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The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath

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Leslie Jamison

16 Hours 0 Minutes

Hachette Book Group USA

April 2018

Audio Book Summary

From the New York Times bestselling author of The Empathy Exams comes this transformative work showing that sometimes the recovery is more gripping than the addiction.

With its deeply personal and seamless blend of memoir, cultural history, literary criticism, and reportage, The Recovering turns our understanding of the traditional addiction narrative on its head, demonstrating that the story of recovery can be every bit as electrifying as the train wreck itself. Leslie Jamison deftly excavates the stories we tell about addiction -- both her own and others' -- and examines what we want these stories to do and what happens when they fail us. All the while, she offers a fascinating look at the larger history of the recovery movement, and at the complicated bearing that race and class have on our understanding of who is criminal and who is ill.

At the heart of the book is Jamison's ongoing conversation with literary and artistic geniuses whose lives and works were shaped by alcoholism and substance dependence, including John Berryman, Jean Rhys, Billie Holiday, Raymond Carver, Denis Johnson, and David Foster Wallace, as well as brilliant lesser-known figures such as George Cain, lost to obscurity but newly illuminated here. Through its unvarnished relation of Jamison's own ordeals, The Recovering also becomes a book about a different kind of dependency: the way our desires can make us all, as she puts it, 'broken spigots of need.' It's about the particular loneliness of the human experience-the craving for love that both devours us and shapes who we are.

For her striking language and piercing observations, Jamison has been compared to such iconic writers as Joan Didion and Susan Sontag, yet her utterly singular voice also offers something new. With enormous empathy and wisdom, Jamison has given us nothing less than the story of addiction and recovery in America writ large, a definitive and revelatory account that will resonate for years to come.

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Reviews

  • Andrea V.

    So beautiful and eye-opening. I'd recommend to anyone, whether or not you have dealt with alcoholism.

    Book Rating

  • Jeffrey O.

    Leslie Jamison has really accomplished something special in this autobiography. She is an extraordinary writer. Perhaps I am not the most sophisticated reader, but neither am I the least. I find myself entranced by Jamison’s imagery and lyricism. Her ability to communicate through her writing is really superb. I absolutely love her strings of metaphors and alliterations. She is masterful in the presentation of her story, the genuine feelings, intimate inklings, honest thoughts that accompany the events which defined her alcoholism, her drinking days and the recovery which followed. She is a pleasure to read and listen to with a unique capacity to express herself which makes reading her material a pleasure!

    Book Rating