The Recovering Quotes

“Every addiction story wants a villain. But America has never been able to decide whether addicts are victims or criminals, whether addiction is an illness or a crime. So we relieve the pressure of cognitive dissonance with various provisions of psychic labor - some addicts got pitied, others get blamed - that keep overlapping and evolving to suit our purposes: Alcoholics are tortured geniuses. Drug addicts are deviant zombies. Male drunks are thrilling. Female drunks are bad moms. White addicts get their suffering witnessed. Addicts of color get punished. Celebrity addicts get posh rehab with equine therapy. Poor addicts get hard time. Someone carrying crack gets five years in prison, while someone driving drunk gets a night in jail, even though drunk driving kills more people every year than cocaine. In her seminal account of mass incarceration, The New Jim Crow, legal scholar Michelle Alexander points out that many of these biases tell a much larger story about 'who is viewed as disposable - someone to be purged from the body politic - and who is not.' They aren't incidental discrepancies - between black and white addicts, drinkers and drug users - but casualties of our need to vilify some people under the guise of protecting others.”
― Leslie Jamison, The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath

“My loneliness was a full-time job.”
― Leslie Jamison, The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath

“I am precisely the kind of nice upper-middle-class white girl whose relationship to substances has been treated as benign or pitiable - a cause for concern, or a shrug, rather than punishment. No one has ever called me a leper or a psychopath. No doctor has ever pointed a gun at me. No cop has ever shot me at an intersection while I was reaching for my wallet, for that matter, or even pulled me over for drunk driving, something I've done more times than I could count. My skin is the right color to permit my intoxication. When it comes to addiction, the abstraction of privilege is ultimately a question of what type of story gets told about your body: Do you need to be shielded from harm, or prevented from causing it? My body has been understood as something to be protected, rather than something to be protected from.”
― Leslie Jamison, The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath

“All my life I had believed — at first unwittingly, then explicitly — that I had to earn affection and love by being interesting, and so I had frantically tried to become really fucking interesting. Once I hit the right relationship, I planned to hurl my interestingness at it, like a final exam I’d spent my whole life studying for. This was it.”
― Leslie Jamison, The Recovering: Intoxication and its Aftermath

“If addiction stories run on the fuel of darkness—the hypnotic spiral of an ongoing, deepening crisis—then recovery is often seen as the narrative slack, the dull terrain of wellness, a tedious addendum to the riveting blaze. I wasn’t immune; I’d always been enthralled by stories of wreckage. But I wanted to know if stories about getting better could ever be as compelling as stories about falling apart.”
― Leslie Jamison, The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath

“You can reclaim some things once you’re ready; they’ve been waiting for you patiently. But some things are just lost for good.”
― Leslie Jamison, The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath

“Everything between us felt exhausted, brittle, depleted. The hot magma of conflict—with all its heat and surge—had cooled into hardened ridges of resentment, a quieter lunar landscape.”
― Leslie Jamison, The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath

“It seems there are two kinds of American writers. Those who drink, and those who used to.”
― Leslie Jamison, The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath

“Though I saw us living in binary--Dave wanted to be free, and I wanted to be certain--in truth we were asking so many of the same questions: what it meant to let your edges dissolve, to be surprised, to touch some dream or being larger than yourself.”
― Leslie Jamison, The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath

“Nights out turned into endless calculations: How many glasses of wine has each person at this table had? What's the most of anyone? How much can I take, of what's left, without taking too much? How many people can I pour for, and how much can I pour for them, and still have enough left to pour for myself? How long until the waiter comes back and how likely is it someone else will ask him for another bottle?”
― Leslie Jamison, The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath

“There was a little voice in me that considered the possibility that perhaps there were people who didn't spend hours every day trying to decide if their desperate desire to drink had preceded recovery meetings or been created by them. But it irritated me, that voice. I tried not to listen to it.”
― Leslie Jamison, The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath

“Certain parts of Peter began to repel me: his insecurities about our relationship and about himself, his hunger for my reassurance. These parts of him echoed the parts of me that had been hungry for reassurance all my life; that was probably why they disgusted me. But I couldn't see that then. 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.”
― Leslie Jamison, The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath

“the whole thing ends in capital letters and exclamation points: “WET BRAIN. INSTITUTIONS. DEATH!!!”
― Leslie Jamison, The Recovering: Intoxication and its Aftermath

“When does ordinary craving become pathology? Now I think: When it becomes tyrannical enough to summon shame. When it stops constituting the self, and begins to construe it as lack.”
― Leslie Jamison, The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath

“There’s no objective metric for how much brilliance might be required to redeem a lifetime of damage—and no ratio that justifies the conversion. Whatever beauty comes from pain can’t usually be traded back for happiness.”
― Leslie Jamison, The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath

“any self is always plural.”
― Leslie Jamison, The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath

“We weren’t the first people who’d gotten drunk in Iowa. We knew that. The myths of Iowa City drinking ran like subterranean rivers beneath the drinking we were doing. They surged with dreamlike tales of dysfunction: Raymond Carver and John Cheever tire-squealing through early-morning grocery-store parking lots to restock their liquor stash; John Berryman opening bar tabs on Dubuque Street and ranting about Whitman till dawn, playing chess”
― Leslie Jamison, The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath

“and”
― Leslie Jamison, The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath

“for no earthly reason: because because.”
― Leslie Jamison, The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath

“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. It’s nothing”
― Leslie Jamison, The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath

“Winter kept going; we kept drinking. Then it was spring. We kept drinking then too.”
― Leslie Jamison, The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath

“Trying to know him entirely was like trying to pick up a thousand grains of rice scattered across the sidewalk.”
― Leslie Jamison, The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath

“Rhys once wrote in her journal. “I wanted to be loved and I wanted to be always alone.”
― Leslie Jamison, The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath

“I wanted nothing more than to be absent from my own life.”
― Leslie Jamison, The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath

“Dave’s ghost was everywhere: eating pea-shoot risotto, talking to the woman behind the bar. I was even nostalgic for the things I hadn’t been able to stand.”
― Leslie Jamison, The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath

“It was hard to explain the almost in our love—to myself or anyone—how consuming it was, that sense of being almost able to make it work. His mind was the mind I most wanted to ask every question.”
― Leslie Jamison, The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath

“Burroughs doesn't want to be broken into explanations and reassembled into well-being. He wants to stand behind his subtitle: Unredeemed. The syllogisms of cause and effect dangle the prospect of transformation, but he's not interested in that kind of redemption.”
― Leslie Jamison, The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath

“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.”
― Leslie Jamison, The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath