The Recovering

by Leslie Jamison

  You’re special—it’s OK… Wallace letter to Evan Wright, qtd. in D. T. Max, “D.F.W.’s Favorite Grammarian,” The New Yorker, December 11, 2013, 285.

  Her name is Gwen, and she’s an alcoholic… This section based on interviews conducted with Gwen, January 22, 2015, telephone, and March 10, 2015, in person.

  His name is Marcus, and he’s an alcoholic and an addict… Material in this section drawn from interviews with Marcus conducted July 28, 2015, telephone, and November 3, 2015, in person.

  How did you negotiate that anger?… National Public Radio, “Program Targets Rehab Help for Federal Inmates,” Morning Edition, September 27, 2006.

  Her name is Shirley, and she’s an alcoholic… Material in this section drawn from interviews conducted March 6, 2015, telephone; March 20, 2015, telephone; and August 10, 11, 12, in person.

  Remember that we deal with alcohol—cunning, baffling, powerful!…Alcoholics Anonymous, 58.

  What you really want is to stay just who you are and not drink… John Berryman, Recovery (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1973), 141.

  XII. SALVAGE

  stunted and complexly deformed… David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest (New York: Little, Brown, 1996), 744.

  grudging move toward maybe acknowledging… Ibid., 350.

  Serious AAs look like these weird combinations… Ibid., 357.

  humble, kind, helpful, tactful… Ibid. An addict in Infinite Jest named Poor Tony rides the Gray Line in the thick of withdrawal, shitting himself as invisible ants crawl up and down his arms. He wears red high-heels and old eyeliner, weeping in shame, with ghost ants catching his tears. At the top of that page, I wrote: The humane quality of this novel is that it makes us bear witness to utter degradation. It’s as if the form of the book itself makes us sit still and listen during some of the most difficult shares at a meeting.

  to lay responsibility for themselves… Wallace, Infinite Jest, 863.

  It’s a rough crowd… Wallace qtd. in D. T. Max, Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story (New York: Viking, 2012), 139.

  They listened because, in the last analysis… Wallace, “An Ex-Resident’s Story,” http://www.granadahouse.org/people/letters_from_our_alum.html.

  literary opportunity… Max, Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story, 140.

  “Heard in Meetings”… David Foster Wallace, handwritten note, David Foster Wallace Papers, University of Texas at Austin.

  single-entendre writing, writing that meant what it said… Max, Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story, 158.

  Recovery shifted Wallace’s whole notion of what writing could do, what purpose it might serve… For an astute discussion of the relationship between Wallace’s creativity and his life in recovery, see also critic Elaine Blair, “A New Brilliant Start,” New York Review of Books, December 6, 2012.

  An ironist in a Boston AA meeting is a witch in church… Wallace, Infinite Jest, 369.

  I don’t want to sound melodramatic here… Qtd. in “Note on the Texts,” Collected Stories, ed. William Stull and Maureen Carroll (New York: Library of America, 2009), 993. Perhaps it was the aversion to melodrama that came across so forcefully in Lish’s edits that made Carver self-conscious about becoming too “melodramatic” in his resistance to them.

  I’m serious, [they’re] intimately hooked up… Qtd. in “Note on the Texts,” 995.

  bleakness… “Note on the Texts,” 991. As Stull and Carroll note of Lish’s edits, “As [Lish] later said, what struck him in Carver’s writing was ‘a peculiar bleakness.’ To foreground that bleakness, he cut the stories radically, reducing plot, character development, and figurative language to a minimum.”

  he also pushed back against what he understood as the lurking threat of sentimentality… In “The Carver Chronicles,” the first journalistic account of Lish’s substantial editorial role in shaping Carver’s early work, D. T. Max made use of Carver’s archives at the Lilly Library, Indiana University. This article made the extent of the editorial changes public before the original versions were reprinted in full in the 2009 Collected Stories. Max describes Lish pushing back against “creeping sentimentality.” “The Carver Chronicles,” New York Times Magazine, August 9, 1998.

  I remember Ray’s bafflement at one particular suggestion… Tess Gallagher, “Interview,” in Collected Stories, ed. William Stull and Maureen Carroll (New York: Library of America, 2009).

  called his students to cancel class because he was too sick to teach… Details about Carver’s teaching near the end of his drinking from Carol Sklenicka, Raymond Carver: A Writer’s Life (New York: Scribner, 2009), 256 and 259.

