When reviewing a book, I use a critic’s trick I picked up from C.S. Lewis: For quick reference, I scrawl a few words across the tops of pages to flag, say, the part where the heroine moves to Dallas ...

About two-thirds of the way through The Recovering, Leslie Jamison—newly sober for the second time—finally confronts the reality of winter in Iowa City. “For years,” she writes, “I’d felt personally ...