The Recovering: Intoxication and its Aftermath

Review 'Leslie Jamison has written an honest and important book, vivid writing and required reading'--Stephen King 'Leslie Jamison's The Recovering is a definitive investigation of both the romance of intoxication and the possibilities for recovery. Graceful, forensic, The Recovering sets a new bar in addiction studies. It is a courageous and brilliant example of what nonfiction writing can do'--Chris Kraus 'This strangely exhilarating book is about recovery, but it is more resonantly a book about desire, consciousness, kindness, self-control, and love-and hence a Tolstoyan study of the human condition'--Andrew Solomon 'Her writing is unexpected, profound, and perverse-in short, a thrill to read. Best of all, for a writer so gifted at locating the excruciating commonalities of isolation, Jamison manages this greatest feat of magic: when I read her words, I come away feeling less alone'--Mary-Louise Parker 'The Recovering is beautifully written, beautifully honest, formidably intelligent, emotionally powerful, and absolutely fascinating. Leslie Jamison captured my attention in the very first sentence and didn't let it go for a second until - with reluctance - I finished the very last. Addiction literature has just welcomed a new classic'--Anne Fadiman 'Leslie Jamison has done a magnificent job of rescuing an age-old social problem from the clichés that surround it, and making us see it anew for the cruel assault on the human spirit that it really is'-- --Vivian Gornick 'an incredible writer'--Florence Welch 'Engaging as it is thoughtful...Ms Jamison proves both an insightful guide to decades of literature by and about addicts, and a self-aware chronicler of her own struggle with alcoholism... a movingly humble book'--Economist 'Touched with flashes of beauty and humour'--Financial Times 'Painstakingly and honestly delineated, with flashes of humour and wry wit that leaven the sense of waste.... a brave, honest and surprisingly generous account of intoxication and its consequences'--Literary Review 'Jamison breaks the addiction-lit mould'--Vanity Fair 'The arc of [Jamison's] redemption has arguably made her a better writer: more at ease with her own complicatedness, looking to the future, beyond the bottom of a glass'--Irish Times 'The Recovering is graced by self-awareness and luminous writing.... Jamison's brilliance is most evident when she puts her finger on the complexity of human emotion'--Sunday Independent '[The Recovering is] gripping to the end, because of [Jamison's] honesty and intelligence'--Daily Telegraph 'She is a particularly talented exponent of a kind of essayistic contemporary non-fiction I love: scholarly but never academic; lyrical but exact; confessional but analytical; discursive but with enough narrative momentum to keep you reading' -- --TLS Product Description Addiction is seemingly inexplicable. From the outside, it can look like wilful, arrogant self-destruction; from the inside, it can feel as inevitable and insistent as a heartbeat. It is possible to describe, but hard to explore. Yet in The Recovering, Leslie Jamison draws on her own life and the lives of addicts of extraordinary talent - John Cheever, John Berryman, Jean Rhys and Amy Winehouse among them - to take us inside the experience of addiction, exposing the contours, edges and wholes of an intoxicated life. Part memoir, part group biography, part literary history and part definitive analysis of cultural and social considerations of addiction, The Recovering is a significant moment in the history of post-war narrative non-fiction. About the Author Leslie Jamison grew up in Los Angeles. Educated at Harvard College and the Iowa Writers' Workshop, she has also worked as an innkeeper in California, a schoolteacher in Nicaragua, and an office temp in Manhattan. She is the NewYork Times bestselling author of The Recovering and The Empathy Exams, as well as a novel, The Gin Closet. Her work has appeared in Harper's, The Atlan