The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath

by Leslie Jamison

The narrative doesn’t just insist on the moment as anticlimactic; it insists that this anticlimax has still been meaningful.

Your story is probably pretty ordinary. This doesn’t mean it can’t be useful.

“I want a poem I can grow old in. I want a poem I can die in.”

I wanted a story I could get sober in.

I’d come to believe that life happened every hour, every minute; that it wasn’t made of dramatic climaxes so much as quiet effort and continuous presence. But

“what he called the ‘alcoholocaust’ of his life, and the way that drinking had affected his art.”

Whatever it was, I needed to believe in something stronger than my willpower. This willpower was a fine-tuned machine, fierce and humming, and it had done plenty of things—gotten me straight A’s, gotten my papers written, gotten me through cross-country training runs—but when I’d applied it to drinking, the only thing I felt was that I was turning my life into a small, joyless clenched fist. The

Whenever someone shared, you had to look at her—so that if she ever locked eyes with you, you could give what she was saying a place to land.

because I’ve often had it myself: this hunger for a story larger than my own, with taller buildings and sharper knives.

Something about desire itself, its naked and unartful articulation, had started to seem beautiful.

The word itself—“cliché”—derives from the sound that printing plates made when they were cast from movable type. Some phrases were used often enough that it made sense to cast the whole phrase in metal, rather than having to create an arrangement of individual letters. It was about utility. You didn’t have to remake the entire plate each time.

Now he was presenting them in hopes that they might be useful to the rest of us—less like a sermon, more like a song.

People who were always late had to spend a week waking everyone up at seven in the morning. They had to be first in line at every meal, and no one got any food until they showed up.

Patients who hated themselves had to look into a mirror and figure out what they liked.

animals: “Once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.”

The Toys that became Real were the ones that looked most broken.

they knew that having fun without booze was something you had to learn how to do, like developin...

Craig said if something haunted you, you should talk about it three times: The first time would be almost unbearable, and the second time would still be pretty bad, but by the third time you’d finally be able to say it without breaking down entirely.

William Burroughs’s novel The Wild Boys, described the addict-author as someone struggling to escape an “infatuation with the storeroom of his own mind.”

“All stream of consciousness writing, in order to rise above the terrible fascination with itself, has to find something other than itself to love.” David

“You’re special—it’s OK,” he wrote to a friend, “but so’s the guy across the table who’s raising two kids sober and rebuilding a ’73 Mustang. It’s a magical thing with 4,000,000,000 forms. It kind of takes your breath away.”

But it’s the only language that feels accurate, holding recovery the way a sail holds the air—not made of wind, only moved by it.

wriggling out of the tight swaddling of self-awareness.

EFD was our catchphrase for necessary daily commitments: Every Fucking Day.

But this was something that kept happening in sobriety, understanding that everyone—your boss, your bank teller, your baker, even your partner—was waking up every fucking day and dealing with shit you couldn’t even imagine.

“I’m trying to figure out how to spin my drinking so I can eventually do it again.”

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.

EVERYTHING I’VE EVER LET GO OF HAD CLAW MARKS ON IT.

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.

but in those quiet moments when characters have fallen away from each other and don’t know how to come together again. These silences are the hollow spaces that booze wants to fill.

He wanted to stand behind stories that didn’t end on irony, stories awkward and grasping enough to hold the longings of sobriety, with its strange permissions and unexpected bonds.

Desire and regret still glowed fiercely in that room, still hot to the touch.

It reminded me of how I’d imagined sobriety: one dull evening after another, a mountain of dried-up tea bags—no single night impossible, their infinite horizon unthinkable. We’re all drama queens, even in our sobriety: My dry nights were gunshot wounds.

incontestable. Of course my pain was real, just like everyone’s. Of course it wasn’t quite like anyone’s, just like everyone’s.

Back in New Haven we were kinder with each other, gentler, but also robotic somehow; when we came back home to each other at the end of the day, it was as if we were both reaching for bodies that weren’t quite there.

but I kept seeing the story of rebirth because it was the story I wanted to see: people who were starting again, who were lonely and free.

Part of me craved the relief of a clean beginning—a pure loss, then rebuilding on my own.

industry was the theater of his recovery. Good intentions turned into profit, and sobriety made the alchemy possible.

We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” Joan Didion wrote, and at first I took her words as gospel: Stories help us survive!

“If you carve me out,” she wondered, “will there be enough here to be a person?”

“How different it would be with love.” Years later she told her daughter that Charles was the best thing that had ever happened to her. This was the trick of living, that both feelings could be true at once.

For a simple reason: Stability was when he felt closest to God.

But he’d never been repulsed by my need, only tired of the ways I constantly forgot how much he’d given me.

Emotion was my compulsion and obsession, the organ through which I processed the world—turning it to praise and harm like the liver turns ethyl alcohol to acetaldehyde and acid. I could do better.

Contract logic involved its own tyrannical authorial impulse—I will write the script, and God will make it come true—but sobriety didn’t dutifully deliver on its end of the contracts I’d written. It did the opposite: offered relief from my own plotline.

Recovery means giving what you need yourself, not what you already possess. Your own fragility isn’t a liability but a gift. You bump suicide scars with a stranger. You don’t kick the drunk out of a meeting. You find a way to let him stay in the room.

It wasn’t just that he was afraid I’d leave him, it was that he had begun to understand the ways fear could rearrange you, could fill you with disarming and overwhelming kinds of longing—to know another person, to gather all their pieces, to read their secret thoughts.

After waking up, there is always the question of what comes next—what life might lie beyond the life you’ve left behind.

She wasn’t just a legend but also a woman who couldn’t walk straight, a woman on a bed who wasn’t sleeping but gone. When she died, her blood alcohol content was 0.4 percent, a level well above deadly. The coroner ruled it “death by misadventure.”

Life teaches you, really, how to live it, if you live long enough.”