The fraternity of the recovering has a long and storied lineage, with the likes of Raymond Carver, Jean Rhys, and Elizabeth Bishop contributing accounts of their own struggles, spirals, and submissions to addiction. In this moving and brutally honest memoir, Jamison joins their ranks, taking an unflinching look at her own descent into alcoholism—first as a way to cope with shyness in her 20s, and later, to cope with life. Far from saccharine or prosaic, Jamison asks hard questions of herself as well as her contemporaries of the bottle, pondering the relationship between creativity and addiction through her own experiences and those of the great writers in whose steps she follows.
The Recovering by Leslie Jamison, $20, amazon.com on April 3. BUY
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