The Recovering

by Leslie Jamison

  During that meeting, as others were speaking, I tried to figure out how to spin my drinking so I could leave the meeting and eventually drink again. Instead I raised my hand and said exactly what I was thinking: “I’m trying to figure out how to spin my drinking so I can eventually do it again.” When I opened my mouth to speak, it was like a valve releasing a toxic, pressurized gas.

  After the meeting, a young woman—maybe twenty years old, with a shiny curtain of blond hair, skinny jeans and heels, straight from some sorority pledge class—came up to me and started crying. “I can’t stop trying to convince myself that I don’t have to be here,” she told me. “Even though I need to be here.”

  I was about to tell her that she should probably talk to someone better at sobriety—someone who hadn’t just spent three weeks avoiding meetings—but then I realized she’d come up to me because I’d just announced that I’d spent three weeks avoiding meetings. She connected to that part of me, and to the part of me that had come back anyway. We were both in that room for a reason. She said she’d never gotten drunk in the mornings until she heard someone in a meeting confess that he used to get drunk in the mornings.

  “That’s fucked up, right?” she asked me. It seemed like half of her wanted me to tell her she was beyond hope, and half of her wanted me to tell her there was hope for her. But maybe she was just a Quinnipiac sorority girl who drank too much—and who was I to tell her anything?

  That’s when she pulled up her bubblegum-pink baby tee to show me her colostomy bag—a beige pouch tucked against the salon-tanned concavity of her abdomen. “I’m making myself sick,” she said. Nothing before or since has dissolved my self-absorption faster than the sight of that colostomy bag. She told me she knew she was supposed to drink less, now that she had it, but she couldn’t moderate. She’d just changed what she drank—no more beer, since it bloated the bag.

  Looking down at the ground, mumbling, she asked if she could have my number. I said of course she could, though it seemed absurd to think that I could help her. And you, you ridiculous people, you expect me to help you. It turned out I needed her help, too.

  A few weeks after my first meeting in New Haven, I started reading David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. I’d been surprised to hear it was a novel about recovery, because I’d always thought of it as ego-inflated—a blue brick of a book by a smart guy who’d wanted to buoy his ego by writing it, beloved by other smart guys who wanted to buoy their egos by reading it. But once I started reading Infinite Jest, it seemed like much more than virtuosity for its own sake. The core of the book—for me, at least—was Ennet House Alcohol and Drug Recovery House (“Redundancy sic”), where a massive and genuinely decent man named Don Gately is recovering from his Dilaudid addiction and helping other people get better one day at a time. The novel seemed self-aware about the trite sheen of these slogans, their simplicity and handled polish, but unapologetically committed to their messages anyway.

  Infinite Jest wasn’t just about recovery, of course. It was also about a tennis academy right up the hill from Ennet House—and three brothers living there, a punter, a prodigy, and a “stunted and complexly deformed” boy barely taller than a fire hydrant, all grieving a father who’d stuck his head in a microwave. It was also about the lethal film their father had made before he died, and the Québécois separatist wheelchair assassins hell-bent on finding the film and deploying it as a weapon. This film was the engine at the center of the whole story, so engrossing that no one who watched it wanted to do anything but watch it forever. That’s how it killed you.

  I approached my reading like a recovery program, by reading fifty pages a day—showing up for them whether I wanted to or not. At the top of each page, I took note of what had happened: He is weeping from desperation, but detached even from his own weeping. Or: Millicent makes a move. Or: Lyle licks the sweat. These notes were a way of taking my own attendance, a way of saying I’ve been here.

  It wasn’t that Infinite Jest took me back to meetings. It was the persistent desire to drink that took me back to meetings. But Infinite Jest helped me understand why I needed them. More specifically, it helped me understand that certain things about meetings could drive me crazy, and I could still need them. The novel had metabolized recovery with so much rigor it had already asked all of my questions and weathered all my intellectual discomforts. It documented what it called the “grudging move toward maybe acknowledging that this unromantic, unhip, clichéd AA thing—so unlikely and unpromising… this goofy slapdash anarchic system of low-rent gatherings and corny slogans and saccharine grins and hideous coffee” might actually offer something, in its simplicity and its slogans, in its church-basement coffee and its effusion of anonymous and unqualified love. The novel offered an encounter with recovery charged by double consciousness: both interrogating and affirming it, investigating its labor, its oddness, and its sublimity. The novel was questioning the recitations of recovery but still alive to its miracles, and not afraid to say so.

