By Claire FallonOriginal Source: huffingtonpost.comOnce you feel the desperate urge to be drunk, Leslie Jamison meditates in The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath, the mode doesn’t matter so much.
“It could be boxed wine if that’s cheaper,” she told me as we stood in her Park Slope apartment. Her oldest brother, a liquor connoisseur who collects scotch, was struck by this as he read her new book; one of the first things he told her after reading it was that “it really made him realize how much he wasn’t an alcoholic.”
I’d just spent an hour sitting on her low, cat-scratched couch. Jamison stood nearby, bouncing her napping baby while we talked about the memoir weeks ahead of publication. The book, an amalgam of addiction memoir, literary criticism, biography and cultural history, grapples with alcoholism and rehabilitation in large part through the lens of her own experience.
Her brother’s comment seemed, I thought, an odd thing to say to...click here to continue reading
