On Page 42: The Recovering
[Source: The Recovering: Intoxication and its Aftermath by Leslie Jamison, First Edition: April 2018. Genre: Nonfiction]
The Recovering: Intoxication and its Aftermath is a raw description of personal and societal response and reaction to addiction and rehabilitation. When looking at the next book to explore for this series, I didn’t just want a variety of authors, but a variety of genres. This week its nonfiction. Although Leslie Jamison’s sources are exhaustively listed in the back of her book, her page 42 is in part of the text that explores her personal struggles.
The other day, I realized that in fiction characters usually understand each other and each person has absolute certainty in the knowledge they know. In reality, people mishear, or misunderstand almost daily, and rarely in casual conversation is there certainty. This page 42 reminds us of this fact:
“I was telling a friend all about how I hadn’t vomited since I
was nine years old, and she told me I’d vomited all over the
inside of her car the night I’d been initiated.”
The page looks heavily at blacking out and fainting. There’s this palpable concern that she was not working at full capacity at the law firm in Boston. This heavy weight of responsibility was combined with the claustrophobia of the personal:
“It seemed shameful that my sadness had no extraordinary
source– just the common loneliness of leaving home. So I
found a more extreme costume for it: the not-eating.”
How do we hide or digest our stress? What we tell ourselves, effects what we tell the world. The extraordinary thing we can learn from this as storytellers is the frailty of communication. Too often are characters in fiction confident about their information, about their selves, and about what others are telling them.
Raymond Carver played with fraught interaction a lot. In his short story “Gazebo,” a couple is stuck in a hotel room arguing and neither is speaking directly to each other’s concerns and neither is quite catching what the other is saying. Jamison’s experience gives us this first hand look at the reality of communication. One can mislead themselves as much as they can unintentionally mislead others.
The Recovering, as whole is a complex look at a subject that is too often oversimplified. This page 42, is a glimpse into the intimate struggle of the author and this moment can help writers and creators craft communication issues that a fair amount of fiction ignores. No one knows everything and not all interactions end smoothly, whether it’s the internal dialogue or exterior exchanges.