In late 2018, I read The Recovering by Leslie Jamison, a compelling memoir of debasement and redemption. This book changed the way I see the world through the deep lessons it offers about how to tell powerful stories, and thus about how to build new culture of the kind we need in order to re-infuse meaning into modern life.
Jamison’s voracious alcoholism devours the first decade of her adulthood, leaving her bereft and hopeless. From rock bottom, she slowly finds a path forward through AA, and over the subsequent years she takes her first halting steps towards (and away from, and back towards) recovery. It’s beautifully written, sometimes salacious, and often heartrending.
Jamison learns that AA culture builds and maintains a collection of ancient narrative templates. Moreover, she discovers that when she maps the unique landscape of her own suffering onto those pre-built forms, sharing her story in AA groups with no goal in mind but the process of doing so, she is finally granted a form of grace powerful enough to sustain true sobriety.
She encounters a ritual wherein the storyteller’s sole aim is to share the raw and open truth of their personal experiences. In its ideal form, such a story is told simply, without ego, embellishment, or comparison to others. I’m calling this ideal lighthouse storytelling, and I’ve become convinced that the surprising power of this practice makes it one of our best tools for building the cultures of the future.
Jamison’s experiences with lighthouse storytelling in AA teach her the limitations of the Western humanism she was raised with, which casts meaning-making as a personal project, and shows her the beauty of relating communally, which allows meaning to be mutually created and self-referential (“this is meaningful to me because it’s meaningful to you”).
As she sets out initially to write a book about how AA helped her get sober, Jamison finds herself treating her own life story as both subject and object, content and metaphor, deeply personal and widely shared. To her own surprise, it is not her recovery but rather The Recovering that becomes her redemption.
The Recovering - The Fall
Like many people who gravitate towards writing, Jamison’s natural disposition is compulsively self-reflective. It also tends to be strongly negative. She spends most of her teens and twenties in a cacophony of self-criticism, so overwhelmed by what she perceives to be her own flaws and errors that she often totally fails to hear the experiences and needs that others try to share with her.
"I was so self-absorbed there should have been a different word for what I was. Of course I would have loved that, if there had been a different word for what I was."
Over the years, she seeks to push back against the relentless assaults of this personal hell with an assortment of coping strategies including anorexia, cutting, and, eventually, a deep and destructive alcoholism.
Jamison deliberately lingers over these experiences in all their ugliness and shame, applying her talent for evocative scene-setting alongside an unflinching commitment to forcing us, her readers, to face reality alongside her. Reading the autobiographical sections of the book is immersive, moving, and painful.
"It was no wonder we got drunk so much; we just wanted a fucking break. Booze let me live inside moments without the endless chatter of my own self-conscious annotation. It was like finally going on vacation somewhere beautiful without having to pose for photographs the whole time."
"At a certain point we were on my bed and I didn’t want to fuck him—but I was too drunk and too tired to figure out how not to fuck him, so I just lay there, still and quiet, while he finished. The situation would sharpen into awareness, in fleeting moments, and I’d think, This isn’t what I want, and then it would dissolve into soft focus again."
"I wasn’t using the word “alcoholic” with other people, wasn’t describing myself or my drinking that way, but those were the years when I started writing it in my diary, secretly, often during blackouts, syntax out the window: Is this what an alcoholic? It was as if a child just learning how to write had crawled inside my diary and called me by my name."
Jamison paints a rich and vivid portrait of American literary culture as it’s embodied in the elite academic institutions she attends (Harvard, the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, and Yale). She gives a nuanced account of the ways in which that tradition has long valorized and enabled its heroes’ self-destructive behaviors in the name of creative inspiration.
The writerly subculture surrounding her fits hand-in-glove within our humanist fixation on individuality, and both of them matched her natural self-obsession perfectly.
Her vision of creative success was intimately intertwined with her hunger to be, or perhaps to become, a special person. More specifically, the kind of success she always yearned for centered on producing something genuinely novel.
"In recovery, years later, when someone described self-loathing as the flip side of narcissism, I almost laughed out loud at the stark truth of what she’d said. This black-and-white thinking, this all-or-nothing, it was cut from the same cloth. Being just a man among men, or a woman among women, with nothing extraordinary about your flaws or your mistakes—that was the hardest thing to accept."
The book beautifully conveys the emotional texture and unresolvable tension of how it feels to believe in these cultural ideals of individuality, exceptionalism, and self-destructive genius. By her mid-20s, as her drinking has spiraled completely out of control and dominates every aspect of her life, it is clear to her that finding alternative stories to buy into is literally a matter of life and death.
