by Leslie Jamison ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 3, 2018
The bracing, unflinching, and beautifully resonant history of a writer’s addiction and hard-won reclamation.
An alcoholic’s confessional of life from buzzed adolescence to blitzed adulthood and the fellowship of recovery.
Educator, essayist, and novelist Jamison’s (The Empathy Exams: Essays, 2014, etc.) introduction to the alluring crackle of alcohol occurred innocently in her early teens, but her messy descent into full-blown addiction began years later with her first blackout. In her early 20s she began drinking daily to blunt chronic shyness and ease relationship woes while getting her master’s degree at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. There, the author found “drunken dysfunction appealing” and identified with accomplished writers whose creative genius managed to function notably beneath the blurry haze of intoxication, something she dubs the “whiskey-and-ink mythology.” Throughout, the author references historical literary greats who were alcoholics, including Elizabeth Bishop, John Berryman, Raymond Carver, Jean Rhys, and Charles Jackson, among others. Jamison examines the transformative patterns of addiction and how these authors, within their own bodies of work, attempted to “make some sense of the sadness that consumed” them. Saturated with unbridled honesty, her riveting chronicle expectedly slopes downward, as the author notes how she once believed that “passing out was no longer the price but the point.” After an abortion and persistent heart arrhythmias, Jamison eventually spiraled into the bleak desolation of rock-bottom alcoholism. Her ensuing heartbreaking attempts at rehabilitation ebbed and flowed. She relapsed after desperately missing the sensation of being drunk (“like having a candle lit inside you”), yet she also acknowledged that sobriety would be the only way to rediscover happiness and remain alive. Attending meetings, sharing her stories, and working the steps of Alcoholics Anonymous ushered the author into a new sober reality. Throughout Jamison’s somber yet earnestly revelatory narrative, she remains cogent and true to her dual commitment to sobriety and to author a unique memoir “that was honest about the grit and bliss and tedium of learning to live this way—in chorus, without the numbing privacy of getting drunk.”
The bracing, unflinching, and beautifully resonant history of a writer’s addiction and hard-won reclamation.Pub Date: April 3, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-25961-3
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 21, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
Share your opinion of this book
More by Rebecca Godfrey
BOOK REVIEW
by Rebecca Godfrey with Leslie Jamison
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
More About This Book
PROFILES
by Joan Didion ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 19, 2005
A potent depiction of grief, but also a book lacking the originality and acerbic prose that distinguished Didion’s earlier...
Awards & Accolades
National Book Award Winner
Pulitzer Prize Finalist
National Book Critics Circle Finalist
A moving record of Didion’s effort to survive the death of her husband and the near-fatal illness of her only daughter.
In late December 2003, Didion (Where I Was From, 2003, etc.) saw her daughter, Quintana Roo Dunne, hospitalized with a severe case of pneumonia, the lingering effects of which would threaten the young woman’s life for several months to come. As her daughter struggled in a New York ICU, Didion’s husband, John Gregory Dunne, suffered a massive heart attack and died on the night of December 30, 2003. For 40 years, Didion and Dunne shared their lives and work in a marriage of remarkable intimacy and endurance. In the wake of Dunne’s death, Didion found herself unable to accept her loss. By “magical thinking,” Didion refers to the ruses of self-deception through which the bereaved seek to shield themselves from grief—being unwilling, for example, to donate a dead husband’s clothes because of the tacit awareness that it would mean acknowledging his final departure. As a poignant and ultimately doomed effort to deny reality through fiction, that magical thinking has much in common with the delusions Didion has chronicled in her several previous collections of essays. But perhaps because it is a work of such intense personal emotion, this memoir lacks the mordant bite of her earlier work. In the classics Slouching Toward Bethlehem (1968) and The White Album (1979), Didion linked her personal anxieties to her withering dissection of a misguided culture prey to its own self-gratifying fantasies. This latest work concentrates almost entirely on the author’s personal suffering and confusion—even her husband and daughter make but fleeting appearances—without connecting them to the larger public delusions that have been her special terrain.
A potent depiction of grief, but also a book lacking the originality and acerbic prose that distinguished Didion’s earlier writing.Pub Date: Oct. 19, 2005
ISBN: 1-4000-4314-X
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2005
Share your opinion of this book
More by Joan Didion
BOOK REVIEW
by Joan Didion
BOOK REVIEW
by Joan Didion
BOOK REVIEW
by Joan Didion
More About This Book
IN THE NEWS
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
by Joy Harjo ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 9, 2012
A unique, incandescent memoir.
A lyrical, soul-stirring memoir about how an acclaimed Native American poet and musician came to embrace “the spirit of poetry.”
For Harjo, life did not begin at birth. She came into the world as an already-living spirit with the goal to release “the voices, songs, and stories” she carried with her from the “ancestor realm.” On Earth, she was the daughter of a half-Cherokee mother and a Creek father who made their home in Tulsa, Okla. Her father's alcoholism and volcanic temper eventually drove Harjo's mother and her children out of the family home. At first, the man who became the author’s stepfather “sang songs and smiled with his eyes,” but he soon revealed himself to be abusive and controlling. Harjo's primary way of escaping “the darkness that plagued the house and our family” was through drawing and music, two interests that allowed her to leave Oklahoma and pursue her high school education at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe. Interaction with her classmates enlightened her to the fact that modern Native American culture and history had been shaped by “colonization and dehumanization.” An education and raised consciousness, however, did not spare Harjo from the hardships of teen pregnancy, poverty and a failed first marriage, but hard work and luck gained her admittance to the University of New Mexico, where she met a man whose “poetry opened one of the doors in my heart that had been closed since childhood.” But his hard-drinking ways wrecked their marriage and nearly destroyed Harjo. Faced with the choice of submitting to despair or becoming “crazy brave,” she found the courage to reclaim a lost spirituality as well as the “intricate and metaphorical language of my ancestors.”
A unique, incandescent memoir.Pub Date: July 9, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-393-07346-1
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: April 29, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2012
Share your opinion of this book
More by Joy Harjo
BOOK REVIEW
by Joy Harjo
BOOK REVIEW
by Joy Harjo ; illustrated by Adriana M. Garcia
BOOK REVIEW
by Joy Harjo ; illustrated by Michaela Goade
More About This Book
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Hey there, book lover.
We’re glad you found a book that interests you!
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Trouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Trouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Don’t fret. We’ll find you.