I wanted to highlight not only famous drunk writers - John Berryman, Raymond Carver - but stories and writers who had been fully forgotten - like George Cain, who wrote about heroin’s grip on him in “Blueschild Baby.”Īs far as the subtitle goes, if authors had their way, there’d be no subtitles. There are many recovering stories that have been lost to the margins. It’s like an umbrella holding different stories. It’s a process larger than any single person. It’s never fully finished and I wanted to ponder that. JAMISON: A big part of the word recovering had to do with ongoingness. How did you come to choose the title and subtitle (“The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath”)? Ahead of the visit, we talked to her about her early days of drinking, the shame and loneliness of addiction, and becoming a sober storyteller. Jamison, based in New York and on the road with her 12-week-old daughter and her mom, will sit down with Wood at the Cambridge Public Library. Novelist and essayist Leslie Jamison ’04 comes to Cambridge Thursday for a conversation with Harvard professor James Wood on her new book, “The Recovering.”Īuthor of the best-selling “The Empathy Exams,” Jamison mixes memoir with literary criticism in her new narrative, reflecting on her own struggles to get sober and the burden of alcohol in the work and lives of writers and performers such as Raymond Carver, Billie Holiday, Stephen King, and Amy Winehouse.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |