The Recovering

by Leslie Jamison

  In my literary analysis, I was in conversation with a number of deeply insightful critics and scholars who helped shaped my understanding of the complicated links between addiction, recovery, and creativity: John Crowley’s White Logic: Alcoholism and Gender in American Modernist Fiction and Olivia Laing’s Trip to Echo Spring: On Writers and Drinking, as well as Elaine Blair’s New York Review of Books essay on David Foster Wallace (“A New Brilliant Start”), are all works of literary criticism that examine with humanity and insight the relationship between addiction, recovery, and creativity. Crowley’s book was especially formative and helpful in its illuminating treatment of the rivalry between Jackson and Lowry, and the ways in which The Lost Weekend and Under the Volcano offer contrasting visions of alcoholism.

  As I tried to figure out the larger social context for how addiction has been narrated in twentieth-century America, I found tremendous—and necessarily horrifying—insight and illumination in Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, Drew Humphries’s Crack Mothers: Pregnancy, Drugs, and the Media, Johann Hari’s Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs, and Doris Marie Provine’s Unequal Under Law: Race in the War on Drugs. Avital Ronell’s Crack Wars: Literature Addiction Mania and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s “Epidemics of the Will” helped structure my thinking about how the social imagination has absorbed and produced various, often contradictory, notions of addiction. Gabor Maté’s In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction helped me think about addiction, harm reduction, and decriminalization in new ways. Nancy Campbell, J. P. Olsen, and Luke Walden’s The Narcotic Farm was a vital resource on the cure at Lexington. I also consulted the literary accounts of the Narcotic Farm offered in Clarence Cooper’s Farm, William Burroughs’s Junkie, Billy Burroughs Jr.’s Kentucky Ham, and Helen MacGill Hughes’s Fantastic Lodge: The Autobiography of a Girl Drug.

  I’m grateful to all the clinicians, social workers, and caregiving professionals aiding vulnerable populations struggling with substance dependence who shared their insights and wisdom with me along the way. Substantial portions of the advance from this book have gone to support two nonprofit organizations devoted to aiding vulnerable populations affected by substance dependence: the Bridge, a New York City transitional housing facility; and Marian House, a Baltimore transitional housing facility that serves women emerging from incarceration, homelessness, and inpatient treatment programs.

  Much of the research for this book was drawn from the dissertation I wrote for my doctoral program at Yale University, and I’m grateful to my advisers there: Wai Chee Dimock, Amy Hungerford, and Caleb Smith. All three of them supported me with hard questions and keen insights, again and again, over the course of many years. Caleb offered me the provocation I needed, even—often—when I didn’t know I needed it. My once-teacher and forever-friend Charles D’Ambrosio is one of the most extraordinary people I’ve ever met. His words are with me every time I sit down to write.

  The Lannan Foundation generously gave me a residency in Marfa, Texas, for the month of April 2015, and it’s not hyperbole to say that this month allowed the book to come to life: I spread an outline across the floor of my office, worked twelve hours a day, and finally believed that it could actually be.

  I’ve been lucky enough to work with extraordinary editors near and far, especially Max Porter at Granta, Karsten Kredel at Hanser Berlin, Svante Weyler at Weyler Förlag, Robbert Ammerlaan and Diana Gvozden at Hollands Diep, Sophie de Closets and Leonello Brandolini at Fayard, and—of course, always—Jeff Shotts and Fiona McCrae at Graywolf, and the inimitable Amber Qureshi, all friends and allies and kindred spirits for life, as well as Michael Taeckens, who holds a special place in my heart. Thank you to Trinity Ray and Kevin Mills at the Tuesday Agency, who make hitting the road possible. Thank you to my inspiring colleagues at Columbia University, a community I’m perpetually grateful to be part of; and to all my students past and present—at Columbia, Yale, Wesleyan, and Southern New Hampshire University—who have challenged, surprised, and inspired me. Sean Lavery spent almost a year fact-checking this book, setting me straight about Real World, the War on Drugs, and everything in between.

  I’ve been working with the Wylie Agency for more than a decade, and I consider myself absurdly lucky to have landed with Andrew Wylie, who believed in me from the beginning, and the unstoppable Jin Auh, a force of nature who has been my ally, confidante, fierce advocate, and cherished friend for years. A particular thanks also to Jessica Friedman, savior and wunderkind, and to the folks at Wylie UK, especially Luke Ingram and Sarah Chalfant.

