The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath
Leslie Jamison
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath
Leslie Jamison
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
...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.
This ruthless, patient questioning of the narrative structures by which we make sense of the experience of suffering — where story arcs fall short, where they substitute false certainty for mystery, where they act as cover for more unpalatable or unspeakable truths — is ultimately the most important contribution of Jamison’s memoir, and deepens themes first explored in her earlier, celebrated book of essays, The Empathy Exams.
The Recovering is in its way a successful synthesis of [William] Styron’s and [Al] Alvarez’s masterpieces.
With The Recovering, Jamison still articulates a clear, compelling mission. But the book may not strike such a chord, layered as it is with highbrow references and unconventional structures.
When Jamison writes about drinking and drugs, and later about sobriety, it is the kind of gorgeous and exact writing that only comes from extreme attention, that greater part of love.
Instead of demanding that she perform a virtuosic solo, recovery asks Jamison to become part of a chorus of unremarkable equals. The Recovering is her heartfelt but haphazard, repetitive, and frequently exasperating attempt to represent that change.
There’s a beauty to it that those who already love Jamison will appreciate, but she hasn’t compromised her ethos to achieve it.
This material has been hashed over many times in previous books, and in the first half of The Recovering Jamison brings little that’s new to this discussion. You frequently feel you’re reading filler; mental sawdust. The first half is off-putting in other ways. Jamison is close to humorless as a writer, and she rubs and rubs our noses in her bad-girl bona fides.
Despite her anxiety that her experience alone is not sufficiently dramatic or compelling, Jamison’s own story makes for riveting reading.
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 concerned from the outset that her book will not escape 'the tedious architecture and tawdry self-congratulation of a redemption story'—that it will, in short, be boring. She needn’t have worried; such is her 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 .. But the book does flag, tellingly if briefly, when, near the end, she turns the story over to fellow-addicts...Accompanying Jamison on her flight to discover those constraints is thrilling, if often harrowing. But the stories of others seem to weigh her down, and the tedium she fears begins to find its way into the book..
At times, these [writer bio] sections can read a bit like thesis outtakes. But the paradox is that they work because they give a sense, perhaps as viscerally as the personal material, of the writer using everything she has to flounder toward some sort of meaning — not resolution, never resolution, but at least a form of reckoning.
The Recovering is a sprawling, compelling, fiercely ambitious book that considers excess with full control, and strives for both exceptionalism and utility at the same time.
Most writers would struggle with this kind of book to keep the momentum for 400-plus pages, but the approach suits Jamison, who is at her best when thinking out loud. But her strength is inseparable from her vulnerability.
Jamison’s tone is earnest, but touched with flashes of beauty and humour. She offers the coin of depth and intensity rather than epiphanies.
Within this relentless work of self-scrutiny, Jamison also conducts a meticulously researched, richly nuanced, and sensitive inquiry into the lives of now-legendary alcoholic writers.
It’s a neat trick: she satisfies readers who want the grisly details that addiction memoirs promise while dismantling that same genre, interrogating why tales of addiction prove so resonant.
Jamison is an incisive stylist and has amassed an enormous amount of information and insight on what her subtitle calls 'intoxication and its aftermath.' But her own recovery story, the spine on which she hangs reams of archival research and reportage, is—well, boring is a little harsh, but it’s not enough to carry a 500-page book.
Memoir’s purpose is to embrace discoveries about common human truths, and so 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.
As in The Empathy Exams, there is a dynamic energy between Jamison’s personal experiences and the texts she examines.
I can absolutely see what Ms. Jamison is going for here, and I applaud her ambition. The problem is that Ms. Jamison can’t or won’t cut the highfalutin language, the unrelentingly earnest, good-student voice and academic distance.
Faced with this framework, it seems small to evaluate, much less criticize, the artistic merits of The Recovering. Yet it’s clear that Jamison aims beyond such a narrow claim of utility: she wants totality.
The intellectual project of the book, as she sets it out, is to create a narrative about recovery that is as powerful as the fictional representations of alcoholism in literature.
By all rights, Leslie Jamison’s new memoir, The Recovering: Intoxication and its Aftermath shouldn’t work.
Nearly every page is dense with insight, expressed in tautly constructed sentences. Sometimes reading it feels like sitting in on a therapy session with a hyper-introspective, hyper-articulate patient—an appraisal some might interpret, but I don’t intend, as pejorative. But it has shortcomings common to many essay collections. While the volume is ostensibly knit together by the themes of pain and empathy, some pieces, such as a brief account of a trip to a writers’ conference, feel like filler. The book can also come across as overly performative. It is easier to admire than to enjoy.
I admit: when I read Jamison’s...'glorious arc of blaze and rot' which spans the first three hundred pages of an almost four-hundred-and-fifty-page book, I was enthralled by her drunkalog. That is, I read for the visceral, intoxicating charge of someone long sober in need of a proxy buzz. I read it not as a critic but as someone who could recognize her own drunk self on the page.
Through a compelling amalgam of literary criticism, memoir, and cultural criticism, in The Recovering...Leslie Jamison traces the alcoholism and subsequent recovery attempts of several famous writers, including herself.
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..
The crawl back up to sobriety is as engrossing as the downward spiral in this unsparing and luminous autobiographical study of alcoholism.