Read[H]er: "The Recovering: Intoxication and its Aftermath" by Leslie Jamison and "Drinking Games" by Sarah Levy

Unquiet Quitting

Quick: think of a character, author, or artist that is known for their drinking. Anyone leap to mind? Maybe Don Draper (or, in one horrifying scene, Freddy Rumson) from Mad Men or Dylan Thomas or Ernest Hemingway or Edgar Allen Poe or Dorothy Parker or Nick and Nora from The Thin Man movies or Billie Holiday or Barney from The Simpsons (or Homer himself). These two recovery memoirs—Drinking Games by Sarah Levy and The Recovering by Leslie Jamison—are ultimately about a lot more than sobriety, and indeed are more than memoirs: they are (sometimes exhaustive) studies of the authors’ relationships to alcohol, but they are also an examination of our culture’s relationship to drinking and the stories our culture tells (through books, movies, and music) about creativity, alcohol, and sobriety.

In The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath, Jamison interweaves (at least) three stories: one involving her romantic relationships, which ignite, burn, and sputter out during her extensive time as a graduate student; one involving her love affair with alcohol; and one involving her intellectual life, which, for a time, centered on stories we consume about alcohol and sobriety. For Jamison, these stories cannot be separated: she takes us through a period of her life during which she was developing as a writer and thinker (she attends the Iowa Writers Workshop and begins a PhD at Yale) and during which she simultaneously develops a dependence on alcohol. By studying her own story and the story of other artists who were known for their drinking—like John Berryman, Raymond Carver, Billie Holiday, and Jean Rhys (a personal favorite)—she begins to piece together (and ultimately, to challenge) the story our culture tells about creativity and drinking. (When, about halfway through this massive book, Jamison mentions that her doctoral dissertation was a study of sobriety narratives, I had the sudden grim realization: “Hey! I think Leslie Jamison just tricked us all into reading her dissertation….”) Ultimately, Jamison, for her own sake and for that of others, wants to uncouple the sexy pairing of drinking and creativity, and instead write a story about unsexy sobriety as the necessary component in creative enterprises.

The Recovering is fascinating, both in its conception and in its writing. Jamison is voracious in her intellectual endeavor, and reveals memorable insights into, say, the difference between our culture’s treatment of men and women and alcohol (she argues that while alcohol is seen as an allowable aspect of male creative genius, female artists who drink are often portrayed as neglectful, particularly of what should be their “true calling”: motherhood. We can see this in something as recent as the portrayal of Kitty in Oppenheimer.) But for all of its brilliance, there were times when I wondered if Jamison replaced her addiction to alcohol with an addiction to writing; this book is exhilarating but too damn long (I took out both a physical copy and the audiobook version of it from the library, and could only complete it by alternating between reading and listening to it during a long daily commute). This book contains multitudes: it is a memoir, a dissertation, a painstaking recollection of every time Jamison got drunk and every morning she regretted it, a history of AA and other recovery organizations… and within each genre Jamison pursues every possible digression. (We get, for example, not only a history of AA but a personal history of its founder and a detailed description of and reflection on one of the most famous meeting sites and brief bios of everyone who attended the recovery meetings with Jamison.) In short: Jamison has never met a rabbit hole she didn’t like. But you are guaranteed to find something riveting in its pages if you’re prepared to go along for the ride.

Drinking Games by Sarah Levy is more modest in its scope. It resembles The Recovering in the ways in which Levy considers drinking alongside writing and thereby illustrates the ubiquitousness of stories that link literary aspirations and alcohol. She too does not shirk from brutally honest portrayals of her own drinking, revealing her most shameful and regrettable moments with unstinting clarity. But Levy’s memoir, while also covering a period of time after which she graduated from college and began to strike out on her own, is more comforting and encouraging, and seems to me to be written for more specific audience: that of young women. Levy thoughtfully reflects on the narratives twenty-something women learn about alcohol, and how hard it can be to uproot the pernicious narratives around women, alcohol, and desirability. By exposing her own struggles—and, say, her inability to imagine her wedding day without also simultaneously imagining drinking champagne—she shows young women both how often they are bombarded with calls to drink, and shows them a way to resist these calls. Levy’s memoir is honest, frank, and reassuring without being too much of anything: it’s not too cheerful or too self-help-y. It reads like a funny, dependable friend who’s done some stuff but who can give good advice because of it.