This is the first novel by the author of The Empathy Exams, which I didn't like. But this is a very well told story, as if it came from a terribly real life. Stella comes from a family of abandoned women. Her grandmother Lucy married into a wealthy family and she is barely provided for after her husband runs off. Her daughter Dora, Stella's mother, is a successful, emotionally closed off attorney. When Lucy becomes incapacitated, Stella, who has been drifting, moves in as caretaker. Before her grandmother dies, she murmurs something about her daughter Matilda, and that's how Stella finds out about her aunt Tilly, who banished herself from the family.

The women, as well as the brothers and sons in their lives, walk incredibly difficult paths for a variety of reasons. There is a portrayal of alcoholism that is the most searing and powerful I have ever read. This is such a dynamic, thoughtful, and enveloping read. Highly recommended. ( )

I finished this novel two days ago and it has been in my mind ever since. A friend inquired as to whether the book was good - it is; very, very good - but I feel as though there are not sufficient words to express, in a review, my thoughts about the story or the writer. I need to invent new words to do this novel justice. The book is urgent and raw, and without requesting the readers sympathy, it demands of the reader to be a sentient human being. That Jamison, in this, her first novel, can create and sustain these senses - of urgency, of compassion, of exposed nerves - is to be commended. Her writing elevates the story from being 'another story about a disjointed and struggling family' to being something wholly new. Jamison has given readers a work that is heart-achingly beautiful. ( )

I read the first few pages and I was suddenly afraid. Afraid to put this down even for a quick break because it deserved my complete focus on it, each tortured character demanding that I listen to their voice, their story. I didn't want to miss a thing, no matter whether disturbing or unsettling, and I certainly didn't want to forget a single moment that the characters experienced.

The book is told from two perspectives in the first person: Stella and Tilly. Stella is the daughter of a high-powered immigration lawyer, Dora, and the granddaughter of Lucy, who in her ailing years reveals a secret that no one has talked about. There is another, a daughter of Lucy's that has never been spoken of. Stella, broken though she may be, is determined to find this aunt, someone named Matilda who goes by Tilly. When she finds her, Tilly is surrounded by empty bottles of gin in a run-down trailer in the middle of the desert. But it's something that Stella can grasp onto in the mired sadness of her life -- again, maybe someone she can try to help. She convinces Tilly that they should pack everything up, get her dry and sober on the trip, and move together to San Francisco, where Tilly's son is a rich banker with plenty of space in his home, and plenty of his own quiet grief to share. Stella and Tilly really almost are the same person, their experiences painfully different and similar all at the same time. Is that possible? It almost felt like I was reading a song.

I felt guilty as I read this book -- each character's troubled story touched me and I felt ashamed that I was enjoying reading about their terrible miseries, rooting though I may have been for them to overcome their tragedies.

This is a story of grief, sadness, isolation. There were scenes that were uncomfortable and troubling but they were real, completely authentic and believable to each character, and I never felt tricked into any part of this story -- I was a willing reader who wanted a happy ending, but instead I got life's truth. Leslie Jamison's debut will render you speechless and amazed, and leave you thinking about it for days. ( )

Sometimes you pick up a book and it ends up being one of those truly amazing pieces of writing, the kind you wish you could have created when you were in your early twenties with college-angst. The kind professors yearn for and literary critics swoon over. Leslie Jamison makes me green with writers-envy. Her ability to take a string of simple words and turn them into a profound sentence blew me away on (what felt like) every page.

On the material surface, The Gin Closet is a novel about two women, one trying to find herself, one trying to survive. When Stella learns she has an estranged aunt she packs up her meaningless New York City existence and moves to the desert to help this broken woman cope with alcoholism and loneliness. Tilly is a mess, she seems to only hurt the people around her and has been that way she since she was young. She hasn’t had an easy life so when Stella turns up Tilly surfaces from her gin-induced waking-coma to think of the life she could possibly have, a life that means something, a life near her son in San Francisco. Together, Stella and Tilly embark on a trip, not a journey to somewhere even though they have a destination; more a sort of movement, fumbling many times along the way.

Told from both women’s first-person points of view, Stella is damaged, and Tilly is lost. The dueling narratives juxtapose these women, and give the reader a unique sense of being each of them, as well as watching each of them. This is a novel about family paradigms, but more specifically, female family paradigms: what it means to be a mother, a daughter, or a sister; what we do to our family and what is done to us. Jamison draws a true, poignant portrait of the dichotomy between female relations.

The Gin Closet is about the things we live with and survive through. How we perceive the one body we are given and what we choose to do with, and to, our life. What definitions do we place upon ourself? Anorexic, Alcoholic, Loner, Dreamer? What do we make of the people around us? Stella expects to be used, expects to be abandoned, but she is hardened and does the same to others. Tilly pushes everyone away until she decides to pull them close, but too close.

A beautiful, heartbreaking portrait of the female soul, a novel with an exquisite use of language, Leslie Jamison’s debut is remarkable in its simplistic truth. She doesn’t pander to the audience, she doesn’t mince words, she’s obvious but understated. Like Marilyn Robinson’s Housekeeping, or Alice Munro’s The Beggar Maid, The Gin Closet is unsettling but utterly remarkable. ( )

This is a dark and troubled story. Stella is a bit adrift in her life. She works as a personal assistant for an inspirational writer who is more of a barracuda in her out of the spotlight life. She's dating a married man. And she spends her evenings at alcohol and drug soaked parties in New York City. She's never quite decided what to make of her life, marking time until her indomitable grandmother starts to fail. Giving up her unsatisfying existence in the city to be the caretaker for her grandmother, she discovers that her mother had a sister, Tilly, about whom Stella knows nothing. After her grandmother's death, she feels honor-bound to tell Tilly face to face that her mother is dead and so she sets off to find this wayward aunt, estranged from the family for so many years. Tilly has had a hard life. She's a serious alcoholic, living in a trash-filled trailer, hoarding gin and she is reluctant to let Stella into her life. But Stella pushes her way in and Tilly and Stella create a fragile family as Stella tries to help Tilly finally get her life on track.

Stella and Tilly both narrate the story alternately, offering the reader glimpses of their broken souls. Tilly's back story, her time as a prostitute, the birth of her son Abe, her inability to break her dependence on alcohol, and the secrets and lies that drove her out of her family are all powerful and terrible stories. Stella is not quite a counterpoint to Tilly's unrelentingly bleak and doomed person. She details her own disappointments and the mind-numbing stagnation of her life. Really, the misery and dysfunction that infuse this novel is overwhelming. Jamison has captured the despair and pain of alcoholism, the death-grip with which the addiction holds its sufferers and she has accurately portrayed the futility and hopelessness that can thread its way into the lives of the people around the alcoholic. This is not a comfortable read. It is not a happily ever after. It is tragedy on a personal scale. And it can be hard to read but equally hard from which to turn away. ( )