PositiveThe RumpusI admit: when I read Jamison’s...\'glorious arc of blaze and rot\' which spans the first three hundred pages of an almost four-hundred-and-fifty-page book, I was enthralled by her drunkalog. That is, I read for the visceral, intoxicating charge of someone long sober in need of a proxy buzz. I read it not as a critic but as someone who could recognize her own drunk self on the page ... Passages...help me to live with more honest, self-critical awareness in my own recovering ... What is absent, however, are the consequential \'firsts\' of drinking: first loss of job, of boyfriend, of family and friends, of kids, of marriage, of status, of income, of health, of health care, of forgiveness—the drunkalog that, for many in sobriety, is our reckoning. Some might refer to it as \'the bottom.\' Perhaps the absence of large-scale, cataclysmic consequences of addiction is due to the fact that she got sober at twenty-seven and is now only thirty-four ... I don’t wish any additional suffering upon Jamison nor do I wish to define what \'bottoming out\' means for her, but I often skimmed through the \'What It Was Like\' section—especially the fetishizing of the writing program at Iowa ... Ultimately, despite some writerly reservations, I found Jamison’s narrative to be a powerful testimony to why we share our stories, whether formally (as published memoir) or informally (at a 12-step meeting, over a shared meal, in a therapist’s office).