A few passages from The Recovering:

In recovery, years later, when someone described self-loathing as the flip side of narcissism, I almost laughed out loud at the stark truth of what she’d said. This black-and-white thinking, this all-or-nothing, it was cut from the same cloth. Being just a man among men, or a woman among women, with nothing extraordinary about your flaws or your mistakes – that was the hardest thing to accept.

It took me years to understand that my interior had never been interior – that my relationship to my own pain, a relationship that felt endlessly private, was not private at all. It owed its existence to narratives that make it very possible…

Addiction doesn’t surprise me. It seems more surprising that some people aren’t addicted to anything.

The paradox of recovery stories, I was learning, was that you were supposed to relinquish your ego by authoring a story in which you also starred. It was a paradox made possible by the acknowledgement of commonality: I happen to be at the center of this story, but anyone could be. When Gilles Deleuze wrote that “life is not personal,” he was getting at this, too, that an individual story is both more and less than self-expression. ( )

This took me a very long time to read because I have to be honest here, I found Jamison exhausting. Toward the end, she acknowledges that someone's observation that she is emotionally abusive may be true (it is true, but she isn't quite that full-throated in her acknowledgment) and I felt somewhat emotionally abused just reading about a lot of this. I had to walk away several times and come back. That said, it was worth the abuse for me. Most of it was excellent and eye-opening.

Jamison is a prodigiously skilled writer who can fully evoke feelings, conversations, and scenes to give the reader a present sense experience. When she focuses on alcohol and writers, including in part Raymond Carver, Jean Rhys, John Berryman, Charles Jackson, Denis Johnson, and David Foster Wallace, her observations are fascinating and the portraits she draws are nuanced and vulnerable. I learned a lot about process that changed my thinking about art, She also wrote a lot about 12-step recovery and the work on addiction recovery by Gabor Mate. I learned a lot from this as well. I think we all know the trappings, the cliches, the structure of 12-step recovery which has all been covered ad nauseum in popular culture, but Jamison digs down into why the cliches and consistency, the acknowledgment that we are all alike in most ways make this route to recovery work for many (not all, and she is clear this is not the only route and that it does not work for all.)

Why did I take a star? I thought Jamison spent way way way too much time on her own journeys, both the journey as a drunk and the damage she wrought (including a lot of damage to herself) and her journey in sobriety. A lot of this was duplicative, and even more of it did nothing to illuminate her thesis. I get frustrated when reviewers bitch about memoirs being self-indulgent because they are MEMOIRS and so by definition they are self-indulgent. And yet here I am about to complain about Jamison's self-indulgence. Too much of this book consists of lengthy detailed recountings of events that are clearly just Jamison trying to lessen her guilt and shame by shining light on the ugliness and selfishness of her actions. Self-flagellation serves no one but the flagellated. I don't think any reader needs the litany, and to the extent it is enjoyed I expect the enjoyment stems from prurience or competition. (People like to believe they are the most pathetic screw-ups in the house. At least there is one race they can win.) I get that brand of sharing is the heart and soul of 12-step process, but it is not the heart and soul of good writing. The issue is compounded by the fact that this is only in part a memoir. There is a bigger story Jamison is trying to tell and her memememe approach lessens the impact of more important messaging.

I read Jamison's newest and I DNF'd because she was telling the most boring story with this same level of memememe. Even in that book though, her writing rose above that noise often enough that I knew I wanted to try reading her other work. I am very glad I did that. This was extremely worthwhile and I expect it will stay with me. ( )

Gave up 60 pages in. ( )

At the beginning of this book, I found it very difficult to have sympathy for Leslie Jamison. Her acknowledgement of her privileged position (Harvard, Iowa Writers Workshop, Yale PhD, loving parents, traveling abroad) seemed pro forma, and her desire to see herself as unique seemed stronger than her ability to place her alcoholism in context.

Luckily for both her and me, the book strengthened after the first couple of chapters and felt more natural and less self conscious. Jamison is an excellent writer (I loved The Empathy Exams), although the book is a little messy. It loops between a personal memoir, a study of alcoholism and abuse in literary and artistic figures, and a background to the social history of addiction in the US. The latter two subjects could be lengthy books on their own, so the focus is selective, but it's more effective than any amount of navelgazing at showing how on a personal level, addiction is both your own unique story and yet not essentially different from anyone else's. There's also a brief rundown on how enforcement efforts have always been disproportionately directed at black people (and to a lesser extent other people of color). Instead of just looking at famous drunk white men, she includes the story of Billie Holiday and other descriptions of heroin and crack use.

The recovery section is AA focused. Although the effectiveness of AA and 12 step programs has been recently scrutinized, the empirical value of AA isn't examined here. AA works for her, because AA provides a social network and structure. AA provides peer accountability, and reminds you again of her theme: your addiction is your own, but is uniquely banal. ( )

This was interesting enough, but the writer confuses her self-centered nature with the effect of drinking. It seemed too clever to be entirely honest, and I felt manipulated as a reader. To her credit there is a lot in here about authors and the nature of addiction which is interesting, but (as I heard describing something else): what's good isn't new, and what's new isn't good. ( )