  Thank you to everyone at Little, Brown: Reagan Arthur, for believing, and Michael Pietsch, for inviting me into a legacy I admire so deeply. Thank you to Allison Warner, for designing such a beautiful jacket; to Pamela Marshall, Deborah P. Jacobs, and David Coen, for making sure everything was right inside; and to Craig Young, Lauren Velasquez, Sabrina Callahan, and Liz Garriga, for helping to bring it to the world. Thank you to Cheryl Smith and Charles McCrorey, for welcoming me into their enchanted audio cave; to Sarah Haugen and Cynthia Saad; and of course to Paul Boccardi, for coming to that first meeting. Last but not least, my deep gratitude to the fiercely intelligent and deeply passionate Ben George. I believed you were the editor for this book from the very beginning, but working on it with you was more intense, and more rewarding, than I ever could have imagined. Thank you for your humanity, your relentless belief, and your soulful eye. You do the work right.

  I am lucky to count so many extraordinary writers and thinkers as the deep and lasting friends of my life. They listened to me talk about this book for eight years, and I’m grateful for it, particularly to the ones who read portions of this book (Jeremy Reff and Greg Pardlo) and the ones who—miraculously—read the whole damn thing: Harriet Clark, Colleen Kinder, Greg Jackson, Nam Le, Emily Matchar, Kyle McCarthy, Jacob Rubin, and Robin Wasserman. I’m also grateful for the grace of their company and wisdom, along with countless others, especially Rachel Fagnant, Abby Wild, Aria Sloss, Katie Parry, Bri Hopper, Tara Menon, Alexis Chema, Casey Cep, Miranda Featherstone, Ben Nugent, Kiki Petrosino, Max Nicholas, Jim Weatherall, Nina Siegel, Bridget Talone, Emma Borges-Scott, Margot Kaminski, Jenny Zhang, Michelle Huneven, Micah Fitzerman-Blue, Taryn Schwilling, Ali Mariana, Susan Szmyt, Staci Perelman, the ladies of DeLuxe—especially Jamie Powers and Mary Simmons—and the Lunch Bunch from way back when: Eve Peters, Amalia McGibbon, Caitlin Pilla, and Meg Swertlow.

  I owe a particular note of thanks to David Gorin, who read drafts of this book not once but twice, and offered his heart and singular mind to the task of making it truer. DG: Thank you for our years together, and for the care, intelligence, insight, and grace you brought to this project.

  Thank you to my entire extended family, who fill my life with anchoring and inspiration: Jim, Phyllis, Ben, Georgia, Genevieve, Ian, Cathie, Kerry, Colin, and all their next generations; Grandpa Jack (at one hundred years old!); and especially my aunts Kay and Kathleen, as well as my stepparents, Mei and Walter. Gratitude to my brothers, Julian and Eliot, worshipped from the very beginning, and their beautiful families; to my father, Dean, whom I love so much it makes my heart swell; and to my singular, beloved mother, Joanne Leslie, for whom there will never be enough words, or enough gratitude, only the knowledge that nothing I do would be possible without her love.

  Thank you to Lily: beautiful human, dervish tornado, firecracker and delight.

  Thank you to Ione Bird, who breaks me open with love each day. Everything is still ahead.

  Finally, thank you to my husband, Charles Bock, who read this book first, and helped me see what it could become; then read it again, a year later, and helped me take it the rest of the way. I’m grateful for your intelligence, your own beautiful writing, and—most of all—your love. You make me laugh like no one else. Thank you for making every day of life better than the script I could have written for it.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR<
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  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. 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. She directs the graduate nonfiction program at Columbia University and lives in Brooklyn with her husband, the novelist Charles Bock, and their two daughters.

  ALSO BY LESLIE JAMISON

  NONFICTION

  The Empathy Exams: Essays

  FICTION

  The Gin Closet

  NOTES

  I. WONDER

  It has always been a hazard for me to speak at an AA meeting… I think I got tired of being my own hero… I’ve written a book that’s been called the definitive portrait of the alcoholic… Charles Jackson, speech, Alcoholics Anonymous, Cleveland, Ohio, 1959.

