‘In vino veritas was one of the most appealing promises of drinking’

In this extract from Leslie Jamison’s memoir The Recovering: Intoxication and its Aftermath, she explores whether addiction makes for the best fiction

• Read Rachel Cooke’s interview with Leslie Jamison

During my winter of Saltine sandwiches, I started sleeping with more men. This was easier when I was drunk. There was the standup comic, the tow-truck driver, the man building his own house. Drunk sex became a way of purging feeling, siphoning it off and putting it somewhere else, like collecting the rendered fat off cooked meat and pouring it in a jar, storing it away so it wouldn’t clog the drains.

My workshop instructor that last semester found something seriously wrong with almost every student story we discussed, and he could spend an hour dissecting why the language wasn’t working.

My main character smashed a glass of wine against her fridge, and then licked all the red trails of Shiraz

Continue reading... April 22, 2018 at 12:30PM