The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath

by Leslie Jamison

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.

Back then, I was too busy imagining Carver falling asleep past dawn with polka-dot burns on his hands and a stack of heartbroken pages in his lap, a diplomat from the bleakest reaches of his own wrecked life.

“You just got a hundred times more interesting,” he said, and I tried to divide myself by a hundred, right there in front of him, to figure out what I’d been before.

When he told me, “Back there, I was in love with every fucking word coming out of your mouth,” it came as the confirmation of a hunch. I’d always suspected love came as a reward for saying the right things.

Long ago, I had learned that to become a writer I had to resist clichés at all costs. It was such accepted dogma that I’d never wondered why it was true.

He taught me the notion of love bestowed stam, as they said in Hebrew, for no earthly reason: because because.

a black steeple against the sky, with only its basement glowing underneath, as if a little bit of yolky light had spilled under the church and gathered into a puddle.

It was writing that was literally beyond me, insofar as it was often beyond my control: I couldn’t shape what people said, or how they said it. This made the world feel infinite, as if it had suddenly arrived—when of course it had been there the whole time.

Hartford seemed like the right landscape for these daydreams because of its grim skyscrapers and its unglamorous insurance companies, its resistance to redemption arcs.

I wanted to find diner waitresses who would remind me of Carver’s diner waitresses, with twin pulses of cynicism and hope running through the varicose veins beneath their panty hose.

In Iowa, in Kentucky, in Wyoming. In Los Angeles, in Boston, in Portland. I could say I wrote this book for all of them—for all of us—or I could say they wrote this book for me.