De-Mythologizing the Drunk Genius
THE FIRST TIME Leslie Jamison shared her story of addiction in an AA meeting, spilling her guts to a group of strangers in folding chairs, a man in the back of the school gymnasium started to yell at her. She’d been saying something about learning to pray, struggling to articulate the intermittent relief prayer had offered from the grind of being newly sober, when it happened: “This is boring!” he shouted. As it turned out, the man was suffering from dementia. He was an accepted character who yelled impolite things at everyone. Still, for Jamison, the encounter tapped into a deep anxiety: what if the part of us that seeks health and happiness is never as interesting as the part that courts damage?
The addiction memoir, after all, tends to assume that self-destructive escapades are what we most want to hear about, often sidestepping recovery almost entirely. Caroline Knapp devotes only the last two of sixteen chapters to her tentative sobriety in Drinking: A Love Story. It is only in the final paragraphs of Permanent Midnight—only pages earlier, the author is smoking crack—that we finally sense Jerry Stahl might muster a lasting change. That’s not to detract from the lacerating power of the genre. But Jamison wanted to write a different kind of book.
In The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath, Jamison defies the rules of narrative gravity by giving her recovery equal space, somehow making it as vividly compelling as the bleakest depths of her addiction. In her telling, sobriety comes at the halfway point rather than being tacked on as a denouement. Part of the way Jamison wrings conflict and dramatic stakes from recovery is by foregrounding the doubt and restlessness that comes with deprivation. “I tried to charge sobriety with energy,” she writes, “but all of it felt dull and dry, like getting kissed by a pair of chapped lips.” She also turns for help to other artists who struggled with addiction, looking to see how they navigated the same uneasy territory, stuck between a thirst that never ends and a recuperation that is never quite complete.
Through original archival research, Jamison unearths the private lives of figures like John Berryman, Raymond Carver, Billie Holiday, Denis Johnson, and Jean Rhys, poring over the intimate journal entries, letters, and drafts that never quite made the public record. What she uncovers is astonishing. These lives were fuller, more complicated, and often more hopeful than anyone guessed; addiction was not the dark key to their genius, but the devastating scourge of it. As Jamison shifts fluidly between memoir, criticism, and literary biography, telling her own story alongside the secret histories of artists we thought we knew, she finds epic poetry in the faltering, endless path toward life after drinking.
Leslie Jamison is, a novel and , an essay collection. Her work has been a finalist for The National Book Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and her essays have appeared in venues like , the , and the . We talked about the way myths of addiction and recovery shape our choices, the process of committing one’s own most personal experiences to the page, and the difficulty of writing about health and healing rather than brokenness.
