And yet, she has written a completely compelling book about a precarious march from sticky gin-soaked floors toward stability. (Her collection of essays, The Empathy Exams, can most succinctly, if glibly, be described as a book about pain.) “Difficulty is our most reliable narrative engine,” she told me. I spoke with Leslie about the inspiration here and more broadly. Part memoir, part cultural-literary history, it is also a book that beautifully blends and merges genres.

It is also a book about the way that new identities can emerge, both in intoxication and sobriety. The Recovering is a book about identities that are hidden, to others and to ourselves. I didn’t know the Leslie described early on in this book: uncertain, insecure, and sometimes, blackout drunk. Now with a new preface by acclaimed writer Leslie Jamison, this is an unvarnished conjuring of the tyranny of dependence: its desperation, its degradation, its rage and rebellion the fragile, unsettled, occasional shards of hope it permits the strange joys of being alive and young and lost and hooked and full of feverish determination anyway.ĭieser Download kann aus rechtlichen Gründen nur mit Rechnungsadresse in A, B, BG, CY, CZ, D, DK, EW, E, FIN, F, GR, HR, H, I, LT, L, LR, M, NL, PL, P, R, S, SLO, SK ausgeliefert werden.There’s a passage in Leslie Jamison’s new book, The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath, in which she describes the shabbily glamorous headquarters of her college literary magazine: “perpetually sticky hardwood floor and a cluster of ratty velvet couches with stuffing and springs thrusting up through rips in their fabric.” I met Leslie in those offices, where she seemed to me the preternaturally composed and incisive overseer of the fiction committee, presiding over printed-out submissions, dark wine in plastic cups, and plates of soft cheese.

First published in 1970, this frankly autobiographical novel was a revelation, a stunning depiction of a marginal figure, marked literally and figuratively by his drug addiction and navigating a predatory underground of junkies and hustlersand named George Cain, like his author. Produktbeschreibung A searing chronicle of the life of a young ex-convict and heroin addict in 1960's Harlem, an unsparing portrait of a man who couldn't free himself from the horrors of addiction Blueschild Baby takes place during the summer of 1967the summer of race riots all across the nation the Summer of Love in the Haight Ashbury the summer of Marines dying near Con Thien, across the world in Vietnambut the novel illuminates the contours of a more private hell: the angry desperation of a heroin addict who returns to his home in Harlem after being in prison.

Blueschild Baby by George Cain