Writing and Alcohol: A Reckoning
About two-thirds of the way through The Recovering, Leslie Jamison—newly sober for the second time—finally confronts the reality of winter in Iowa City. “For years,” she writes, “I’d felt personally persecuted by winter—a martyr to its bitter chill, my numbness epic and inevitable, the air little more than an external companion to my interior weather.” But then she buys a down coat. And, “as it turned out, a good jacket made you less cold.”
It’s a sharp instance of Jamison falling sway to the allure of self-pity, the sweep of pathetic fallacy, and then puncturing her own bubble of writerly delusion. Winter is cold for everyone; there are ways of making it bearable. But Jamison has long become accustomed to perceiving the world “as a conspiracy of forces directing their attention toward me.” In the scene, her mind interprets a regular, banal experience—being cold—as an epic conflict between one woman and the seasons, the
