...there’s much about The Recovering that’s inventive: its careful braiding of memoir and literary criticism, its close observation of addiction and creativity, its comprehensive grasp of the way alcoholism provokes scapegoating, solipsism, fear, shame, and solitude. And yet the redemption story won’t be blown up, behaving as if it were encased in twenty feet of concrete. Familiar as it may be, the redemption story is what helps save her ... The Recovering is nearly 500 pages and has such an intense and clarified energy, such a bone-deep compulsion to work out recovery’s paradoxes, that you feel she could go on for twice as long. (And I would happily read that book.)
This ruthless, patient questioning of the narrative structures by which we make sense of the experience of suffering — where story arcs fall short, where they substitute false certainty for mystery, where they act as cover for more unpalatable or unspeakable truths — is ultimately the most important contribution of Jamison’s memoir, and deepens themes first explored in her earlier, celebrated book of essays, The Empathy Exams ... Jamison’s 500-page narrative is nothing if not classically beautiful: implausibly so, almost ludicrously consistent in its fierce freshness and poetry from page to page to page. Her language manages somehow to be simultaneously lush and piercing. It is richly imaged, delighting the senses with its descriptive texture ... There is some repetition and overlap in the weave of the narrative, its rowdy and eclectic cast of characters, from narc agents to jazz singers to psychiatrists to gin-blind poets, popping in and out at unexpected intervals. A story line is taken up, dropped, then revisited again just when the reader had begun to let it go. But if this ruminative, polyphonic mode may be cited by some as a weakness of the book, it is also necessarily its greatest strength. It embodies the aesthetic of resonance, of echo and call and response, that Jamison finds best fits the collective story of addiction.
The Recovering is in its way a successful synthesis of [William] Styron’s and [Al] Alvarez’s masterpieces ... Jamison’s greatest strength is her ability to show honestly the outrageous mental gymnastics every alcoholic masters in the attempt simultaneously to quit drinking and, above all, to continue drinking ... Jamison’s descriptions of drinking are so well turned and evocative that those who have just quit drinking, who haven’t found their footing as nondrinkers yet, might find them triggering. But this too is a compliment ... The prose is clean and clear and a pleasure to read, utterly without pretension. Although the subject is dark, Jamison has managed to write an often very funny page-turner ... I applaud Jamison for not romanticizing drunks, for her frankness about the destruction that alcohol and drugs can wreak on a great artist...But why not admit that booze has helped some writers find their best lines? Not because they wrote best drunk, but because the trauma of addiction might keep some nerves sensitive that otherwise become dull.
With The Recovering, Jamison still articulates a clear, compelling mission. But the book may not strike such a chord, layered as it is with highbrow references and unconventional structures ... There’s something profound at work here, a truth about how we grow into ourselves that rings achingly wise and burrows painfully deep. In this astounding triumph, Jamison reveals how myths make us who we are, situating herself within a storied American movement before steering us all toward a new, clearer state of being.
When Jamison writes about drinking and drugs, and later about sobriety, it is the kind of gorgeous and exact writing that only comes from extreme attention, that greater part of love ... When I reread The Recovering, I skipped the parts about other people and found a shorter and truer book waiting inside. Her journalism is less natural than her essays, so, for instance, the reported story of a rehab house and its inhabitants feels perfunctory, a way of warding off the appearance of self-involvement ... But for the most part, Jamison's story was the only one I cared about, not because her drunkalog, as she calls it, is different from or better than anyone else's, but because she was so fully there, in her own thronged and fraught mind, illuminating it from the inside. She worries that that kind of interiority suggests a fatal selfishness. But the promise of books is that we are bound up and implicated in other people's lives, even if they have nothing to do with us. Her story is ours now — what a gift.
