With a deeply personal blend of memoir, cultural history, literary criticism, and reportage, Leslie Jamison, assistant professor of writing at the School of the Arts, offers a story of addiction and recovery in America writ large. At the heart of the book is an ongoing conversation with artistic geniuses whose lives and works were shaped by addiction, including Billie Holiday, Raymond Carver, and David Foster Wallace. Jamison demonstrates that the story of recovery can be every bit as electrifying as the path to addiction. She also offers a look at the larger history of the recovery movement and the complicated bearing that race and class have on our understanding of who is a criminal and who is ill.