Leslie Jamison, "The Recovering" (w/ Jamie Quatro)

Leslie Jamison disucsses her book, "The Recovering", at Politics and Prose on 4/4/18.

Jamison’s comprehensive study of recovery from addiction is an antidote to the romantic myth of the alcoholic artist. Drawing on her own experience, those of residents of a communal rehab house, and the stories of writers and musicians such as Raymond Carver, Denis Johnson, David Foster Wallace, and Billie Holiday, Jamison both surveys the history of the American recovery movement and constructs a new kind of recovery narrative. Writing with the sharp, lucid prose and keen insight that made The Empathy Exams so rewarding, Jamison, whose novel The Gin Closet portrays an unsuccessful recovering alcoholic, investigates what we want and need from this literature and shows that recovery can be as compelling to read about as the demons. Jamison is in conversation with Jamie Quatro, contributing editor at Oxford American and author, most recently, of Fire Sermon.

Leslie Jamison is the author of the essay collection The Empathy Exams, a New York Times bestseller, and the novel The Gin Closet, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Her work has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Harper's, and the Oxford American, among others, and she is a columnist for the New York Times Book Review. She teaches at Columbia University and lives in Brooklyn with her family.

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Produced by Tom Warren