At the Guardian she tagged some favorite books about new beginnings, including:
In 2019 I will celebrate eight years sober. In The Recovering: Intoxication and its Aftermath, Leslie Jamison, one of the most accomplished and challenging essayists around, explores the topic at (quite some) length. It is not your average recovery memoir – it takes a step back and examines dominating narratives of addiction and recovery and the myth of the tortured artist. Anyone considering using the new year as a prompt to change their drinking habits will find much to consider here. Jamison fights, as I have, to write about what comes after getting sober – not the drunken backstory but the reality of a positive new start: “I’d always been enthralled by stories of wreckage. But I wanted to know if stories about getting better could ever be as compelling as stories about falling apart. I needed to believe they could.”Read about another entry on the list.
--Marshal Zeringue
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