In Praise of Addiction: Or How We Can Learn to Love Dependency in a Damaged World with Elizabeth F. S. Roberts (Princeton UP, 2026)

Podcast: New Books in Food · Marshall Poe

Opublikowano: 2026-10-26

Elizabeth Roberts has experienced the suffering wrought by addiction: her sister’s destructive alcoholism and dependency on prescription drugs, her mother’s hoarding, and her own struggles with binge eating. As for so many of us, addiction brought about self-loathing, reflecting her individual failure to exercise self-control, to keep it together. But during her fieldwork studying chemical exposure in Mexico City, her sense of addiction got turned upside down. She witnessed her neighbors, both young and old, defiantly celebrate their compulsive dependencies on alcohol, drugs, and junk food instead of hiding them in shame. Roberts began to wonder if ever...