Addiction is a handy tool in fiction because it causes characters to behave in dramatically destructive ways. And fictional characters don’t need to sober up because fiction does not require redemption — they can just perish. But there are no good memoirs about being a drunk and staying a drunk. Memoirs about addiction are always recovery stories — and, fortunately, recovery is a great subject. If addiction is an attempt to medicate bad feeling, recovery forces the writer to experience it straight, like everyone else.

In fact, for all the “this was living” justification of her drinking life, Jamison’s book actually becomes more alive and more interesting in the second half, when she starts wrestling with her demons sober, which is to say really wrestling.

Jamison’s prose is strikingly uneven. The writing itself seems tipsy: It can be energetic, colorful, fun, buzzy, affecting and spot on, but also loose, sloppy, digressive and excessively poetized at moments, veering into nebulous grandiosity. In “The Empathy Exams,” Jamison’s acclaimed book of essays, her writing benefited from the tighter form of the essay, whereas in this book, like a drunk spinning a colorful yarn at a party, she sometimes loses track of her audience and what we need to know. Her tale is bloated with detail about what she and various boyfriends did together too, while far too little is said about more central questions such as the curious lack of attempts at intervention by those boyfriends, not to mention her accomplished parents and her brothers. Perhaps she wants to preserve her family’s privacy, but, of course, the need for privacy is at odds with the needs of a memoir.

The redeeming grace of the book is Jamison’s honesty. She shared at an A.A. meeting that before she gets out of the car, she makes sure to turn the radio from the pop station she was enjoying to NPR in order to impress her boyfriend, and a woman in the meeting laughed and warmed up to her — and so will readers. Just when her self-indulgence becomes wearying, she cuts through it with a critique of her own self-absorption. She chooses to share many unflattering moments, both large and small. There was the time, for example, when she was living with her dying grandmother in order to take care of her, but instead she spent her nights holed upstairs in her room drinking wine she pinched from the hotel where she worked and her mornings trying to write her novel about alcoholism through a hangover. (In fact, her sense of moral failing was so keen that she was driven to ease her guilt with more booze.)

Emotional, as well as factual, honesty is the sine qua non of a memoir. Yet this kind of deep honesty — the merciless self-examination and exposure that Jamison displays — is increasingly rare in memoirs now that readers can, and will, attack them online. And many memoirists no longer feel the literary necessity of self-scrutiny, as the advertisements-for-myself-style writing on social media has been culturally validated.

The book is at its least successful when Jamison diverges from alcoholism to the larger social issue of criminalization of drug addiction, including the persecution of pregnant drug abusers and the targeting of minorities in the war on drugs. She trots out familiar arguments (that addicts should be suffering from a disease, not criminals) that may be true, but fail to advance the conversation. Attempts to link those arguments to her story seem more than a little strained. She writes about the infamous case of Marcia Powell — a mentally ill prostitute and crystal meth addict who died of heat exposure in 2009 in an outdoor holding cell in the Arizona desert. “My story included the woman who died in a cage in a desert, or her story included me; not just because of my guilt — the guilt of my privilege, or my survival — but because we both put things inside our bodies to change how we felt,” she writes.

The analogy seems like such a stretch that it belies the truth of each of their experiences. Jamison writes that while society would prefer to view the two women separately, she rejects that narrative — an assertion that seems like a clumsy attempt to ward off potential (unfair) criticism that her social privilege makes her own suffering an unworthy topic. Likewise, at the close of the book, she writes of the recovering alcoholics she met in A.A.: “In Iowa, in Kentucky, in Wyoming. In Los Angeles, in Boston, in Portland. I could say I wrote this book for all of them — for all of us — or I could say they wrote this book for me.” Identification rendered that broadly — the fantasy that the similarity between her and other addicts is so great that those strangers could actually have written her memoir — feels fulsome and so simplistic as to be almost silly.

The book is dedicated to “anyone addiction has touched.” Such readers will doubtless relate to her story and be grateful for her honesty and insight. But what about readers who do not have a personal interest in the subject? Jamison’s book falls into that vast category of good books that tantalize the reader with all the ways in which they could have been better.