As part of her all-consuming quest for a viable way of being in her world, Jamison does her entire PhD on American writers who struggled with, wrote about, and overcame (or didn’t) their demons of addiction.
"I was moving between the worlds of graduate school and recovery, straddling the powerful rifts between their competing imperatives: Think harder. Don’t overthink it. Say something new. You can’t say anything new. Interrogate simplicity. Keep it simple. Be loved because you’re smart. Be loved because you are. My dissertation was reckoning with a question I hoped might bridge these worlds, examining authors who’d tried to get sober and exploring how recovery had become part of their creative lives. It wasn’t criticism as autobiography, exactly, so much as speculative autobiography–trying to find a map for what my own sober creativity might look like."
In this passage, Jamison reveals that she has already internalized the fundamental logic of lighthouse storytelling. To chart her own path to sober creativity, she doesn’t need to invent a brilliant new solution to her intractable problems. Rather, she needs to hear personal stories from people who have gone through those same crucibles, become changed, and emerged.
The Recovering - Whence Redemption?
One easy criticism to level at the book is about the many privileges Jamison enjoys in her life. She has an essentially white and middle-class experience of addiction. Her story would have looked very different if she had been born brown or poor (among other things).
Jamison is well aware of this. She starts out skeptical of her own fit within AA, with its old clichés and unhip pastiche of struggling humanity, just as any intellectual young American of privilege would expect to be. But, and herein lies the heart of the matter:
"At that meeting, I was painfully aware of how much I had, and how much I hadn’t lost. I was wary of how anything I shared might come across to others in the room, people who were struggling with so much more: the woman fighting for custody of her kids; the guy who’d been in and out of shelters for almost a year, but had finally gotten a job at the pizza parlor in town. How could comparing my addiction to theirs seem like anything but a misunderstanding of what they’d suffered? I didn’t want to suggest I’ve been through that too, with my very presence–when of course I hadn’t. My story was contoured by desire more than loss.
But I was surprised by the ways other people sought commonality, and at a certain point I realized I was the one projecting difference by assuming others felt it. Believing in what we shared didn’t have to make me blind to what we didn’t. Resonance wasn’t the same as conflation. It didn’t mean pretending we’d all lived the same thing. It just meant listening. [...] We weren’t there to assume or insist on perfect correspondence; we were there to open ourselves to the possibility of company."
Analogously, many readers may struggle to find sympathy for the sad white girl drinking herself to death because she’s not being recognized as a creative genius. And that’s a completely valid reaction.
But if you are somebody who needs to hear what the book has to tell you, then the fact that the particulars of her life may not align with yours will not matter.
The fundamental patterns and demands of her addiction and recovery, which she chronicles exhaustively, mercilessly, and in some measure also lovingly, will speak powerfully to you.
In the sharing of her journey towards recovery (her recovering, never to become a past-tense success until the day she dies), you will find communion.
Over the course of working on the project, Jamison realizes that her own goals have evolved. More than being simply about her own sobriety, her true goal with the book becomes to create a “Twelfth Step work,” which alludes to AA’s (final) Step Twelve: Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.
"Googling the phrase ‘just another addiction memoir’ yields several pages of results, mostly blurbs insisting that a certain book isn’t ‘just another addiction memoir.’ [...] This insistent chorus reflects a broader disdain for the already-told story, and a cynical take on interchangeability: the idea that if we’ve heard this story before, we won’t want to hear it again. But the accusation of sameness, just another addiction memoir, gets turned on its head by recovery—where a story’s sameness is precisely why it should be told. Your story is only useful because others have lived it and will live it again."
For it is always the case that nobody else has ever lived a life quite like ours; and also, that all of our triumphs and all of our tragedies have played themselves out uncountably many times before, as part of the grand shared human experience.
"‘We tell ourselves stories in order to live,’ Joan Didion wrote, and at first I took her words as gospel: Stories help us survive! But eventually I realized they were more like an admonition–a suggestion that there was something compromised and shameful about our dependence on their false coherence. When Didion wrote, ‘I began to doubt the premises of all the stories I had ever told myself,’ I understood her skepticism as an accusation: trusting stories was naive, a refusal to confront actuality in all its senselessness.
But in recovery, I started to believe again that stories could do all the things Didion had taught me to distrust, that they could lend meaningful arcs of cohesion; that they could save us from our lives by letting us construct ourselves. [...]
Recovery reminded me that storytelling was ultimately about community, not self-deception. Recovery didn’t say: We tell ourselves stories in order to live. It said: We tell others our stories in order to help them live, too."
The Current Landscape
I am not the first person to say any of this. Our culture is already moving in these directions.
