The Recovering

Starred review from November 13, 2017
The crawl back up to sobriety is as engrossing as the downward spiral in this unsparing and luminous autobiographical study of alcoholism. Novelist and essayist Jamison (The Empathy Exams) recounts her booze-sodden 20s, which she spent bouncing between Yale and the University of Iowa Writer’s Workshop—a time when she resorted to drinking because it blocked out her insecurities about herself and her relationships. Jamison’s recovery, with backsliding, is a grim affair as she fights a constant craving for alcohol. She joins Alcoholics Anonymous in her mid-20s, and while she finds the prosaic honesty and camaraderie at her AA meetings to be revelatory, she still dreads sobriety as “a string of empty evenings, a life lit by the sallow fluorescence of church-basement bromides rather than the glow of dive-bar neon signs.” Intertwined with her narrative are shrewd profiles of alcoholic writers—including John Berryman, Raymond Carver, The Lost Weekend writer Charles Jackson, and Jean Rhys—that probe the fraught link between drinking (and not drinking) and literary creativity. The dark humor, evocative prose, and clear-eyed, heartfelt insights Jamison deploys here only underscore her reputation as a writer of fearsome talent.

February 1, 2018
An alcoholic's confessional of life from buzzed adolescence to blitzed adulthood and the fellowship of recovery.Educator, essayist, and novelist Jamison's (The Empathy Exams: Essays, 2014, etc.) introduction to the alluring crackle of alcohol occurred innocently in her early teens, but her messy descent into full-blown addiction began years later with her first blackout. In her early 20s she began drinking daily to blunt chronic shyness and ease relationship woes while getting her master's degree at the Iowa Writers' Workshop. There, the author found "drunken dysfunction appealing" and identified with accomplished writers whose creative genius managed to function notably beneath the blurry haze of intoxication, something she dubs the "whiskey-and-ink mythology." Throughout, the author references historical literary greats who were alcoholics, including Elizabeth Bishop, John Berryman, Raymond Carver, Jean Rhys, and Charles Jackson among others. Jamison examines the transformative patterns of addiction and how these authors, within their own bodies of work, attempted to "make some sense of the sadness that consumed" them. Saturated with unbridled honesty, her riveting chronicle expectedly slopes downward, as the author notes how she once believed that "passing out was no longer the price but the point." After an abortion and persistent heart arrhythmias, Jamison eventually spiraled into the bleak desolation of rock-bottom alcoholism. Her ensuing heartbreaking attempts at rehabilitation ebbed and flowed. She relapsed after desperately missing the sensation of being drunk ("like having a candle lit inside you"), yet she also acknowledged that sobriety would be the only way to rediscover happiness and remain alive. Attending meetings, sharing her stories, and working the steps of Alcoholics Anonymous ushered the author into a new sober reality. 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.

COPYRIGHT(2018) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Starred review from March 15, 2018
In this exacting memoir and multifaceted inquiry into addiction and recovery, Jamison reveals that while she was at Harvard and the Iowa Writers' Workshop and writing her novel, The Gin Closet (2010), she was, in phases, cutting herself, coping with anorexia, and drinking heavily. She worked on her highly lauded essay collection, The Empathy Exams (2014), while attending a doctoral program at Yale and battling to stay sober. Jamison observes, My childhood was easier than most, and I ended up drinking anyway, a conundrum somewhat explained by a parsing of her family history. Her belief that she had to earn affection and love by being interesting induced her to seek the unfettering, the bliss, the risk, and the escape alcohol delivers. Writing with galvanizing specificity and mesmerizing fluidity, Jamison recounts her constant preoccupation with alcohol; her numerous crazy, dangerous, bad drunks; her blackouts and hangovers. She exhaustively documents her fraught relationships with men, gradually disclosing how her drinking fostered a distorted and isolating sense of self. As she commits herself to AA, she explores the complications and paradoxes of recovery, including the way stories of addiction are told.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, and keenly critiques the romanticized whisky-and-ink mythology of the tormented, hard-drinking literary genius. She contrasts the reverence for such white male writers as John Berryman and Raymond Carver, whom she portrays deeply, with the ways chemically dependent women writers, such as Jean Rhys, another focus, were maligned or pitied. Widening the lens and adding race to the mix, she protests the brutal criminalization of addiction that destroyed Billie Holiday. She then compares the lives of famous addicts with those of the diverse people she meets at the many recovery meetings she attends, encounters that alter her life and her writing.With her thorough dissection of The Lost Weekend (1944), Charles R. Jackson's now-classic autobiographical novel of alcoholism, and reclamation of George Cain's autobiographical novel of addiction and African American life, Blueschild Baby (1970), Jamison's encompassing investigation makes an excellent pairing with Olivia Laing's The Trip to Echo Spring: On Writers and Drinking (2014). Jamison's questing immersion in intoxication and sobriety is exceptional in its vivid, courageous, hypnotic telling; brilliant in its subtlety of perception, interpretation, and compassion; and capacious in its scholarship, scale, concern, and mission.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)

Starred review from May 1, 2018

In this candid and frequently poignant book, Jamison (The Empathy Exams) discusses her addiction to alcohol. Her student years at Harvard, Yale, and the Iowa Writers' Workshop were marked with accomplishments but also with heavy bouts of drinking that culminated in her attending AA meetings. Jamison is frank in describing her alcohol dependence and her attempts to stay sober. While recounting her own struggles, she interweaves the addiction battles of famous people, citing correspondence and often unpublished manuscripts to reveal the torment and creativity alcohol produced in such writers as Raymond Carver, David Foster Wallace, and Jean Rhys. Jamison visits abandoned rehabilitation centers and a Narco farm to understand how addiction was addressed in the past. She also provides a history of AA and America's misguided war on addiction starting with the first drug czar, Harry Anslinger, whose treatment of addicts as criminals continues to influence government policy. Jamison feared that her quest for sobriety story would be too ordinary before realizing that it could still be useful to others. This brilliant work is the product of that realization. VERDICT An account of addiction and a story of redemption that will appeal to many readers interested in literature, psychology, and social work. [See Prepub Alert, 10/22/17.]--Erica Swenson Danowitz, Delaware Cty. Community Coll. Lib., Media, PA

Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

May 1, 2018

From the New York Times best-selling author of The Empathy Exams, whose novel, The Gin Closet, was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, comes a memoir that focuses not on the down-down-down of addiction but on the energizing act of recovery. Personal insights, of course (it's a memoir) but also reporting on the recovery movement in general and thoughts drawn from the works of John Berryman, Jean Rhys, Raymond Carver, Billie Holiday, and more. With a 100,000-copy first printing.

Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.