  When he came back to Iowa City to give a reading before his first book came out… Ibid. The workshop director had to get on stage and tell him to stop, saying maybe he could come back again and read when he was sober. Certain dreams were coming true for Carver, but he was barely around to appreciate them. His body had shown up, but the rest of him couldn’t—and his body wouldn’t last much longer anyway. Ibid.

  If you want the truth, I’m prouder of that… Raymond Carver, interview by Mona Simpson and Lewis Buzbee, “The Art of Fiction No. 76,” Paris Review 88 (Summer 1983).

  no one else could ever love me in that way, that much… Carver, “Where Is Everyone?” Collected Stories, 765.

  Booze takes a lot of time and effort if you’re going to do a good job with it… Carver, “Gazebo,” Collected Stories, 237.

  When Carver first saw Lish’s versions, not just whittled but spiritually rearranged, he couldn’t stomach the thought of their publication… “My very sanity is on the line here,” he wrote to Lish. “All this is complicatedly, and maybe not so complicatedly, tied up with my feelings of worth and self-esteem since I quit drinking.” Carver to Gordon Lish, qtd. in “Note on the Texts,” Collected Stories, 993–94.

  unkindness and condescension of some of these stories… Michael Wood, “Stories Full of Edges and Silences,” New York Times Book Review, April 26, 1981.

  I don’t want to lose track, lose touch with the little human connections… Carver to Gordon Lish, qtd. in Sklenicka, Raymond Carver: A Writer’s Life, 362.

  It’s not clear why Carver allowed his stories to be published with the edits… The notes in the Library of America edition of Carver’s Collected Stories narrate the fraught editorial process that resulted in the published version of What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, including the letters Carver wrote to Lish, but the decisive phone call isn’t transcribed. When Lish described the process decades later in a Paris Review interview with critic Christian Lorentzen, he put it like this: “For all those years, Carver could not have been more enthusiastic, nor more complicit—or complacent.” Though Carver’s letters suggest more friction in the process, Lish certainly believes he deserves the credit for the amount of attention Carver’s work has received: “Had I not revised Carver, would he be paid the attention given him? Baloney!” (“The Art of Editing, No. 2,” Paris Review, Winter 2015).

  “It is about Scotty. It has to do with Scotty, yes”… Carver, “The Bath.” Collected Stories, 251. The story describes its characters communicating in minimal ways, with “the barest information, nothing that was not necessary.”

  warm cinnamon rolls just out of the oven, the icing still runny… They listened to him… Carver, “A Small, Good Thing,” Collected Stories, 830.

  stab[bing] at the eye with a length of blue silk thread… Carver, “After the Denim,” Collected Stories, 272.

  He and the hippie were in the same boat… [he felt] something stir inside him again, but it was not anger this time… Carver, “If It Please You,” Collected Stories, 860, 863.

  This time he was able to include the girl and the hippie in his prayers… Ibid., 863. This closing prayer is expansive in its reach, evoking not only “all of them” but also the end of James Joyce’s “The Dead”: snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead. Joyce’s story is also ab
out a man coming to terms with his marriage, and with the ways in which his marriage is haunted by mortality—not only his wife’s impending mortality, and his own, but also the death of her first love, Michael, and the presence of his abiding ghost.

  If you have a resentment you want to be free of… “Freedom From Bondage,” Alcoholics Anonymous, 552.

  the wet eyes of the sentimentalist betray his aversion to experience… his arid heart… James Baldwin, “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” Notes of a Native Son (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955), 14.

  Gordon, God’s truth, and I may as well say it out now… Carver to Gordon Lish, qtd. in “Note on the Texts,” 984.

  You gone risk vulnerability and discomfort and hug my ass… Wallace, Infinite Jest, 506.

  fucking up in sobriety… Ibid., 444.

  He uses his pinkie finger to mime the world’s smallest viola… Ibid., 835. The wraith is the ghost of James Incandenza, the filmmaker whose cartridge animates the entire novel, and whose suicide casts a long shadow over it.

  No one single instant of it was unendurable… Ibid., 860.

  Gately wanted to tell Tiny Ewell that he could totally fucking I.D.… Ibid., 815–16.

