The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath

by Leslie Jamison

In recovery, I found a community that resisted what I’d always been told about stories—that they had to be unique—suggesting instead that a story was most useful when it wasn’t unique at all, when it understood itself as something that had been lived before and would be lived again. Our stories were valuable because of this redundancy, not despite it. Originality wasn’t the ideal, and beauty wasn’t the point.

But I wanted to know if stories about getting better could ever be as compelling as stories about falling apart. I needed to believe they could.

Someone had once told me cloves had little bits of glass in them, and I always pictured shards glittering through the smoky chambers of my lungs.

blood. It was a pain I could claim, because it was physical and irrefutable, even if I was always ashamed of it for being voluntary.

I pictured Carver in terms of hijinks and love triangles, petty theft and seductions, ash falling unnoticed from the tip of his cigarette as he sat engrossed at his typewriter, riding the comet’s tail of a bender into its ruthless wisdom. Whatever psychic ledges his long drunks had taken him to, whatever voids he had glimpsed from those perches, I pictured him deftly smuggling that desperation into the quiet betrayals and pregnant pauses of his fiction. One of Carver’s friends put it like this: “Ray was our designated Dylan Thomas, I think—our contact with the courage to face all possible darkness and survive.”

“It was really difficult even to look at him,” one acquaintance said, “the booze and the cigarettes were so much there that they seemed like another person with us in the room.”

and I tried to divide myself by a hundred, right there in front of him, to figure out what I’d been before.

exhausting. I had no stomach for that murky state that came between being strangers and being passionately committed for the rest of our lives—in other words, dating.

I needed it all, right away: More. Again. Forever.

I’d always suspected love came as a reward for saying the right things.

I only worried I would never mean as much to him as she had.

If you needed to drink that much, you had to hurt, and drinking and writing were two different responses to that same molten pain. You could numb it, or else grant it a voice.

My fascination owed a debt to what Susan Sontag calls the “nihilistic and sentimental idea of ‘the interesting.’” In Illness as Metaphor, Sontag describes the nineteenth-century idea that if you were ill, you were also “more conscious, more complex psychologically.” Illness became an “interior décor of the body,” while health was considered “banal, even vulgar.”

It was as if the bright surfaces of the world were all false, and the desperate drunk space underground was where the truth lived.

“When a woman drinks,” she wrote, “it’s as if an animal were drinking, or a child.”

A woman escaping into drink was usually a woman failing to fulfill her duties to home and family.

back toward herself. Rhys once wrote that she learned early that “it was bad policy to say that you were lonely or unhappy,” and Sasha is an explosion of bad policy.

That was the truth of me: not the skinny girl who never ate but that girl with dirty fingers, leaning into the trash.

Before I spoke, I ran every possible comment through a wash cycle in my mind—scrubbing its fabric and wringing it dry, getting rid of its dirt—trying to make it good enough to say aloud.

This journal was the truth of me: I wanted to spend every single moment of my life eating everything. The journal that recorded what I actually ate was just a mask—

I had two longings and one was fighting the other,” Rhys once wrote in her journal. “I wanted to be loved and I wanted to be always alone.”

He loved when I was drunk, he told me once, because I got as stupid as everyone else. He liked when I said simple things.

Things got dark, and you wrote from that darkness. Heartbreak could become the beginning of a career.

In vino veritas was one of the most appealing promises of drinking: that it wasn’t degradation but illumination, that it wasn’t obscuring truth but unveiling it. If that was true, then my truth was passing out partway through the romantic comedies I watched alone at night, before the booze took me under.

By contrast, with little to complain about, I was animated by self-pity like toxic electricity.

The glass had started to seem like little more than a contrivance.

sensed there was an animal in me—beneath all that obedient living—some part of me that wanted to do what she had done: start fights, make scenes, fall apart.

“He would have had to leave behind a lot of his own work. He would have had to leave his friends who had helped him live off his pain for twenty years.”

its insistence on the horrors of drinking, rubbed bare of their gloss, and its conviction that these horrors weren’t the engine of creativity but its straitjacket.

“for the sake of young kids whose whole life will be ruined because they are sent to jail instead of a hospital.”

candlelight that wavered like a voice about to break into crying.

His eyes were blue and crystalline, adamant, their beauty piercing and skeptical. It felt like victory to be admired by him. He was one of the most intelligent people I’d ever met. His mind was precise and relentless, his phrases like scrimshaw, whittled to intricate perfection.

We were like two twenty-four-hour archeological digs happening side by side—just when you thought we’d pause for lunch, we went deeper.

Booze let me live inside moments without the endless chatter of my own self-conscious annotation. It was like finally going on vacation somewhere beautiful

The more you start to need a thing, whether it’s a man or a bottle of wine, the more you are unwittingly—reflexively, implicitly—convincing yourself you’re not enough without it.

Years later, I interviewed a clinician who described addiction as a “narrowing of repertoire.” For me, that meant my whole life contracting around booze: not just the hours I spent drinking, but the hours I spent anticipating drinking, regretting drinking, apologizing for drinking, figuring out when and how to drink again.

suddenly: to feel relief or euphoria or the dulling of anxiety, to feel different, to feel the world made strange, more spellbinding or simply more possible.

The compulsion to use overrides normal survival behaviors like seeking food, shelter, and mating. It’s the narrowing again: this, only this.

But we’re all dependent people, literally all of us—anyone human. So what

But there were other kinds of intimacy I was scared of: tension, tedium, familiarity.

I could only see that he’d gotten the same lip balm I’d gotten; he hadn’t even been able to choose his own brand.

We were made fools of by the macaws, who mated for life. They looked so impossibly regal, streaking twin arcs of color across the sky.

When I turned my head, the motion was slow enough to hold the thought I am turning my head, as if the words were rippling through my muscles. Things were easy and liquid. There was a worm living in my ankle, sure, but that was just one truth out of many truths.

It’s nothing I can blame on my drinking, but it came from the same place drinking came from.

I wanted to turn the plastic spigot on some box wine and eat six lemon bars and a slice of cake.

I couldn’t understand why you’d ever drink half of anything.

His mind was the mind I wanted filtering my world.

In recovery, years later, when someone described self-loathing as the flip side of narcissism, I almost laughed out loud at the stark truth of what she’d said. This black-and-white thinking, this all-or-nothing, it was cut from the same cloth. Being just a man among men, or a woman among women, with nothing extraordinary about your flaws or your mistakes—that was the hardest thing to accept.

When he was with her, he’d had a black eye from falling down drunk the night before. I got that. It made a lot more sense than taking half an hour to make a cocktail.

“Do you realize that while you’re battling against death, or whatever you imagine you’re doing, while what is mystical in you is being released, or whatever it is you imagine is being released, while you’re enjoying all this, do you realize what extraordinary allowances are being made for you by the world which has to cope with you?”