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.

Hard-shelled and soft-centered, hero and novel both.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. With her help and for her sake he kicks his habit and discovers in his detoxification delirium (the last sixty pages) that his trouble has been the burden of black hopes and the corrosive glamour of white esteem, with an assortment of secondary losses and rejections. In due course he steals a friend's stolen money, rapes a white babysitter, and bumps into his childhood sweetheart, Nandy. To find out he has to review his past, the white mistress he has come to loathe and their child he barely knows his parents with their well-intentioned expectations and incomprehension of his and other blacks' rising bitterness the magnetism of Harlem nights. But why? He was always the exception, scholarship student, basketball star, a born success yet as the novel begins he is fresh out of prison, mean-mouthed and unpredictable. The hero, George Cain himself, confronts and remembers as he roams the city looking for friends and junk. A first-person novel that comes on slugging - in the first fifty-or-so pages one is treated to a complete scenic slide show of city streets: scoring and shooting dope, a near-fatal overdose and resuscitation by necrophile love-making, a throat cutting, a grandmother's death in a tenement fire, mass arrests, a knifing over a dice game, and the explosion of Newark, to name the highlights.

Blueschild Baby by George Cain