The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath

by Leslie Jamison

know what will happen if I drink,” another sober alcoholic said. “I don’t know what will happen if I don’t.”

Contract logic justifies all kinds of labor, and makes all kinds of promises—If I do x, I’ll get y—but anyone who lives by contract logic for long enough is eventually betrayed by

The truest thing I can say of Carver’s sober poetry is that I’ve joined it there: A house where no one / was home, no one coming back, / and all I could drink. Those lines resonated so much they felt like a meeting, as if I were sitting on a folding chair in some church basement—listening to Carver’s voice deliver the news that it might be possible, someday, to want more than that.

It takes me so long to process certain things. How similar stories are. Jim taking his family to the airport not going on vacstion with them and going back home to drink in peace for a week.

It’s about adjusting our vision. Johnny Perez, a formerly incarcerated man now working as a criminal justice reformer, puts it like this: “If we see people as people, then we’ll treat people as people. Period.”