Instead of demanding that she perform a virtuosic solo, recovery asks Jamison to become part of a chorus of unremarkable equals. The Recovering is her heartfelt but haphazard, repetitive, and frequently exasperating attempt to represent that change ... The Recovering is overlong—a better book seems entombed within it by a surplus of at least 100 pages—partly because Jamison still has a hard time distinguishing excess from essence, actual problems from the dramas and messes, often involving her relationships to men, that she once ginned up to make her life feel more thrilling and vital ... What The Recovering falls short of articulating is the ironic paradox at the heart of AA: its ability to turn the alcoholic’s grandiosity against itself. Like a martial art that redirects the enemy’s strength to defeat him, the 12-step method transforms the dismantling of the addict’s narcissism into a heroic task appealing to that very same narcissism—all while providing it with an appreciative audience.
There’s a beauty to it that those who already love Jamison will appreciate, but she hasn’t compromised her ethos to achieve it ... She creates, as she set out to do, 'a book that might work like a meeting—that…place[s] [her] story alongside the stories of others.' In this context, the definite article in the title reads as far more appropriate than a possessive pronoun.
This material has been hashed over many times in previous books, and in the first half of The Recovering Jamison brings little that’s new to this discussion. You frequently feel you’re reading filler; mental sawdust. The first half is off-putting in other ways. Jamison is close to humorless as a writer, and she rubs and rubs our noses in her bad-girl bona fides ... The great surprise of The Recovering is that the second half is close to magnificent, and genuinely moving. This is that rare addiction memoir that gets better after sobriety takes hold ... Inside the 500-plus pages of The Recovery is a shorter, finer book and maybe even a screenplay awaiting someone. In this case I am not entirely unhappy to have taken the long way home.
Despite her anxiety that her experience alone is not sufficiently dramatic or compelling, Jamison’s own story makes for riveting reading ... Desire and romantic love are major themes, explored with aching vulnerability and unsparing honesty ... Against the temptation to single herself out along a line of likewise exceptional singletons, she orchestrates a multivoiced, universal song of lack, shame, surrender, uncertain and unsentimental redemption ... It is a pleasure and feels like a social duty to report that Jamison’s book shines sunlight on these creepy, crepuscular enchantments. Wisdom floods the scene, and genius never flees. Quite on its own terms, The Recovering is a beautifully told example of the considered and self-aware becoming art.
Like Mary Karr’s Lit or Caroline Knapp’s Drinking: A Love Story, Jamison’s perceptive and generous-hearted new book is uncompromising on the ugliness of addiction, yet tenderly hopeful that people can heal ... Jamison is a writer of exacting grace ... Central as they are to Jamison’s project, the biographical portions don’t progress under their own narrative power (or even, often, chronologically), instead resurfacing whenever they can hold a useful mirror to the central memoir. This can be confusing or even frustrating...But these faults matter less than the fullness with which Jamison captures the feeling of growing up and growing into oneself.
Jamison is concerned from the outset that her book will not escape 'the tedious architecture and tawdry self-congratulation of a redemption story'—that it will, in short, be boring. She needn’t have worried; such is her command of metaphor and assonance that she could rivet a reader with a treatise on toast. We perhaps have no writer better on the subject of psychic suffering and its consolations .. But the book does flag, tellingly if briefly, when, near the end, she turns the story over to fellow-addicts...Accompanying Jamison on her flight to discover those constraints is thrilling, if often harrowing. But the stories of others seem to weigh her down, and the tedium she fears begins to find its way into the book.
At times, these [writer bio] sections can read a bit like thesis outtakes. But the paradox is that they work because they give a sense, perhaps as viscerally as the personal material, of the writer using everything she has to flounder toward some sort of meaning — not resolution, never resolution, but at least a form of reckoning ... that's where The Recovering leaves us, with the sense of a writer intent on holding nothing back. It's not that one approach is more effective than the other, just that they are different — in The Empathy Exams, we appreciate the care of her language, her construction, whereas here we are aware, most fundamentally, of her urgency. This, of course, is as it should be, for Jamison is writing to survive.