  Recovery is hope in Infinite Jest, but it’s also absurd. It’s grown men crawling across cheap carpeting with teddy bears tucked into the crooks of their arms. It’s guys killing alley cats to get a sense of “resolution.” It’s old-timer crocodiles and their emphysema-addled voices of prophecy. It’s the soul-swollen, heartbroken, chain-smoking world of Boston AA in all its “unromantic, unhip” wonder. “Serious AAs look like these weird combinations of Gandhi and Mr. Rogers,” the novel observes, “with tattoos and enlarged livers and no teeth.” Infinite Jest gets at something truthful and astonishing about how all of these people gather together seeming so “humble, kind, helpful, tactful,” how they actually are these things, not because anyone is forcing them, but simply because it’s the way they survive. The novel conjures the strange foods of recovery: meatloaf covered in cornflakes, pasta doused with cream-of-something soup, ordinary things I’d also eaten—in the company of other ordinary people and their ordinary drinking memories.

  If I’d read The Lost Weekend rooting for Don Birnam to get drunk again, I read Infinite Jest rooting for Don Gately to stay sober. I was grateful to direct my narrative desires toward recovery rather than relapse, glad to know it was possible for a book to make me thrill toward wellness. If Berryman had imagined Recovery as Twelfth Step work, then I was Twelfth-Stepped by Wallace. The novel was my old-timer just when I needed one. Gately describes the newly sober as “so desperate to escape their own interior” that they want “to lay responsibility for themselves at the feet of something as seductive and consuming as their former friend the Substance.” I wanted to lay myself at the feet of the book that told me that.

  Wallace himself went to a Boston rehab called Granada House in late 1989, seven years before Infinite Jest was published. “It’s a rough crowd,” he wrote to a friend. “Sometimes I’m scared or feel superior or both.” Years later, he described his experiences at Granada House in an anonymous online testimonial:

  They listened because, in the last analysis, they really understood me: they had been on the fence of both wanting to get sober and not, of loving the very thing that was killing you, of being able to imagine life neither with drugs and alcohol nor without them. They also recognized bullshit, and manipulation, and meaningless intellectualization as a way of evading terrible truths—and on many days the most helpful thing they did was to laugh at me and make fun of my dodges (which were, I realize now, pathetically easy for a fellow addict to spot), and to advise me just not to use chemicals today because tomorrow might very well look different. Advice like this sounds too simplistic to be helpful, but it was crucial.

  In his biography of Wallace, D. T. Max argues that he quickly understood the ways that recovery was also a “literary opportunity.” Wallace was learning a new world; he was glimpsing hundreds of exposed interior lives. He kept a list called “Heard in Meetings” that still remains in his archives, written on ordinary yellow lined paper:

  “The happiness of being among people. Just a person a
mong people.”

  “They say it’s good for the soul, but I don’t feel nothing inside you could call a soul.”

  “I shit myself every day for years.”

  “I came in to save my ass and found my soul was attached.”

  “‘No’ is also an answer to my prayers, as well.”

  “It hurts.”

  But recovery was far from just a source of material for Wallace. Max argues recovery was part of his growing commitment to “single-entendre writing, writing that meant what it said.” Recovery shifted Wallace’s whole notion of what writing could do, what purpose it might serve—made him want to dramatize the saving alchemy of community, the transformative force of outward-facing attention, the possibilities of simplicity as an alternative to the clever alibis of complexity: meaningless intellectualization as a way of evading terrible truths.