  The myths of Iowa City drinking ran like subterranean rivers beneath the drinking we were doing.… For more on John Cheever in Iowa, see Blake Bailey’s biography Cheever: A Life (New York: Knopf, 2009). For more on Ray Carver in Iowa, see Carol Sklenicka’s biography Raymond Carver: A Writer’s Life (New York: Scribner, 2009); and for a vivid and incisive account of their friendship, see also Olivia Laing’s The Trip to Echo Spring: On Writers and Drinking (New York: Picador, 2014). For more on Berryman in Iowa, see John Haffenden’s biography The Life of John Berryman (London: Methuen & Co., 1984).

  just a poor mortal human… Denis Johnson, “Where the Failed Gods Are Drinking,” The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations Millennium General Assembly: Poems Collected and New (New York: Harper Perennial, 1995).

  When Cheever showed up to teach in Iowa, he was grateful for the glen… For more on Carver and Cheever’s friendship, see Sklenicka, Raymond Carver: A Writer’s Life, 253, 258. For Yates and Dubus, see Blake Bailey’s biography of Yates, A Tragic Honesty: The Life and Work of Richard Yates (New York: Picador, 2003).

  He and I did nothing but drink… Carver, qtd. in Sklenicka, Raymond Carver: A Writer’s Life, 253.

  blue mice and pink elephants… the pitiless, spectral syllogisms of the white logic… Jack London, John Barleycorn (New York: The Century Company, 1913), 7–8.

  bitten numbly by numb maggots… sees through all illusions… God is bad, truth is a cheat, and life is a joke… Ibid., 14. In certain versions, the text is quoted as “Good is bad, truth is a cheat, and life is a joke” (for example, a serialized version of London’s novel in the Saturday Evening Post 185, no. 7, March 15, 1913).

  cosmic sadness… Ibid., 309.

  so bad it was like somebody was sticking wires… Raymond Carver, “Vitamins,” Collected Stories, ed. William Stull and Maureen Carroll (New York: Library of America, 2009), 427.

  You can’t tell a bunch of writers not to smoke… Now we are going to tell each other our life stories… Carver, qtd. in Sklenicka, Raymond Carver: A Writer’s Life, 270.

  Ray was our designated Dylan Thomas, I think—our contact with the courage… Sklenicka, Raymond Carver: A Writer’s Life, 265.

  It was really difficult even to look at him, the booze and the cigarettes were so much there… Ibid., 269.

  Of course there’s a mythology… Raymond Carver interview, Mona Simpson and Lewis Buzbee, Paris Review (Summer 1983).

  invisible forces… Sklenicka, Raymond Carver: A Writer’s Life, 269. See Sklenicka for a fuller account of Carver’s attachment to John Barleycorn.

  like a hummingbird over a blossom… Denis Johnson, Jesus’ Son (New York: Picador, 2009), 53.

  McInnes isn’t feeling too good today… Ibid., 37.

  The sky was torn away… Ibid., 66.

  When Johnson arrived in Iowa City as a college freshman in the fall of 1967… These details about Johnson’s freshman year are from a letter he wrote to his parents, Vera Childress and Alfred Johnson, September 20, 1967, Denis Johnson Papers, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin.

  Boy, I tried all day to get you out of jail… Peg [last name unknown.] Greeting card to Denis Johnson, November 1967, Denis Johnson Papers, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin.

  I kissed her fully… Johnson, Jesus’ Son, 93.

  diamonds were being incinerated in there… Ibid., 9.

  And you, you ridiculous people… Ibid., 10.

  Because we all believed we were tragic… Ibid., 32.

  Whisky and ink… These are the fluids John Berryman needs… Jane Howard, “Whisky and Ink, Whisky and Ink,” Life Magazine, July 21, 1967, 68.

  I am, outside… John Berryman, “Dream Song 46,” The Dream Songs (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969).

  Are you radioactive, pal?… John Berryman, “Dream Song 51,” The Dream Songs.

  Hey, out there!—assistant professors, full, / associates,—instructors—others… John Berryman, “Dream Song 35,” The Dream Songs.

  whole fucking life out in the weather… Deneen Peckinpah to John Berryman, July 8, 1970, John Berryman Papers, University of Minnesota.

  At present, the figure is mountainous… James Shea to John Berryman, September 1954, John Berryman Papers, University of Minnesota.

  The day Berryman showed up in Iowa, he fell down a flight of stairs… See Laing, The Trip to Echo Spring: On Writers and Drinking, 225.

  Mr. Berryman often called me… Bette Schissel, qtd. in Haffenden, The Life of John Berryman, 283.

