THE INFINITE WORLD
FOR LESLIE JAMISON, WHO STARTED OUT WRITING FICTION AND PUBLISHED A NOVEL EIGHT YEARS AGO, NONFICTION OFFERS A METHOD OF EXPLORING THE RICHNESS OF LIFE IN ALL ITS COMPLEXITIES, AS ILLUSTRATED IN HER NEW BOOK, THE RECOVERING.
ON THE day I’m scheduled to interview the writer Leslie Jamison, a Friday afternoon in mid-December, the finest snow falls in Brooklyn. The blemishes of the city are hidden beneath a thin blanket of white, and the world is new. It makes me think of the many wintry days Jamison spent in Iowa City, first as a student at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, in her early twenties, and later as the girlfriend of a poet attending the same program. Some of her time in Iowa was spent blackout drunk, but a good deal of it was also spent icing cookies in a local bakery and trying to stop drinking. During her first dry spell, the Midwestern winter became an affront: She describes being sober as “the rabid, dangerous glare of sunlight on snow, and the warmth of car vents” as she drove back and forth to AA meetings in the cold, trying to figure out how to navigate a life without alcohol.
In her third book, , out in April from Little, Brown, the author of the best-selling essay collection (Graywolf Press, 2014)—a book that earned her comparisons to Joan Didion, Susan Sontag, and John Jeremiah Sullivan—and the novel (Free Press, 2010), does what she does best: She uses her own life as a jumping-off point to explore larger ideas. is part memoir, a recounting of the darkest days of Jamison’s alcoholism, when she looked to drunken writers as validation, understanding “their drinking as proof of extreme interior weather,” she writes. “It seemed generative, volatile, and authentic.” But the book is also about those same writers and artists—John Berryman and Charles R. Jackson, Jean Rhys and Billie Holiday, among others—and serves as an examination of the genius, the dysfunction, and such wide acclaim; she uses a reporter’s eye to weave into her own experiences the stories of these famous artists, as well as the stories of ordinary people who have struggled with alcoholism. “I really had this sense that I wanted this book to work like a chorus,” she says.
