Nine months into my second sobriety — the sobriety I’m still inside of, seven years and counting — I stopped going to meetings and found myself wanting deeply to drink. I’d just moved back to the New England college town where I’d spent several years drinking heavily, and all the old bars made me nostalgic. I remembered their crushed peanut shells and vodka specials, the sweet blur of that nightly surrender. The shimmering alternate world in which I decided to drink again grew close once more. It lay just beyond the drudgework of recanting: I know I said I was an alcoholic and then took it back and said I wasn’t really and then took that back and said I actually was but the thing is I’m really not, I promise. Then I’d be back in the sweet autumnal swirl of red wine and hard cider, the chilled salt slide of dirty martinis. It would be like finally crawling back under the covers on a cold morning.

That’s when I found “Infinite Jest.” David Foster Wallace’s novel didn’t exactly lead me back to meetings, though I did return to them, but it helped me understand why I needed them. More specific, it helped me understand that certain things about meetings could drive me crazy and that I could still need them. The novel had metabolized recovery with so much rigor that it had already asked all my questions and weathered all my intellectual discomforts. It documented what Wallace called the “grudging move toward maybe acknowledging that this unromantic, unhip, clichéd A.A. thing — so unlikely and unpromising ... this goofy slapdash anarchic system of low-rent gatherings and corny slogans and saccharine grins and hideous coffee” might actually offer hope, in its simplicity and its slogans, in its church-basement coffee and its effusion of anonymous and unqualified love.

While Berryman and Jackson understood the project of writing sobriety in terms of deprivation — denying themselves the luxuries of plot and stylistic adornment, eschewing the momentous for the plain-spoken — Wallace wrote recovery with an exuberant excess. “Infinite Jest” is full of humor and wild imagination — giant feral hamsters roaming the land, Québécois-separatist assassins in wheelchairs — and its vision of recovery is similarly full of earnest absurdity: grown men crawling across cheap carpeting with teddy bears tucked into the crooks of their arms, sober folk struggling with “pastry dependence” or a man in rehab killing alley cats to get a sense of “resolution.” “Serious AAs look like these weird combinations of Gandhi and Mr. Rogers,” the novel observes, “with tattoos and enlarged livers and no teeth.”

If I’d read “The Lost Weekend” rooting for Don Birnam to get drunk again, I read “Infinite Jest” rooting for Don Gately — one of Wallace’s protagonists, a beleaguered halfway-house counselor — to stay sober. Gately describes the newly sober as “so desperate to escape their own interior” that they want “to lay responsibility for themselves at the feet of something as seductive and consuming as their former friend the Substance.” I wanted to lay myself at the feet of the book that told me that.

Wallace himself went to a Boston rehab called Granada House in late 1989, seven years before “Infinite Jest” was published and nearly 20 years before his suicide in 2008. In his 2012 biography of Wallace, “Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story,” D.T. Max argues that Wallace quickly understood the ways that recovery was also a “literary opportunity.” He credits recovery as part of Wallace’s growing commitment to “single-entendre writing, writing that meant what it said.” Recovery shifted Wallace’s whole notion of what writing could do, what purpose it might serve — made him want to dramatize the saving alchemy of community, the transformative force of outward-facing attention, the possibilities of simplicity as an alternative to the clever alibis of complexity. (The rehab staff, he wrote in an anonymous online testimonial often attributed to him, recognized his “meaningless intellectualization as a way of evading terrible truths.”) I’d been so afraid of sobriety as a flatline, as Jackson had been afraid of sobriety as a flatline, as Berryman and Johnson and maybe the older waitress sitting at the Tuesday-morning meeting had been afraid of sobriety as a flatline. I’d been afraid that meetings were basically lobotomies served alongside coffee-flavored water and Chips Ahoy!; afraid that even if sobriety could offer stability and sincerity and maybe even salvation, it could never be a story. But “Infinite Jest” knew better. It wasn’t that the novel’s brilliance survived the deadening force of sobriety. Its brilliance depended on what sobriety had wrought.

Three years after I got sober, I found myself teaching Denis Johnson’s stories to a classroom of college students in Connecticut: another circle of chairs full of people listening to tales of drugged-out misadventure. My students seemed unspeakably cool — they spent their weekends finding their spirit animals and doing drugs I’d never heard of — and I was desperate to earn their affection. On the first day of class, I brought two dozen doughnuts and a cardboard box of coffee, and then I kept bringing them each week, afraid that if I stopped, the students would be disappointed. When we read Johnson’s stories about barflies and hallucinated visions, I could see myself a decade earlier, convinced that these fever dreams had a monopoly on creative brilliance, these farmhouses full of pharmaceutical opium and outdoor movie screens lit by the gigantic faces of angels. I asked the class if they had a favorite story from the collection. “Don’t worry,” I said. “There’s no right answer.”

But I was lying. There was a right answer. Their favorite story was supposed to be my favorite story, which was now “Beverly Home” — the only one about recovery. Johnson’s protagonist is finally sober and working at a rehabilitation center for the elderly and disabled, where he spends his days walking the O-shaped circuit of its lobby with the patients: “All these weirdos, and me getting a little better every day right in the midst of them,” he says. “I had never known, never even imagined for a heartbeat, that there might be a place for people like us.”