The American writer Leslie Jamison is the bestselling author of the acclaimed essay collection The Empathy Exams (2014). She grew up in Los Angeles, read English at Harvard, studied for her MFA in creative writing at the Iowa Workshop, and has a PhD from Yale, where her thesis looked at addiction and sincerity in 20th-century American literature. She now lives in New York, where she teaches at Columbia University, with her husband, the writer Charles Bock, her stepdaughter, and their three-month-old baby daughter.
Her new book, The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath, describes her struggle with alcoholism, as well as that of key literary figures such as Elizabeth Bishop and John Cheever. But its main focus is on her subsequent sobriety, achieved with the help of the 12-step programme, better known as Alcoholics Anonymous; eventually, she turns her narrative over to the voices of some fellow addicts. She is interested in the connection between storytelling, and both alcoholism and sobriety. As she writes early on: “Yearning is our most powerful narrative engine, and addiction is one of its dialects.” She first felt the buzz of alcohol at 13. She first drank in secret at 15. At a Harvard student initiation ceremony, she drank so much that all she remembers is waking up in her dorm room where whoever had brought her home had left a note that read: “Hope you’re OK.” And on, and on. Booze made her feel, she writes, as if it had plunged her into “a darkness that seemed like honesty… as if the bright surfaces of the world were all false and the desperate drunk space underground was where the truth lived.”
How does The Recovering connect, if at all, to The Empathy Exams?
There is one line in the last essay in that book where I say “suffering is interesting, but so is getting better”. I threw down some kind of gauntlet, and this book picks that up. The most natural form for it might have been a scholarly monograph; the hybrid nonfiction book is usually a slim volume. But at a certain point, I had to accept that this would be a big book: critical, reported, personal, all sorts of things. I decided to let the material call the shots.
You talk in the book of people’s eyes glazing over at the thought of yet another tale of alcoholism and recovery. How nervous were you about tackling the subject? Did it seem daunting?
Not really. I was very aware that there is this aesthetic problem embedded in the form of the addiction-recovery story, which is that people feel they’ve heard it before. But you’re not just retelling a story if you’re faithful to your experience. Every story is reborn in each life. My drinking certainly never got as bad as many people’s, but if you’re willing to ask vigorous questions of your interior experience, there is always something there.
The book examines the lives of several alcoholic writers, among them John Berryman and Jean Rhys. Again, their stories are quite well known. How did you choose who to include?
The picking was largely a function of writers who had been important to me, and of circumstance. So when I moved to Iowa [to join the Iowa Writers’ Workshop], writers who had been there became important: Berryman, Raymond Carver, Denis Johnson. Others I sought out, like Charles Jackson [author of The Lost Weekend, a powerfully realistic novel about alcoholism from 1944]. I felt such a connection with the way the alcoholic impulse is evoked in that book. It was revolutionary, then, that he was willing to be so honest about how petty and banal and claustrophobic drinking can be, but he also captures its enthralment. I was fascinated that he’d tried and failed to write a sober novel. Jean Rhys was important to me in my early 20s: I had a heart-swelling identification with Good Morning Midnight [a 1939 novel about a heavy-drinking woman’s feelings of desperation between the wars]. I returned to her in my 30s, when I was thinking harder about what it meant that Rhys never overcame her drinking.
You use Rhys to look at the way our culture may be harder on, more disgusted by, the female alcoholic than the male. Why do you think male drunks are treated with more sympathy than female?
Some of it has to do with care-giving: we’re much more prone to bring expectations of care-giving to women than to men. Part of what it means to be addicted to anything is that you’re absenting yourself from your relationships. That’s more of a crime when a woman does it. This is true in the context of Jean Rhys [who never forgave herself for drinking while her baby son lay dying], but you also see it in the media construction of the crack-mother phenomenon. When a man is a drunk, there is self-destruction. A drunk woman is just as self-destructive, but she’s also unseemly, histrionic, melodramatic.
Was it painful to write about your own drinking, to remember the blackouts and all the other humiliations involved?
Yes, but not in the ways people expect. I don’t want to write personal narrative unless I’m granular. You lose the truth if you glaze over things. I was reluctant to dramatise the fights with my boyfriend at first, but then I realised that in order to bring someone into my experience, I had to be specific. It was an aesthetic imperative. It’s about craft. When I write loaded personal material, something about the process of crafting, it really bolsters me. How is it serving the larger story? Driving questions carried me through it. It’s actually harder for me to write about other people than about myself.
Have any of the other people in the book responded to it?
