On her book The Language of the Heart: A Cultural History of the Recovery Movement from Alcoholics Anonymous to Oprah Winfrey
Cover Interview of January 26, 2010
In a nutshell
My book is about that loosely defined cultural phenomenon known as “the recovery movement”—an agglomeration of self-help groups and practices that have grown out of Alcoholics Anonymous since its founding in 1935. Although most people know someone who is or has been “in recovery,” most people are also a little vague about what that means. That vagueness has allowed critics—both conservative and progressive—to caricature the recovery movement as narcissistic, banal, and apolitical. The Language of the Heart is intended to show that recovery is a diverse and evolving phenomenon whose complex history reflects the shifting ideas about gender and power that characterize contemporary America.
I’ve used recovery’s print culture to narrate the story of its evolution from AA—which began as an alcohol-focused, evangelical Christian, and resolutely masculine sub-culture—to Oprah Winfrey, a self-proclaimed “food addict” and survivor of childhood sexual abuse who espouses a healing metaphysical spirituality to millions of women around the globe. Most recovery publications come from the margins of polite print culture. Rather than the products of professionally credentialed authors writing in the pages of esteemed journals, many of recovery’s central ideas appeared first in obscure pamphlets, self-published tracts, and the textbooks of the addiction treatment industry. None of these are usually considered “serious” literature. But both the writing and the reading of such materials is an extremely serious matter for many recovering people.
[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.Carolyn J. Dean, Interview of February 01, 2011
The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.Jerome Kagan, Interview of September 17, 2009
In a nutshell
My book is about that loosely defined cultural phenomenon known as “the recovery movement”—an agglomeration of self-help groups and practices that have grown out of Alcoholics Anonymous since its founding in 1935. Although most people know someone who is or has been “in recovery,” most people are also a little vague about what that means. That vagueness has allowed critics—both conservative and progressive—to caricature the recovery movement as narcissistic, banal, and apolitical. The Language of the Heart is intended to show that recovery is a diverse and evolving phenomenon whose complex history reflects the shifting ideas about gender and power that characterize contemporary America.
I’ve used recovery’s print culture to narrate the story of its evolution from AA—which began as an alcohol-focused, evangelical Christian, and resolutely masculine sub-culture—to Oprah Winfrey, a self-proclaimed “food addict” and survivor of childhood sexual abuse who espouses a healing metaphysical spirituality to millions of women around the globe. Most recovery publications come from the margins of polite print culture. Rather than the products of professionally credentialed authors writing in the pages of esteemed journals, many of recovery’s central ideas appeared first in obscure pamphlets, self-published tracts, and the textbooks of the addiction treatment industry. None of these are usually considered “serious” literature. But both the writing and the reading of such materials is an extremely serious matter for many recovering people.