Join us for an evening with bestselling author Leslie Jamison, who will be reading from her memoir, The Recovering. A Q&A and signing will follow. This event is cosponsored by VQR and will be free and open to the public.
By the New York Times bestselling author of The Empathy Exams, The Recovering is an exploration of addiction, and the stories we tell about it, that reinvents the traditional recovery memoir. With its deeply personal and seamless blend of memoir, cultural history, literary criticism, and journalistic reportage, The Recovering turns our understanding of the traditional addiction narrative on its head, demonstrating that the story of recovery can be every bit as electrifying as the train wreck itself. Leslie Jamison deftly excavates the stories we tell about addiction—both her own and others’—and examines what we want these stories to do, and what happens when they fail us. With enormous empathy and wisdom, Jamison has given us nothing less than the story of addiction and recovery in America writ large, a definitive and revelatory account that will resonate for years to come.
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. She is a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine, and her work has appeared in publications including The Atlantic, Harper’s, the New York Times Book Review, The Oxford American, and Virginia Quarterly Review. She directs the graduate nonfiction program at Columbia University and lives in Brooklyn with her husband, the novelist Charles Bock, and their two daughters.
Photo Credit: Beowulf Sheehan