Leslie Jamison

“Somebody once asked me how I define sobriety, and my response was 'liberation from dependence.'”

“The story of getting better can be just as compelling as the story of falling apart.”

“Whenever I've been stuck on a project, it's always brought me solace to the return to books that moved me in the past. It's a nice way to get outside my own head; and it brings me back to one of the most important reasons I write at all: to bring some pleasure to readers, to make them think or feel.”

“Irony is easier than hopeless silence but braver than flight.”

“You pass the old L.A. County jail, which is surprisingly beautiful. It's got a handsome stone facade and stately columns. The new L.A. County jail - called The Twin Towers - isn't beautiful at all; it's a stucco panopticon the color of sick flesh.”

“Probably every person is some mixture of wanting to feel a sense of commonality and shared experience with others but also wanting to feel completely singular and unique.”

“It was a look that suggested emotions happening just past your line of sight: a grief so deep you'd never be able to see it, a love so fierce it could swallow itself completely.”

“Though there might not be any easy answers to the problem of poverty, its most compelling scribes do not resign themselves to representation solely for the sake of those age-old verities of truth and beauty.”

“We think we should have to work in order to feel. We want to have our cake resist us; and then we want to eat it, too.”

“Bad movies and bad writing and easy cliches still manage to make us feel things toward each other. Part of me is disgusted by this. Part of me celebrates it.”

“I feel like I have a bit of a Type A personality.”

“Freedom from one man is just another one.”

“I had never really thought of myself as a baby person, but it's just a really profound connection.”

“One of the big ways in which I felt my own writing life shaped by recovery had to do with my relationship to other people's stories. And one of the things I loved most about recovery was the way in which, in meetings and through fellowship, you are constantly kind of paying attention to lives outside of your own.”

“Redeeming subjects from cliche is its own pleasure and privilege.”

“When you're a writer and something difficult happens to you, one of the things involved in that is this emergence of narrative potential. And there's then a kind of self-consciousness about telling a story in which you suffered.”

“There's something about that puritanical narrative of progress and upward mobility and work ethic that the glorification of abstinence fits pretty neatly into. That pairs with the fact that 12-step recovery has had too large a monopoly on how treatment is understood in America.”

“12-step recovery is very focused on abstinence, and that's bled into the broader understanding of treatment. It would be most useful to have multiple senses of what treatment could look like.”

“It's not just that everyone has a story. It's that everyone has a thousand stories. Everyone is infinite.”

“Armchair poverty tourism has been around as long as authors have written about class. As an author, I have struggled myself with the nuances of writing about poverty without reducing any community to a catalog of its difficulties.”