Coming Back
By Leslie Jamison
Welcome back! We’re thrilled to kick off 2026 with this essay from American novelist and essayist Leslie Jamison in response to reading Jacob Perkins’ The Dinosaurs. Read her reflection on the play, then grab your tickets — they’re going fast.
At twenty-four hours, I sobbed in a parked car in a gravel parking lot in the middle of a freezing Iowa winter, and I barely got myself through the back door. I was twenty minutes late and it didn’t matter, really, because everyone was still there. Everyone was waiting. Beetle was celebrating a sober birthday and I didn’t even know you could get a cake for that.
At thirty days, I got a chip in a church basement and heard a man in the back row say, “Things don’t always get better, but they always get different.”
At nine months, I told my story for the first time and an elderly man called out, “This is boring!” but everyone understood he was struggling, and that was just the way he could tell us he was struggling. And also, maybe he was bored. I kept coming back. So did he.
At a year, I got a chip at the 7:30 a.m. meeting downtown, where some folks had been coming for thirty years, and other folks came for the free coffee after the shelters made them leave at 7. Sometimes, someone called out something like, “That cocksucker still owes me money!” It was all holy, the most sacred communion I’d ever known, to hear people being honest about the ways life had brought them to their knees. It was holy when they yelled, when they hurt, when they offered their unvarnished struggle. The struggle isn’t always polished; it isn’t always eloquent. Sometimes it’s just struggle.
At a year and a day, I broke up with my boyfriend because you weren’t supposed to make any major changes during the first year. I was nothing if not a girl looking for a good grade. I kept coming back to the 7:30 meeting because there was a hot personal trainer who kept catching my eye from across the room. An old-timer said, “I don’t care what brings you back. Just keep coming back.” He had my number. And then the other guy had my number. I was the only person who didn’t have my number. But it didn’t matter. I kept coming back. For fifteen years, I’ve been coming back — to rooms full of ordinary human beings, not saints; rooms full of burnt coffee and powdered donuts and fossilized Tootsie Rolls and folding chairs scraping across linoleum and absurdly-loud-flushing toilets and people who forgot tissues and other people with extra tissues, and stories that have been told a thousand times and stories that have never been told. Not yet. Because someone is still getting ready to speak — sitting in the back row, or maybe in a car parked just outside, in the gravel parking lot. Keep coming back, I want to tell them. I will too.
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In The Dinosaurs, Jacob Perkins takes us to a meeting. Saturday Survivors is a fellowship of women who share their experience, strength, and hope with each other that they may solve their common problem and help others to recover. He gives us the preamble and the song, the lilt and hum of our familiar cadences. But he gets that the meeting isn’t just the meeting, the script and the shares, the stories about getting drunk and getting better; the meeting is also setting up chairs beforehand, searching for the lost coffee urn, and checking the expiration date on the milk; it’s about making coffee and grumbling about making coffee and wanting credit for making coffee; it’s about the newcomer who turns up and goes away and comes back again; it’s about the moments of profound human resonance but also moments of friction, moments of speaking past or over each other, moments of chorus and collision; it’s about one woman hearing herself spoken by another — resonating about getting totally destroyed by booze, sure, soul and heart corroded by it; but also resonating about the ways a jam-filled donut can squirt all over your shirt. Which is all to say: recovery is life-and-death, but it’s about the little stuff, too.
The Dinosaurs knows that recovery meetings are complicated, many-headed creatures — made of many lives, many bodies, many insecurities, many open hearts — and sometimes these bodies get hungry and thirsty and tired and cranky. They interrupt the meeting to say, “Ah shit, I’ve got jam on my shirt.” They are more than voices. Their imperfection electrifies the room because it means they are fully present, and because it means they have understood that perfection isn’t a prerequisite for being loved by anyone. At thirteen years, Joan tells the room: “I didn’t believe that god saw me, that god could ever wanna take care of a person like me.”
That’s how it works: You feel yourself past saving, past loving, but then you step into a room of ordinary, flawed, struggling, funny, fucked-up people who do love you, without even knowing you; and then — this is even harder to believe — they keep loving you, even after they do know you. The parts of yourself you didn’t want anyone knowing.
I love the way this play doesn’t believe anything has to be pure in order to save us. Okay, you miss a cold beer on a hot day? Sit next to me. Sometimes renouncing the past means feeling a little bit nostalgic for it, just ask Saint Augustine. Sometimes we know what to say, and sometimes we don’t; sometimes we are just bodies in the room, and sometimes we can’t even get past the threshold. The Dinosaurs gets at the mess and struggle of being a flawed human helping other flawed humans get better, the glory of an imperfect chorus. It’s not just that recovery works despite these imperfections, but that it couldn’t work without them. Grace comes like a stranger through the doorway, like a squirt of jam on your shirt, like a sudden glimpse of the sea from a moving train, a flash of blue between buildings — not always visible, but always there.
Leslie Jamison is the author of five books, including the New York Times bestsellers Splinters, The Recovering, and The Empathy Exams. She is a contributing writer at The New Yorker and teaches at Columbia University.