Leslie Jamison never smooths over the thorny edges of life. Her first memoir, The Recovering: Intoxication and its after-math (2018), recounts her journey from addiction to sobriety – or, rather, the cycle of addiction, denial, acceptance, sobriety, and relapse that defined her path to sobriety. Like all members of Alcoholics Anonymous, she is not alone in this messy recovery, and her first memoir reflects this by incorporating a multitude of other stories to sustain its central narrative. As with many of Jamison’s essays in The Empathy Exams (2014) and Make It Scream, Make It Burn (2019), The Recovering connects her own subjectivity to the stories of others.