The Recovering is a sprawling, compelling, fiercely ambitious book that considers excess with full control, and strives for both exceptionalism and utility at the same time ... The parts of The Recovering that I found the most compelling were precisely the parts whose sameness I cherished—and whose sameness I suspect most of her readers will cherish, too. Not the reckoning with cult icons of literary boozing, but the parts about why Jamison drank—how it quelled her anxiety and made her feel alive ... Her writing throughout is spectacularly evocative and sensuous...And she thinks with elegant precision, cutting through the whiskey-soaked myths and the history of why people, particularly writers, put so much stock in drinking as a creative act ... If The Recovering has a stylistic flaw, it’s that it’s relentlessly, deliberately earnest ... Jamison is interested in something else: the possibility that sobriety can form its own kind of legend, no less electric, and more generative in the end.
Most writers would struggle with this kind of book to keep the momentum for 400-plus pages, but the approach suits Jamison, who is at her best when thinking out loud. But her strength is inseparable from her vulnerability ... By turning her attention outward to the stories of others, Jamison understands her own experience in a context larger than the prism of self. The Recovering demonstrates what memoir has always assumed: that in the stories of others we find ourselves. It is a magnificent achievement.
Jamison’s tone is earnest, but touched with flashes of beauty and humour. She offers the coin of depth and intensity rather than epiphanies ... It’s sobering, but as the dedication to The Recovering says, simply, 'For anyone addiction has touched.' That means most of us ... Jamison made that journey to hell and back, and her readers are fortunate that she lived to tell that tale.
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 ... 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.
It’s a neat trick: she satisfies readers who want the grisly details that addiction memoirs promise while dismantling that same genre, interrogating why tales of addiction prove so resonant ... Jamison is a bracingly smart writer; her sentences wind and snake, at turns breathless and tense. She charts the seductive pleasures of liquor like nobody since Caroline Knapp in her extraordinary memoir Drinking: A Love Story (1996) ... Instead of solving the mystery of why she drank, she does something worthier, digging underneath the big emptiness that lives inside every addict to find something profound.
Jamison is an incisive stylist and has amassed an enormous amount of information and insight on what her subtitle calls 'intoxication and its aftermath.' But her own recovery story, the spine on which she hangs reams of archival research and reportage, is—well, boring is a little harsh, but it’s not enough to carry a 500-page book ... Too often, though, stories of lifelong addicts like Holiday, who grew up black and poor and died literally handcuffed to a hospital bed, sit uneasily alongside that of a Harvard-educated novelist who sobered up her 20s without so much as a DWI ... awareness of privilege doesn’t blunt its protective force, and in the end the borrowed pathos of the stories of Holiday and Berryman and other writers like Raymond Carver and David Foster Wallace never solves the core problem, which is that Jamison’s own story lacks the dramatic heft to bear the weight of analysis and research she piles upon it.
Memoir’s purpose is to embrace discoveries about common human truths, and so as a reader of this most consuming book, I celebrate Jamison’s deep openheartedness, deliberate unselfishness, immaculate, inculcating vision and her language — oh, her language ... The Recovering is a long book and in places, especially toward the end, loses some of its pace as it sweeps through perhaps too many 'other' stories. Jamison is an immaculate chronicler of her life of abusing; one might have wished for a glimpse or two of how she managed, despite the self-abuse, to achieve so much as a writer and a student throughout the stumbling shame. But the fact is that the last thing we want from memoir is perfection: Memoir is life, and life is lived raw. For her intelligence, her compassion, her capaciousness, her search, her deep reading, her precise language, Jamison must be honored here.
As in The Empathy Exams, there is a dynamic energy between Jamison’s personal experiences and the texts she examines ... As deftly as Jamison weaves her memoir’s various strands together, occasionally her extensive research slows the book down ... She’s written a singular, extraordinarily insightful memoir of addiction, one which she might insist is altogether ordinary. That a reader might recognize herself in these pages, familiar as they are, is, of course, part of their power.
