a troubling momentum. She began every day pining for her first sip. She preferred drinking alone, with no witnesses to how much liquor she was putting back. “Passing out was no longer the price but the point,” she writes. Why she became an alcoholic she can’t quite say (“My childhood was easier than most”). But eventually she recognised that something was wrong.
At her first 12-step meetings, sipping bad coffee in church basements, she bridles at the clichés—the “insistence on soft-focus greeting-card wisdom” when she longed for nuance and novelty. But after years of hearing countless addicts share tales of cravings, shame and despair, she realises that the power of these testimonies lies in their banality. The very fact that “others have lived it and will live it again” means no one is suffering alone. Where once she distrusted the false cohesion stories lent to messy lives, now she sees that these narratives “could save us from our lives by letting us construct ourselves”. She discovers work by Raymond Carver, Denis Johnson and David Foster Wallace that proves talent and recovery can be combined. She is even grateful for “the common currency of a phrase like Take it one day at a time, which seemed stupid until it didn’t”.
Recovery, she learns, involves blending humility with hope. People who are sober for decades still ask for the luck and strength to stay dry for another day. In “The Recovering”, Ms Jamison has written a movingly humble book, filled to the brim with lessons learned the hard way.