The Recovering: Intoxication and its Aftermath - Hardcover

Leslie Jamison

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1783781521 ISBN 13: 9781783781522

Publisher: Granta Books, 2018

Synopsis

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 this title

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, author of I Love Dick

'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

'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'--John Burnside, Literary Review

'Touched with flashes of beauty and humour' -- --Financial Times
'Clever, bold, earnest' ----Spectator

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 currently studying for a PhD at Yale University, where she is writing a dissertation on poverty and degradation in twentieth century American writing. Her first novel, The Gin Closet, was published in 2010, and her collection of essays, The Empathy Exams, was published in 2014.

Edition details

• Publisher: Granta Books
• Publication date: 2018
• ISBN 10: 1783781521
• ISBN 13: 9781783781522
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 544