  Gately becomes a huge mute confessional booth… Gately is described in this capacity in ibid., 831.

  the sort of professional background where he’s used to trying to impress… Ibid., 367.

  at a lavish Commitment podium, like at an AA convention… Ibid., 858.

  readers who look to novels and novelists for instruction on how to lead their lives… Christian Lorentzen, “The Rewriting of David Foster Wallace,” Vulture, June 30, 2015.

  sometimes human beings have to just sit in one place and, like, hurt…Wallace, Infinite Jest, 203.

  Too simple?… Or just that simple?… Wallace, marginalia written in his copy of Alice Miller’s The Drama of the Gifted Child, qtd. in Maria Bustillo’s “Inside David Foster Wallace’s Private Self-Help Library,” The Awl, April 5, 2011.

  DR. BOB (Inching his chair closer): If I don’t drink, I’m a monster… Samuel Shem and Janet Surrey, Bill W and Dr. Bob (New York: Samuel French Inc., 1987). Play first staged at New Repertory Theater, Newton, Massachusetts. David Foster Wallace Papers, University of Texas at Austin.

  Hello, my name is Gabor, and I am a compulsive classical music shopper… Gabor Maté, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction (Toronto: Knopf Canada, 2008), 110.

  Describing the thousands of dollars he has compulsively spent on classical music… In addition to Maté’s account of his classical music addiction (In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts), see also his interview with Jeff Kaliss, “Losing Yourself in the Music: Confessions of a Classical Music Shopper,” San Francisco Classical Voice, January 29, 2013.

  the frantic self-soothing of overeaters or shopaholics… Maté, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts, 2. See also the interview on Maté’s website, http://drgabormate .com/topic/addiction/.

  Addiction attribution… Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Epidemics of the Will,” Tendencies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 132.

  When the American Psychiatric Association released the fifth edition of its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders… “Substance-Related and Addictive Disorders,” in American Psychiatric Association, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) (Washington: American Psychiatric Association, 2013).

  many scientists were afraid that its broadened criteria… For example, see the public statement about the DSM-5 by Thomas Inse that was released by the National Institute of Mental Health, http://www.nimh.nih.gov/about/director/2013/trans forming-diagnosis.shtml. See also: Christopher Lane, “The NIMH Withdraws Support for DSM-5,” Psychology Today, https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/side-effects/201305/the-nimh-withdraws-support-dsm-5; commentary on the DSM-5 from Stuart Gitlow, president of the ASAM (American Society for Addiction Medicine), http://www.drugfree.org/news-service/commentary-dsm-5-new -addiction-terminology-same-disease/; Gary Greenberg’s The Book of Woe: The Making of the DSM-5 and the Unmaking of Psychiatry (New York: Blue Rider Press, 2013); and the interview with Greenberg, “The Real Problems with Psychiatry,” The Atlantic, May, 2, 2013, http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/05/the -real-problems-with-psychiatry/275371/.

  It is not till many fixes pass that your desire is need… It was what I’d been born for, waiting for all my life… George Cain, Blueschild Baby (New York: McGraw Hill, 1970), 199.

  We tell ourselves stories in order to live… Joan Didion, “The White Album,” The White Album (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979).

  But one of the Seneca counselors, Madeline, said that Shirley needed to put her sobriety before everything else—kids, marriage, career… After the first time she spoke to Shirley on the phone, Madeline told Shirley to call her whenever she felt like taking a drink. If they could talk for ten minutes, Madeline promised, they could outlast the urge. Once, when Shirley called, Madeline said, “You know, Nixon’s not such a bad egg,” knowing it would get Shirley talking—and it worked, spurring Shirley into a half-hour rant. That got them past the ten-minute mark and then some.

  When Shirley showed up at Seneca, in 1973, she was its 269th guest… This material about Shirley’s stay at Seneca drawn from interviews with the author, as well as her pseudonymous Baltimore Sun piece: Barbara Lenmark, “An Alcoholic Housewife: What Happened to Her in 28 Days,” Baltimore Sun, November 18, 1973.

  It was absolutely honest, syllable for syllable… Charles Jackson to Warren Ambrose, March 1, 1954, Charles Jackson Papers, Dartmouth College.

  I keep dreaming of what a good and happy marriage… Rhoda Jackson to Frederick Jackson, 1951, Charles Jackson Papers, Dartmouth College.

  early AA newsletters listed loner meetings…The Group Secretary’s Handbook and Directory (New York: The Alcoholic Foundation, 1953). Center of Alcohol Studies, Rutgers University.

  We always say it’s not a successful tour… Annah Perch qtd. in Lisa W. Foderaro, “Alcoholics Anonymous Founder’s House Is a Self-Help Landmark,” New York Times, July 6, 2007.

  no time did I ever find a place… Marginal notes, “The Rolling Stone,” Alcoholics Anonymous original manuscript. Stepping Stones Foundation Archives.

  flatten[ed] him out… for the mindless… Jackson, “The Sleeping Brain,” qtd. in Blake Bailey, Farther and Wilder: The Lost Weekends and Literary Dreams of Charles Jackson (New York: Vintage, 2013), 349.

  apathy, spiritlessness, blank sobriety, and a vegetable health… Jackson qtd. in ibid., 348.

  Should I say the hell with it and return to my former indulgence… Ibid., 360.

  that he must tell an unqualified success story or not speak… C. H. Aharan, “Problems in Cooperation between AA and Other Treatment Programs,” speech delivered at the 35th Anniversary International Convention, Miami Beach, 1970, 9. Center of Alcohol Studies Archives, Rutgers University.

  XIII. RECKONING

  “The Hunter in the Forest”… All the quotations from “The Hunter in the Forest” are from a handwritten version of the story at the end of Berryman’s “Recovery” notebook. John Berryman Papers, University of Minnesota.

  choke a bit on the rock mythology… Steve Kandell, “Amy Winehouse: Rock Myth, Hard Reality,” Spin, July 25, 2011. Kandell has also been part of this mythology, of course, which was part of what he was acknowledging—he’d written a cover story about Winehouse for Spin in 2007, at the height of her fame.

  If you think dope is for kicks and for thrills… Holiday, Lady Sings the Blues, with William Dufty (New York: Doubleday, 1956), 212–3.

  This is so boring without drugs…Amy (dir. Asif Kapadia, 2015).

  She had the complete gift… Tony Bennett, qtd. in ibid.

  around collapsible tables looking very much like people stuck in a swamp… Denis Johnson, “Beverly Home,” Jesus’ Son (New York: Picador, 2009), 126.

  All these weirdos, and me getting a little better every day right in the midst of them… Ibid., 1
33.

  I had sobered up just in time to have a nervous breakdown… Johnson, “Beverly Home,” unpublished draft, Denis Johnson Papers, University of Texas at Austin.

  Johnson first tried to dry out in 1978 in his parents’ home in Tucson… Jesse McKinley, “A Prodigal Son Turned Novelist Turns Playwright,” New York Times, June 16, 2002.

  I was addicted to everything… Now I just drink a lot of coffee… Johnson qtd. in David Amsden, “Denis Johnson’s Second Stage,” New York Magazine, June 17, 2002.

  concerned about getting sober… typical of people who feel artistic… Ibid.

  Approval was something I craved more than drugs or alcohol… Johnson, “Beverly Home,” unpublished draft, Denis Johnson Papers, Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin.

  I want to thank you for your unfailing support and friendship… Unknown author to Denis Johnson, 1996, Denis Johnson Papers, Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin.

  We are the chain gang, the only female chain gang… See Hari, Chasing the Scream (New York: Bloomsbury, 2015), 104.

  If I had to design a system that was intended to keep people addicted… Maté qtd. in ibid., 166.

  dealing with addiction by chaining, by humiliating… Goulão qtd. in ibid., 237.

  Tent City was the brainchild of one of his protégés, Joe Arpaio… Tent City finally announced its closure in April 2017, and the process of closing the facility was due to be completed by the end of that year. See Fernanda Santos, “Outdoor Jail, a Vestige of Joe Arpaio’s Tenure, Is Closing,” New York Times, April 4, 2017.

  You got a good guy there… Arpaio qtd. in Hari, Chasing the Scream, 105.

  These people are in the same category as lepers… Anonymous Los Angeles Police Department officer, qtd. in Harry Anslinger and William Tompkins, The Traffic in Narcotics (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1953), 272.

  In 2009, at a prison twenty-two miles west of Tent City, one prisoner—Number 109416—was literally cooked alive in a cage in the middle of the desert… For Marcia Powell’s death, see Hari’s Chasing the Scream; also Stephen Lemons, “Marcia Powell’s Death Unavenged: County Attorney Passes on Prosecuting Prison Staff,” Phoenix New Times, September 1, 2010, in which Donna Hamm (from an advocacy group called Middle Ground Prison Reform) notes that Powell’s eyes “were as dry as parchment.”