  Hunger was constitutional with him… John Berryman, “Dream Song 311,” The Dream Songs.

  I, who longed for her love… Jill Berryman to John Berryman, qtd. in Haffenden, The Life of John Berryman, 9.

  I have the authority of suffering… Haffenden, The Life of John Berryman, 149.

  in violent temper & razor sensibility… Ibid., 154–55.

  I would not worry… about an analogy to Rilke… James Shea to John Berryman, January 19, 1954, John Berryman Papers, University of Minnesota.

  Inspiration contained a death threat… Saul Bellow, “Introduction,” John Berryman, Recovery (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1973), xii.

  With your work… I often have the feeling that yr poems are the light… Deneen Peckinpah to John Berryman, July 8, 1970, John Berryman Papers, University of Minnesota.

  Something can (has) been said for sobriety… John Berryman, “Dream Song 57,” The Dream Songs.

  nihilistic and sentimental idea of ‘the interesting’… Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor (1978; repr., New York: Picador, 2001), 31, 26, 28.

  see the truth, the simplicity, and the primitive emotions once more… Patricia Highsmith qtd. in Olivia Laing, “‘Every hour a glass of wine’—The Female Writers Who Drank,” The Guardian, June 13, 2014.

  A woman could not know the perils… Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano (New York: Reynal and Hitchcock, 1945), 108.

  I will not drink… Elizabeth Bishop, One Art: Letters, ed. Robert Giroux (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995), 210–11.

  Please just don’t… scold me… Ibid., 600.

  Maybe Jane Bowles understood something… Negar Azimi, “The Madness of Queen Jane,” The New Yorker, June 12, 2014.

  Maybe Marguerite Duras understood something… These pieces of Duras’s story are from Edmund White’s “In Love with Duras,” New York Review of Books, June 26, 2008. As White writes, “Then [Duras and her companion Yann Andréa] would start uncorking cheap Bordeaux and she’d drink two glasses, vomit, then continue on till she’d drunk as many as nine liters and would pass out.” Nine liters translates to twelve bottles, and is well over the amount generally considered lethal, so it’s most likely that White is offering a tall-tale version of Duras and her drinking—but regardless, she was drinking enough to incapacitate herself daily.

  When a woman drinks… Marguerite Duras, Practicalities (London: William Collins Sons, 1990), 17.

  Intoxication in a woman was thought to signal a failure of contr
ol… Sherry H. Stewart, Dubravka Gavric, and Pamela Collins, “Women, Girls, and Alcohol,” Women and Addiction: A Comprehensive Handbook (New York: The Guilford Press, 2009), 342.

  I’ve escaped… A door has opened and let me out into the sun… Jean Rhys, Smile Please: An Unfinished Autobiography (New York: Harper & Row, 1979), 142.

  Even though they were young and poor… Details about Rhys’s life in Paris in late 1919 from Carole Angier’s Jean Rhys: Life and Work (New York: Little, Brown, 1991), 107–13.

  Paris tells you to forget, forget, let yourself go… Jean Rhys, After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie, in The Complete Novels (New York: W. W. Norton, 1985), 91.

  I was never a good mother… Angier, Jean Rhys: Life and Work, 113.

  This damned baby, poor thing, has gone a strange colour… Qtd. in ibid., 112.

  He was dying… Jean Rhys, Smile Please, 119.

  I know about myself… Jean Rhys, Good Morning, Midnight, in The Complete Novels (New York: W. W. Norton, 1985). Qtd. in Angier, Jean Rhys: Life and Work, 378.

  struggle with life… the way a sleeper struggles… Mary Cantwell, “Conversation with Jean Rhys, ‘the Best Living English Novelist,’” Mademoiselle, October 1974.

  It was astonishing how significant… Jean Rhys, Quartet, in The Complete Novels (New York: W. W. Norton, 1985), 130.

  When you were drunk… you could imagine that it was the sea… Rhys, After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie, in The Complete Novels, 241.

  I must get drunk tonight… Rhys, Quartet, in The Complete Novels, 217.

  the bright idea of drinking myself to death… Jean Rhys, Good Morning, Midnight, in The Complete Novels, 369.

  Sometimes I’m just as unhappy as you are… Ibid., 347.

  You said that if you drink too much you cry… Ibid., 449.

  It was bad policy to say that you were lonely… Rhys, Smile Please, 94.