GENDER
This NYT essay by Elena Ferrante captures these themes in today’s gender politics beautifully. She writes, “There is one form of power that has fascinated me ever since I was a girl, even though it has been widely colonized by men: the power of storytelling,” and closes with a call to action: “The female story, told with increasing skill, increasingly widespread and unapologetic, is what must now assume power.”
On a personal level, I have watched three (women) friends over the past five years who have set out to write about certain vexing and rich elements of modern life - sex, feminism, the first-generation experience - and who have found, to their own chagrin and surprise, that the stories they’re trying to tell keep demanding that they write themselves in.
In each case, their writing was originally intended to be third-person and/or fictional. And in each case, it became clear that an essential piece of the story’s true potential lay in foregrounding the author’s own personal journey, both with the subject matter and in the writing.
IDENTITY
Over the past decade, the progressive left has developed innovations in identity culture at an astounding rate. Broader understanding of intersectionality, along with evolutions like fourth-wave feminism and Black Lives Matter, are meaningfully improving the tools people have for articulating their own experiences and organizing in solidarity around them. Identity-based culture is in fact so powerful that it has had various unintended side effects, including toxic call-out culture (1, 2, 3) and the resulting ascendance of “anti-PC” sentiment across the political spectrum.
Some of the best parts of these identity cultures draw from lighthouse storytelling. Because of the patriarchal and white supremacist structures that are the bones of our modern society, identity-based experiences often create some of the most difficult and essential parts of our selves. Many of my friends who are women and/or of color have found deep healing through sharing stories within identity-based affinity groups. Nothing can quite replace the feeling of speaking your truth to a group of people who really get it.
And some of the worst parts of these identity cultures are based on taking these principles too far. Our externally visible, socially constructed identities are powerful forces shaping our lives, but we are all complex, multi-faceted creatures. The potency of these new tools we have to define affinity based on identity can blind us to other, older ways of seeing commonalities and articulating shared life journeys.
Don’t Invent the New, Remember the Old
Many of us, like Jamison, have internalized the Western idea that progress comes from novelty, and that powerful stories for the future must therefore be sui generis, new in themselves.
If only we can tell the best story, the right story, the one that will pierce the veil of confusion and apathy that has descended upon our society and culture - then, we believe, we will finally ignite the passion that so many people find themselves missing so keenly.
I no longer believe in this theory of change. We must root ourselves back in the ancient forms of our human universals, the ones that are deep enough to provide common ground beneath the sound and fury created by our increasingly severe differences of circumstance and perspective.
Jamison’s book succeeds because she is able to become an exemplar of a struggle and a triumph (addiction and recovery) that is both modern and ancient, and to use the power of her personal story to become a beacon, illuminating the path towards triumph for those who walk behind her.
And the fact that the book will succeed in its true aim only for those readers who find themselves enmeshed within that same struggle is in fact the very point.
An Identifying Audience
One of the most powerful ways most humans learn is through hearing the stories of others who are ahead of them on a shared path. One of the most powerful ways most humans teach is by sharing their own stories with people who are stuck a few steps behind them.
Any given personal story won’t resonate with most people; that’s an inextricable part of why they can be transformative for people attuned to their particular wavelength.
Support groups like AA are built around helping storytellers find the identifying audiences they need to discover the next step in their self stories. Thankfully, one of the best features of our Internet era is how much more quickly and broadly audiences and storytellers can find each other.
We cannot hope to reverse the cultural fragmentation that our technology is creating. We should at least seek to make use of it, to build structures that help people come together around sharing their individual stories of participating in the common struggles of being human in this world.
Why Does This Matter So Much?
Lighthouse storytelling, applied in the right context, has a unique capacity to create and sustain strong communities.
To find meaning, we all need a story of self that somehow both centers us and subsumes us within a larger whole. We can build that kind of self-story collaboratively when we embed within communities of others who find themselves aligning around the same underlying human universal at the same moment in time.
Lighthouse storytelling is a democratic and populist approach. Its prescription for meaning-making is not genius invention, but rather mass participation.
In my reading and thinking about where we might turn to re-energize the community as a source of shared and co-created meaning, lighthouse storytelling is the best lead I’ve found.
And over time, in my writing and thinking, I hope to convince you, dear reader, that the power of this framework provides a crucial reason for optimism in the face of the overwhelmingly complex structural changes we need in order to build a just and sustainable future.
Any path forward will, after all, need to resonate deeply for people on both sides of what we perceive to be our current divides.
If we find the right common bedrock, we can build on it a world in which each person can see themselves, both in the glory of their individuality and in the comfort of communion.
May we all seek, find, and become bright beacons of old truths lived in fresh ways.