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. Leslie Jamison Read Quote
I had never really thought of myself as a baby person, but it’s just a really profound connection. Leslie Jamison Read Quote
I do like arranging things. I like order. I basically like all these things that are the opposite of what people associate with the wild, passionate creative temperament. Leslie Jamison Read Quote
I completely identify with finding freedom in boundaries. That’s why I tend to have more freedom when I write nonfiction over fiction: because I’m running up against actuality and beholden to the truth in a different way. Leslie Jamison Read Quote
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. Leslie Jamison Read Quote
I really believe in people putting stories out there that contain the most difficult moments because nothing to me is more lonely making than sanitized stories or airbrushed stories that kind of allied how hard it got. Leslie Jamison Read Quote
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. Leslie Jamison Read Quote
It’s kind of funny that I’ve been branded as the empathy lady when, really, what I’m doing is questioning and interrogating empathy. Leslie Jamison Read Quote
