Lessons and Carols
A Meditation on Recovery
-
- $24.99
-
- $24.99
Publisher Description
Maybe redemption is not a place you find, but a system of mapmaking. Sketch a land. Pencil in dragons. Imagine it real, resplendent, and broken under a waxing moon.
Lessons and Carols is a genre-bending memoir that explores the aftershocks of alcoholism and mental illness through a fresh look at the powers of poetry, ritual, and community. As a new parent, West grapples with his own fragmented recovery and grief for the friends he lost to addiction, asking if anyone can really change, or if we are always bound to repeat the past.
Echoing the form of a traditional Anglican Christmas service of stories and songs, West's lyrical prose invites readers into an unorthodox rendition of the liturgy called Lessons and Carols. Each December, a faithful circle of irreligious friends assembles to eat and sing and reimagine an old story about love made flesh. In that gathering's glow, resentments turn to quiet wonder at the ways a better world can appear.
Both tender and bracing, West's poetic meditation of the possibilities of change will resonate deeply with anyone who has tired of their own destructive loops. In this stirring account of recovery, redemption remains elusive—and as tangible as the promise of a newborn.
Hardscrabble winter, gray and lonely, requires Christmas. Or, rather, in its depths, I require Christmas: words no longer cold, chrome, and barren, but alive, golden, cradled in my arms.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
West, a technologist at the Wall Street Journal, considers his recovery from addiction in his searing if scattered debut. The author organizes his reflections loosely around the Nine Lessons and Carols of the Christmas worship service, touching on substance abuse, mental health, and religious identity. West discusses the suicidal thoughts that emerged as an adolescent and landed him in a psychiatric ward, and later became intertwined with his alcoholism. As West grappled with his sexuality in college, his drinking worsened and became tightly linked to a desire for connection: "I know that wanting love does not mean wanting sex does not mean wanting a drink does not mean wanting greatness," he writes, "but they are bound up for me." The author eventually wound up in rehab, where he stitched together a fragile sense of self-understanding. Now a parent, West is riven by the love and anxiety of fatherhood, and prays "that I will stay sober, that this baby will live her life unconcerned with sobriety." While West's writing is affectingly raw and often lyrical, the slack narrative structure can be distracting and tends to obscure moments of emotional insight. Patient readers will make the most of this touching if imperfect memoir.
