INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER "An astounding triumph .
She directs the graduate nonfiction program at Columbia University and lives in Brooklyn with her husband, the novelist Charles Bock, and their two daughters..
She is a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine , and her work has appeared in publications including The Atlantic , Harper\'s , the New York Times Book Review , the Oxford American , and the Virginia Quarterly Review .
About the Author: Leslie Jamison is the author of the essay collection The Empathy Exams , a New York Times bestseller, and the novel The Gin Closet , a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.
With enormous empathy and wisdom, Jamison has given us nothing less than the story of addiction and recovery in America writ large, a definitive and revelatory account that will resonate for years to come.
For her striking language and piercing observations, Jamison has been compared to such iconic writers as Joan Didion and Susan Sontag, yet her utterly singular voice also offers something new.
Through its unvarnished relation of Jamison\'s own ordeals, The Recovering also becomes a book about a different kind of dependency: the way our desires can make us all, as she puts it, "broken spigots of need." It\'s about the particular loneliness of the human experience-the craving for love that both devours us and shapes who we are.
At the heart of the book is Jamison\'s ongoing conversation with literary and artistic geniuses whose lives and works were shaped by alcoholism and substance dependence, including John Berryman, Jean Rhys, Billie Holiday, Raymond Carver, Denis Johnson, and David Foster Wallace, as well as brilliant lesser-known figures such as George Cain, lost to obscurity but newly illuminated here.
All the while, she offers a fascinating look at the larger history of the recovery movement, and at the complicated bearing that race and class have on our understanding of who is criminal and who is ill.
Leslie Jamison deftly excavates the stories we tell about addiction--both her own and others\'--and examines what we want these stories to do and what happens when they fail us.
With its deeply personal and seamless blend of memoir, cultural history, literary criticism, and reportage, The Recovering turns our understanding of the traditional addiction narrative on its head, demonstrating that the story of recovery can be every bit as electrifying as the train wreck itself.
Jamison is a writer of exacting grace." -- Washington Post From the New York Times bestselling author of The Empathy Exams comes this transformative work showing that sometimes the recovery is more gripping than the addiction. . .
Uncompromising . . .
Vivid writing and required reading." --Stephen King "Perceptive and generous-hearted . . .
Beautifully told." -- Boston Globe "An honest and important book . . .
A recovery memoir like no other." -- Entertainment Weekly (A) "Riveting . . .
Achingly wise . . .
Profound . . .
INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER "An astounding triumph