  In Infinite Jest, Wallace describes irony and recovery as oil and water: “An ironist in a Boston AA meeting is a witch in church.” The novel believes in the sincere wisdom an ironist might scoff at, the kind you might find on a tear-off calendar or a daily prayer book. It doesn’t believe in bromides as revelations, but it believes in what they seek—the possibility of common ground.

  After Hurricane Irene, our first August back in New Haven, the world was raw and wet and dazed. The Occupy movement filled Zuccotti Park, and then our own downtown green: a cluster of tarps and tents that sheltered protesters alongside people who had already been homeless. Years before, I might have dismissed a movement without a clear agenda as something without purpose, but collectivity itself had started to seem purposeful—the construction of a horizontal society right there on the grass, behind the downtown churches that held our meetings in their basements.

  Dave and I lived in a brick loft whose walls were literally crumbling, leaving little piles of brick dust in the corners. From a huge circular window in our living room, we could see the old converted corset factory where we’d gotten drunk that night Peter first found out about us, back when our love still felt reckless and destined, an animal with an incontestable will of its own.

  In this current chapter of our love, three years later—in which I was sober, and we were struggling to find our pulse—we had friends over to a breakfast-for-dinner party one night: eggs scrambled with melted ribbons of cheese, bacon and fried potatoes that filled the apartment with salty humidity. We ate syrup-soggy pancakes while dusk fell over the smokestacks by the railroad tracks. Other people drank mimosas and I drank orange juice and it was okay, though it was an okay where I still had to remind myself, This is okay. While we were washing dishes at the end of the night, I went into the bathroom and willed myself to remember that a year before I would have been yelling at Dave right now, or fuming, or flinching at his touch. And I wasn’t.

  But it didn’t make everything right. After everyone left, on that night and others, I watched Dave physically drain out—almost like he was deflating. We could still put on the show of ourselves for other people, but on our own we were becoming shells. There was something tender and forced about our jokes, saturated with effort. I’d been sober nine months, and I was going to meetings five times a week, sometimes seven. After that first New Haven meeting, I’d flung myself into them fully, and I’d also started working with a new sponsor, Susan, a lawyer in her sixties who wore big chunky beaded necklaces and drank her lattes with a straw. The first time I ever heard her speak, she talked about packing a magnum bottle of wine to take with her to rehab. That made more sense to me than someone saying, “You never have to drink again.” It made me think of the calligraphy poster in Infinite Jest, hanging in the Ennet House bathroom: EVERYTHING I’VE EVER LET GO OF HAD CLAW MARKS ON IT.

  Susan was warm and sarcastic and real about what hurt; she held me accountable to every rule I wanted to be an exception to. She had ended her marriage just a few months after getting back from rehab, which program wisdom didn’t recommend. You were supposed to wait a year before you made any big life choices. But Susan’s divorce had also opened up the next era of her life: a move away from the Connecticut suburb where she’d lived for decades, to a downtown studio with a piano in the corner and gauzy afternoon light. She drove women to meetings four or five days a week. Sobriety had granted her enough clarity to see that the life she’d spent decades creating wasn’t the one she wanted to stay inside of—which was a gift, but not a gift anyone wants. I didn’t think I was living Susan’s story—the story of sobriety as rupture—but I was oddly compelled by it: the idea that happiness might look like the end of love, rather than its repair.

  During that first year of recovery, I felt so liberated from one type of dependence, that bodily thirst, that I started to push back against the idea of dependence itself. It was hard to distinguish between the kinds of desire that might compose me and those that would diminish me. In many ways, AA was all about embracing need: resisting self-sufficiency, seeking humility, granting help and receiving it. But as I grew comfortable inside the system of validated need AA provided, I grew less comfortable with the more diffuse, nebulous, cluttered needs that defined my relationship with Dave. With him, I started to cauterize every need like an open wound. I stopped asking him for anything. Meetings were easier than love because there was a simple pattern: Do x, do y, do z. You knew you were doing what you were supposed to. Love was more like: Do x, or else do y, hope for z, and pray something works, and maybe it will, and probably it won’t.

