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Four years ago, a 30-year-old writer named Leslie Jamison published an essay inThe BelievertitledThe Empathy Exams.
I get paid by the hour.
Medical students guess my maladies.
In retrospect, there was a double layer to Jamisons play-acting.
Jamison wasnt just impersonating a sick person but impersonating the sort of person who getspaidto impersonate a sick person.
I want to tell them.Im probably going to write about this in a book someday!
Essay collections rarely sell more than 10,000 copies.The Empathy Examssold 80,000 and became a New YorkTimesbest seller.
Everyone was waiting to see what her next big subject would be.
The book is being hailed as the Greatest Addiction Memoir Ever Written.
Stephen Kingcalls itrequired reading.
Dazzlingly brilliant, raves Mary-Louise Parker.
Theres just one glitch.
Recovery narratives usually follow a triptych structure.
And then the part where you get your life back on track.
But what if your life never went off track?
As readers ofThe Recoveringwill quickly deduce, Jamison takes the concept of high-functioning alcoholic to a dizzying new level.
And did it in the midst of a coked-up, Bacardi-and-Midori-fueled death swoon.
Shes an unstoppable force of nature, says Ben George, her editor at Little, Brown.
Im not convinced theres only one of her.
Says her longtime friend Rachel Fagnant-Fassler, I refer to her as Clintonesque.
Its a particular blend of intelligence meets focus.
She doesnt actually need physical rest or replenishment.
Shes not like the rest of us.
Leslie Jamisonwas born in 1983, the third child and only daughter of two brilliant and ambitious global-policy cynosures.
Alleviating global disease burden,a phrase I learned young, Jamison notes in her memoir.
Leslie attended the UCLA-affiliated University Elementary School (now known as the Lab School) and the Brentwood School.
Family dinners were not for the faint of heart.
Especially on French nights when everyone was practicing a language I didnt speak.
The Jamison family shrank from five members to two.
The lesson for Leslie was that people would probably leave, she writes.
It was just a question of when.
InThe Recovering,Jamison plays down this explanation as a depth-psychology fairy tale airplane ticket stubs as smoking gun.
You could collage about that until the cows come home.
Emphasis on the drinking.
I felt freer and looser.
Starting in her senior year, Jamison began to drink with increasing recklessness.
During this time, she also graduated magna cum laude from Harvard; received her M.F.A.
We were all staying out until 3 a.m. drinking lots of wine.
She was getting up at 5 a.m. to write or work at the bakery.
The rest of us were getting up at noon.
To diagnose someone, there has to be dysfunction.
With Leslie, it didnt look like dysfunction.
I assumed everything was fine.
I only found out later that shed go home afterward and have way more to drink on her own.
In 2010, at the age of 27,Jamison concluded her drinking had become unmanageable and got sober.
(Bocks first wife, Diana Colbert, died of leukemia when Lily was almost 3.)
She is wearing her baby in a complex origami-style wrap that goes around her back and over her shoulders.
Babywearing, Jamison says dreamily.
It was pitched to me as convenience, but now I experience it as a state of dependence.
The last frontier of addiction.
Sitting in her book-lined study, we chat for a minute about babies.
Jamison navigates the alpha-mom minefields, from Magda Gerber to Ferber, with the finesse of a politician.
Im reading this book now calledYour Self-Confident Baby, she says.
The idea is not to rely on artificial means of consolation.
But included in that is rocking.
Theyre sayingrockingis nothing more than an escape from reality.
Jamison sighs, fiddles with a dangly earring.
There are so many basic ordinary questions that take on such a fraught quality.
So Im curious: Where doesThe Recoveringfit in?
If it were, it would probably be somewhere between Thrill of the Good-Girl Addict and Surprisingly Successful Addict.
It just didnt have a pulse.
I ask Bock what its like to be married to the Queen of Empathy.
Does Leslie ever drink the last of the milk?
Leave a bag of chips in the cabinet with only crumbs inside?
She does none of those things, he says.
Shes the real deal.
Not holding myself up as an example for all the world to see.
I mean, Im not this endless fountain of empathy.
Get on your fucking knees and beg!
Yet her ardent writing style and extended-release doses of empathy have made her a consistently powerful journalist.
They pull out their phones and show her bathtub videos and photos of tiny shrimplike things theyve coughed up.
Instead, she actually gets to know them.
As the conferees roam the halls, Jamison mulls the meaning of it all.
Jamison works herself into the piece in a way thats illuminating, not self-indulgent.
These demons belong to all of us, she writes.
Its an incredibly ambitious project.
Its a chorus of voices, a chorus of shares.
Jamison stuttering, eyes hot soldiers on through the talking points of my pain, but shes badly thrown.
This man had managed to tap veins of primal insecurity, she writes.
The last decade of Jamisons life has been a marvel of achievement and Stakhanovite productivity.
She longs for a recovery story larger than my own, with taller buildings and sharper knives.
Knapp stumbles into traffic with her friends young children in her arms, nearly killing them.
She also seeks to offset the thinness of her own story by weaving in the accounts of others.
Against all odds, she actually succeeds on the first point.
Even Jamison admits the tales have the easy lilt of practiced narrative grooves except she thinks thats fine.
Fair enough, but in the words of the wheelchair-bound geezer: This is boring!
These ordinary men and women probably arent compelling because Jamison didnt come to them organically.
Pain remains her creative engine and source of material even if its not the stuff of epic.
Im definitely aware of the quasi-gag factor of the sun-filled Park Slope parlor, she says.
Id just say that theres the Facebook version of life, and theres the actual version.
But it could be that the Surprisingly Successful Addict is ready to look on the bright side.
The book has been getting really nice attention, Jamison tells me.
Interviewmagazine came to photograph me.
They brought a lot of suits and, like, these amazing pencil skirts.
I think that was their vision for me.
Jamison pauses to gulp ice water.
I ended up in this silk suit, she says.
And this transparent blue top that had these sort of glammy stones on it.
I think I leaked breast milk onto it at a certain point.
Everyone had a green juice.
The photographer kind of forcibly bunched up the sleeves of my jacket and had me straddle a chair.
He was like, Yes, yes, yes.
He kept saying, You look so tough.
You look so tough.
Toughis one of the last adjectives I would use to describe myself, Jamison says.
She tries to look outraged, but a smile pricks the corners of her mouth.
Somehow, in this photo shoot, another version of self emerged.
