Current Affairs

“It’s not that hard to let yourself be led by something that doesn’t match up with your morals, when you’re desperate.” — Jennifer DinesJennifer Dines is a Boston-based schoolteacher, poet, and essayist who has written an article for Current Affairs called "The Quit-Lit Pseudoscience and Faulty Feminism of Women’s Sobriety Memoirs," which critiques the bestselling books targeted at women recovering from alcoholism. In her piece, Dines shows how these books often try to sell women on expensive courses so they can "buy their way to health," disparaging free alternatives like Alcoholics Anonymous in favor of unrealistically expensive lifestyle changes (e.g. yoga retreats).Dines also discusses how these books use the language of social justice to try to convince readers that their own self-care (and their purchase of the authors' products) advances broader feminist goals. In this conversation, we discuss how difficult it is to get accurate information and receive quality healthcare, and how hard it is for despera