‘Why was life such a barren tundra if I wasn’t drinking?’

addiction recovery ebulletin leslie jamison memoir

MEDIA: Hot New Recovery Memoir –

April 22, 2018 – But its main focus is on her subsequent sobriety, achieved with the help of the 12-step programme, better known as Alcoholics Anonymous; eventually, she turns her narrative over to the voices of some fellow addicts. She is interested in the connection between storytelling, and both alcoholism and sobriety. As she writes early on: “Yearning is our most powerful narrative engine, and addiction is one of its dialects.” She first felt the buzz of alcohol at 13. She first drank in secret at 15. At a Harvard student initiation ceremony, she drank so much that all she remembers is waking up in her dorm room where whoever had brought her home had left a note that read: “Hope you’re OK.” And on, and on. Booze made her feel, she writes, as if it had plunged her into “a darkness that seemed like honesty … as if the bright surfaces of the world were all false and the desperate drunk space underground was where the truth lived.”