Part of my practice is that I ask people who are in a book if they want to read it in manuscript, so we can talk about it, and I can edit. Everyone who’s in it in a substantive way read it a year before publication. Dave [Jamison’s ex-boyfriend], the biggest character, was generous. He made it a better book. But I don’t want to be a Pollyanna. Sometimes, those conversations can be quite difficult. There was material I took out.
You write about being a certain kind of clever but insecure young woman: one who devotes too much energy to worrying about how other people, particularly men, see her. As a child, your parents divorced; your father left. To what degree do you connect your drinking to him?
When I was younger, I drew a very strong connective line between my father and certain of my personality traits: my deep desire for affirmation from men; my deep fear of being abandoned. But by the time I wrote this book, I thought that was only part of the story. I wanted to honour other things. Alcoholism may be traced back to more imperative sources, by which I mean biological ones. I wasn’t writing a popular science book, but it’s no accident that mental illness is everywhere in my family tree, and so is alcoholism.
You were a very high-functioning alcoholic. While you were drinking, you got a PhD from Yale and you published a novel; you held down several jobs. How did you know you needed help? People talk about rock bottom, but I don’t feel you ever got there.
I’ve done a lot of thinking about what is shared and not shared between people with addictive impulses that bring them to different levels of functionality. I don’t believe in protocols of suffering, but I also believe every life is different. My high-functioning impulse is deeply related to my addictive impulses. They felt very knitted together, always. I always had to be good enough, to get every gold star. That desperate drive: I wanted some relief from it, just to shut down.
When I began to want to get sober, it was cumulative. I’d tried to stop drinking a few times, and it scared me how unmanageable it was for me to stop. The failure started to feel awful. Why was life such a barren tundra if I wasn’t drinking? There were days, weeks, months where the first thing I thought about was: when am I going to get drunk? It wasn’t costing me my job or my reputation in a black-and-white way. But my interior felt really small and obsessed with this one thing. That felt shameful and corrosive. The last nights of my drinking were very ordinary; I took a huge amount of whisky into a room to pass out drunk. But it was the smallness of that which sent me into recovery. And when I failed [to get sober] the first time, the repetition convinced me I would always end up in the same place if I drank. The idea of hitting rock bottom has to do with storytelling. Rock bottom is subjective. It’s what you say it is, and what you need it to be.
You got sober by attending AA, an institution that the writer in you thought of as peddling cliches. Now, though, you believe in it wholly. What happened?
It’s true that I had a resistance to the kind of cliched language I would hear over and over again; it didn’t satisfy the part of me that always craves or seeks the most original way of putting something. Hearing people fit their lives into a pattern also felt reductive. But as a writer, I’ve always loved other people’s stories. Every life has stories in it worth telling. That appealed. I also came to have a respect for the cliches. I felt they could be useful as alibis against exceptionality. If you feel a cliche resonates with you, then you’re not so original after all – and that’s also a useful way to connect with someone when your external circumstances are quite different. You look at this piece of truth you share. What could I possibly say to a woman who was living with her son in a van? Actually, though, to have these pieces of wisdom gave me a legitimate and meaningful common language.
You put a lot of extra voices in the final section of the book: those of other addicts in recovery. Why?
I wanted the book to work like an AA meeting, one that lifts you out of your own life by virtue of listening to other people talk about theirs. Also, these 15 people allowed me to show, and not just to tell, that addiction does not go one single way. Some people get sober. Some never do. Some get sober, and then they commit suicide. It allows for this honesty.
Where are you now in your sobriety? How does it feel?
I’ve been sober since 2010. I still go to meetings. I heard somebody in recovery say things don’t always get better, but they always get different, which I found a useful cliche. The condition of sobriety has risen to meet the changing conditions of my life: the end of relationships, my marriage, having a stepdaughter, and a newborn baby. It helps me to show up for life, to expect it to be ordinary, rather than entirely great or entirely terrible. There’s something about its constancy and ongoing-ness that I feel a bit more equipped to handle.
Do you miss drinking?
I miss it in a different way than in the beginning, when it was acute and overpowering, and it was hard to imagine not missing it. But there are times when, say, I’ll go back to a city where I used to live, or hit a certain season. I’ll remember what it felt like to drink dirty martinis in the autumn or white wine in the summer. Certain cues bring back everything that felt blissful and enchanting about it. Of course, I wanted to write that into the book. I wanted to be real about how spellbinding it is. Happiness was entwined with my drinking, as well as sadness. I didn’t want to construct some simple before and after.
