The Recovering

April 15, 2018

Jamison appears to have devoured books by alcoholic authors in an effort to understand her own life as both a writer and an alcoholic. She relates their situations to her own in interesting but indulgent ways, using an overly introspective style. The audience for this work is limited by the author, who assumes her readers are also addict-writers who will appreciate the complicated and intricate interplay of words and the many references to famous writers with addictions. Jamison narrates her personal story of alcoholism, recovery, recidivism, and more recovery. The author as narrator works because Jamison gives her experience, with all its many asides and backstory, a shape with an emphasis and a tone that no one else could have done. As Jamison says, "You have to be sober to listen to this."VERDICT Recommended for large public libraries.--Karen Perry, Old Dominion Univ., Norfolk, VA

Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

March 26, 2018
Jamison easily captures the intimate feel of her writing style in the audiobook edition of her gripping memoir about her struggles with addiction. She enmeshes listeners in her early adulthood and the endless forms of agonizing pain—and blissful pleasure—that she experienced via drugs and alcohol. Jamison smoothly intersperses her personal anecdotes with words from so-called drunk prophets John Berryman, Jean Rhys, Raymond Carver, Billie Holiday, Elizabeth Bishop, Denis Johnson, and others. She wants to dispel the long-held beliefs that addiction cannot be broken, and that misery, booze, and drugs are the engines of the creative process. Jamison transports listeners into her Alcoholic Anonymous sessions, where she learns to escape her self-absorption, listen to and sympathize with others, tolerate boredom, and treasure the consolation of shared experiences. It’s doubtful that another narrator could have engaged listeners so deeply in such a difficult and timeless issue. A Little, Brown hardcover.

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.

Starred review from 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.

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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.