212 Quotes by Leslie Jamison

The ethical divide between showing up and coming back loomed large; it made me feel accused. This was respect, I thought: to look and keep looking, not to look away as soon as you’d gotten what you needed.

Sometimes a person needs help because she needs it, not because her story is compelling or noble or strange enough to earn it, and sometimes you just do what you can. It doesn’t make you any better, or any worse. It doesn’t change you at all, except for the split second when you imagine that day when you will be the one who has to ask.

The phenomenon of female anger has often been turned against itself, the figure of the angry woman reframed as threat – not the one who has been harmed, but the one bent on harming. She conjures a lineage of threatening archetypes: the harpy and her talons, the witch and her spells, the medusa and her writhing locks. The notion that female anger is unnatural or destructive is learned young; children report perceiving displays of anger as more acceptable from boys than from girls.

It seems there are two kinds of American writers. Those who drink, and those who used to.

We get so used to the stories we tell about ourselves. This is why we sometimes need to find ourselves in the stories of others.

I wanted nothing more than to be absent from my own life.

There was a little voice in me that considered the possibility that perhaps there were people who didn’t spend hours every day trying to decide if their desperate desire to drink had preceded recovery meetings or been created by them. But it irritated me, that voice. I tried not to listen to it.

How do we represent female pain without producing a culture in which this pain has been fetishized to the point of fantasy or imperative?

Representing people always involves reducing them, and calling a project “done” involves making an uneasy truce with that reduction. But some part of me rails against that compression. Some part of me wants to keep saying: there’s more, there’s more, there’s more.