I can absolutely see what Ms. Jamison is going for here, and I applaud her ambition. The problem is that Ms. Jamison can’t or won’t cut the highfalutin language, the unrelentingly earnest, good-student voice and academic distance ... in all this detailed recounting, Ms. Jamison never cops to any of the deep, corrosive anger, curdled into self-loathing, that underlies the self-destructiveness of addiction ... Ms. Jamison seems to skitter away from her own story whenever it starts to get emotionally complicated and therefore interesting, shoehorning in another chunk of her thesis or someone else’s experience instead ... The Recovering gets better in the second half—less stiltedly written, more interesting and at times quite beautiful and moving ... But ultimately, The Recovering is a messy, chockablock brick of a book whose scope and ambition are at odds, throughout, with its author’s professed desire not to dominate the narrative as a soloist.
Faced with this framework, it seems small to evaluate, much less criticize, the artistic merits of The Recovering. Yet it’s clear that Jamison aims beyond such a narrow claim of utility: she wants totality ... All this effort might feel more trustworthy had she not drawn one especially dubious parallel and forced it into convergence. Four hundred pages in, Jamison notes that when she first quit drinking, news broke of a meth addict who died of exposure in an outdoor holding cell in Arizona while serving time for prostitution ... Jamison lacks control over her material. I think she would view that as a compliment.
The intellectual project of the book, as she sets it out, is to create a narrative about recovery that is as powerful as the fictional representations of alcoholism in literature ... It’s unfortunate when writers believe they need to create a whole new genre in order for their work to be of value. Jamison’s book fits well into this rich body of recovery memoirs and her book would be strengthened by being situated among them, just as it is strengthened by the portraits of the famous fiction writers and poets she has included ... Jamison’s prose is strikingly uneven. The writing itself seems tipsy: It can be energetic, colorful, fun, buzzy, affecting and spot on, but also loose, sloppy, digressive and excessively poetized at moments, veering into nebulous grandiosity.
By all rights, Leslie Jamison’s new memoir, The Recovering: Intoxication and its Aftermath shouldn’t work ... And yet The Recovering bursts with insight on how we scramble together our identities, told in a voice that manages by some literary legerdemain to be both winsomely idiosyncratic and resoundingly collective ... Although several reviewers have complained that this part of the book lags, I found the disparate sobriety stories of Sawyer, Gwen, Marcus, and Shirley essential to Jamison’s book, serving to widen its scope ... The Recovering creates its own grainy context, defying all the usual tropes of addiction memoirs.
Nearly every page is dense with insight, expressed in tautly constructed sentences. Sometimes reading it feels like sitting in on a therapy session with a hyper-introspective, hyper-articulate patient—an appraisal some might interpret, but I don’t intend, as pejorative. But it has shortcomings common to many essay collections. While the volume is ostensibly knit together by the themes of pain and empathy, some pieces, such as a brief account of a trip to a writers’ conference, feel like filler. The book can also come across as overly performative. It is easier to admire than to enjoy ... the vignettes and self-scrutiny are presented in a more straightforward memoir, fleshed out with context and with the narrative propulsion that chronology bestows. Her prose, meanwhile, has become looser, freer, and funnier ... She salutes the value of unoriginality but does not embody it. Her analytical sharpness and assiduous attention to words are the very reverse of reaching for the nearest truism.
I 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).
Through a compelling amalgam of literary criticism, memoir, and cultural criticism, in The Recovering...Leslie Jamison traces the alcoholism and subsequent recovery attempts of several famous writers, including herself ... Jamison’s personal narrative grows increasingly nuanced as it becomes braided with cultural and literary criticism and all these pieces of other people’s lives ... Jamison’s stunning 'speculative autobiography' allows us to encounter her subterranean animal right at the moment it pops its head out, made luminously visible by her writing.
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.
The crawl back up to sobriety is as engrossing as the downward spiral in this unsparing and luminous autobiographical study of alcoholism ... The dark humor, evocative prose, and clear-eyed, heartfelt insights Jamison deploys here only underscore her reputation as a writer of fearsome talent.
