The Recovering: Intoxication and its Aftermath

Paperback / softback

Main Details

Title The Recovering: Intoxication and its Aftermath
Authors and Contributors      By (author) Leslie Jamison
Physical Properties
Format:Paperback / softback
Pages:272
Dimensions(mm): Height 198,Width 129
Category/GenreLiterary essays
Coping with drug and alcohol abuse
ISBN/Barcode 9781783781539
ClassificationsDewey:362.292
Audience
General

Publishing Details

Publisher Granta Books
Imprint Granta Books
Publication Date 3 January 2019
Publication Country United Kingdom

Description

Addiction is seemingly inexplicable. From the outside, it can look like wilful, arrogant self-destruction; from the inside, it can feel as inevitable and insistent as a heartbeat. It is possible to describe, but hard to explore. Yet in The Recovering, Leslie Jamison draws on her own life and the lives of addicts of extraordinary talent - John Cheever, John Berryman, Jean Rhys and Amy Winehouse among them - to take us inside the experience of addiction, exposing the contours, edges and wholes of an intoxicated life. Part memoir, part group biography, part literary history and part definitive analysis of cultural and social considerations of addiction, The Recovering is a significant moment in the history of post-war narrative non-fiction.

Author Biography

Leslie Jamison grew up in Los Angeles. Educated at Harvard College and the Iowa Writers' Workshop, she has also worked as an innkeeper in California, a schoolteacher in Nicaragua, and an office temp in Manhattan. She is the New York Times bestselling author of The Recovering and The Empathy Exams, as well as a novel, The Gin Closet. Her work has appeared in Harper's, The Atlantic, Oxford American, Virginia Quarterly Review, and the New York Times Magazine, where she is a contributing writer. She directs the graduate nonfiction program at Columbia University