“Addiction Is A Hard Story to Tell”: On Leslie Jamison’s “The Recovering”

1. When Leslie Jamison went before the university board to present her dissertation topic, a dissertation that would form the basis of her new memoir/critical study The Recovering, one of the faculty members gave her a hard time. Jamison’s thesis posited a link between sobriety and creativity, delving into the post-addiction work of alcoholic writers like Raymond Carver and Charles Jackson, to show that the myths of the booze-addled genius are, at the least, severely overstated. But, as the professor’s […]

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