And yet, she has written a completely compelling book about a precarious march from sticky gin-soaked floors toward stability. (Her collection of essays, The Empathy Exams, can most succinctly, if glibly, be described as a book about pain.) “Difficulty is our most reliable narrative engine,” she told me. I spoke with Leslie about the inspiration here and more broadly. Part memoir, part cultural-literary history, it is also a book that beautifully blends and merges genres. It is also a book about the way that new identities can emerge, both in intoxication and sobriety. The Recovering is a book about identities that are hidden, to others and to ourselves. I didn’t know the Leslie described early on in this book: uncertain, insecure, and sometimes, blackout drunk. There’s a passage in Leslie Jamison’s new book, The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath, in which she describes the shabbily glamorous headquarters of her college literary magazine: “perpetually sticky hardwood floor and a cluster of ratty velvet couches with stuffing and springs thrusting up through rips in their fabric.” I met Leslie in those offices, where she seemed to me the preternaturally composed and incisive overseer of the fiction committee, presiding over printed-out submissions, dark wine in plastic cups, and plates of soft cheese.
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