  Many evenings I was away from our apartment, at AA meetings or with my sponsor, and often left in the morning, sometimes before Dave woke, to walk to an early meeting downtown. On a Saturday afternoon Dave suggested we spend together, I told him I was going to an apple orchard with two girls from the program and I could see a flicker of hurt, or disappointment. There was beauty in my life that day—wind-rustled apple trees, soft soil, the mush of fallen fruit—but it was a beauty I inhabited without him. I never imagined he’d feel excluded, though—only thought he’d be relieved I wanted less.

  That fall, I lived in a different version of New Haven than I’d lived in the first time around. This new version of the city was less cloistered by the university, more populated by everyone who lived beyond its borders. At meetings, I ended up in homeless shelters and retirement homes, swapping numbers with women after they’d gotten their court-order slips signed. I was moving between the worlds of graduate school and recovery, straddling the powerful rifts between their conflicting imperatives: Think harder. Don’t overthink it. Say something new. You can’t say anything new. Interrogate simplicity. Keep it simple. Be loved because you’re smart. Be loved because you are. My dissertation was reckoning with a question I hoped might bridge these worlds, examining authors who’d tried to get sober and exploring how recovery had become part of their creative lives. It wasn’t criticism as autobiography, exactly, so much as speculative autobiography—trying to find a map for what my own sober creativity might look like.

  Once a week, I led an undergraduate discussion section for a lecture course on Faulkner, Fitzgerald, and Hemingway: the old, mythic drunks. In one of our classes, we talked about “Babylon Revisited,” Fitzgerald’s short story about an alcoholic named Charlie who comes back to Paris—the city where he used to live, where his wife died—and finds that he can no longer stand his old life of debauchery. He just wants to become a better father. At the end of the story, he loses custody of his daughter but manages to limit himself to just one drink. I asked my students if they thought the story reached any resolution. Would things turn around for Charlie? I knew this wasn’t how we were supposed to teach, acting as if Charlie was a real guy—someone I’d met at a meeting, say—and we were just speculating about his fate; acting as if he were another number on a Narco Farm intake slip (Prognosis guarded). But I was seeking company in pretty much every story I encountered. So I asked my students if they thought Charlie would ever manage to stay sober, and kept calling on people until finally someone said yes, he thought he would.

&
nbsp; I don’t want to sound melodramatic here,” Raymond Carver wrote to his editor Gordon Lish in 1980, protesting a drastic round of edits, “but I’ve come back from the grave to start writing stories once more.” By the grave, Carver meant the drinking that had almost killed him, and by stories he meant the stories in What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, the ones he’d been writing since getting sober, in 1977. Lish’s radical edits threatened Carver’s faith in his newfound sober creativity from many directions at once. “I’m serious,” Carver wrote, insisting the stories were “intimately hooked up with my getting well, recovering, gaining back some little self-esteem and feeling of worth as a writer and a human being.”

  Although Carver’s early sobriety stories were full of desperation, they were also shot through with unexpected veins of hope and surprising moments of connection—the residue of recovery. But Lish had always been attracted to Carver’s “bleakness.” When Lish edited the early sobriety stories, it wasn’t just that he explicitly downplayed references to drinking and AA, he also pushed back against what he understood as the lurking threat of sentimentality—places where he felt the prose reaching for too much sappy affinity or ham-handed redemption. Carver’s original versions, written during the days when he was first finding respite in AA’s community of strangers, often landed on moments when strangers connected in odd or surprising ways: feeding each other, identifying with each other, praying for each other. But Lish’s edited endings usually landed on moments of disdain or unintentional cruelty instead, strangers resenting or abusing each other. Poet Tess Gallagher, Carver’s partner at the time, recalled:

  I remember [Ray’s] bafflement at one particular suggestion: that he remove all the references to drinking from the stories. I remember responding that his editor must not realize what Ray had been through, that he had nearly died from alcoholism and that alcohol was practically a character in the stories. This was to be Ray’s first book since he had become sober. He was telling the truth about physical and emotional damage and what it was like to come back from the dead.