The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath

by Leslie Jamison

It seems there are two kinds of American writers. Those who drink, and those who used to. You introduced me to the latter. Thanks, brother.”

but because we both put things inside our bodies to change how we felt.

Our stories are both stories about coming to depend on a substance—to crave it, seek it, use it—and I no longer want to live by the traditions that keep them apart.

If memory and longing were two radio dials tuned to the same frequency, then others were listening as well.

A friend of mine once observed that writing about yourself is “like trying to make a bed while you’re still in it,”

Tell yourself whatever you want, but nothing will ever yield as much as brokenness.

We lived well in the cinematic epic mode, and not so well in the mundane realities of daily life.

There was something in Dave I’d never find in anyone else. I might get other things, things I couldn’t even imagine, but I would never get him. That felt unbearable.

For Carver, loving rivers back to their source was a way of surrendering himself to something larger than he could properly understand—the palpable splendor and awe of the world itself.

“He’d known for a long time / they would die in separate lives and far from each other,” he wrote, “despite oaths exchanged when they were young.”

the one / you meant to love from the start.”

You can reclaim some things once you’re ready; they’ve been waiting for you patiently. But some things are just lost for good.

And did you get what / you wanted from this life, even so… And what did you want? / To call myself beloved, to feel myself / beloved on the earth. I

Behind a church in Iowa, a biker in leather said the journey was just beginning, and a single mother said she couldn’t imagine it continuing, and I heard them both, and the door was locked, and it did not stop us.

“If we see people as people, then we’ll treat people as people. Period.”