Chasing the Muse … Stone Cold Sober! –
March 30, 2018 – Literature is full of books that glorify addiction, not so many about recovery. The novelist and essayist Leslie Jamison takes on sobriety in her new book “The Recovering” – her own sobriety and famous writers who came before her. She writes that at first, being sober felt like a specific moment from her childhood. At age 7, she told her mom she could make a better apple crumble topping. Her mom said, go for it.
LESLIE JAMISON: I made a disgusting concoction with too much butter and, for whatever reason, raw macaroni. And then too proud to admit I’d failed, I sat there eating the mixture in front of her, pretending that I loved it. Sobriety felt like that.
SHAPIRO: Her relationship with sobriety has changed since then. Jamison told me with this book, she wants to change the ways we think about creativity and recovery.
JAMISON: I was looking for examples of how sobriety could charge and energize creativity rather than killing it. So like a lot of young writers, I think I had internalized a certain mythology about drinking and writing that there was a kind of dark, moody, self-destructive temperament that sought out booze, sought out drugs, sought out intensity of experience in that way and turned it into beautiful art, that kind of suffering and dysfunction were what great art was made of.
