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Voices on Addiction: One More Conversation
My father died alone at dawn on a Sunday in December. He was fifty-seven, and had been living with his parents in his childhood home in Tucson, Arizona. His father went to wake him for breakfast and...
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Voices on Addiction: All the Ways to Save Your Life
I. The first time I was confronted with my mortality, I was five. I don’t think I fully grasped the question the doctor posed to me, but I obviously understood it well enough because I told him I...
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Voices on Addiction: They Call It Spirits
In April and May, Voices on Addiction is partnering with Writing Our Lives (WOL) and its creator, Vanessa Martír. WOL came out of Vanessa’s deep want to see stories like her own out in the world....
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Voices on Addiction: Fault Lines
In April and May, Voices on Addiction is partnering with Writing Our Lives (WOL) and its creator, Vanessa Martír. WOL came out of Vanessa’s deep want to see stories like her own out in the world....
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Voices on Addiction: Happy Birthday to Me
In April and May, Voices on Addiction is partnering with Writing Our Lives (WOL) and its creator, Vanessa Martír. WOL came out of Vanessa’s deep want to see stories like her own out in the world....
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Voices on Addiction: A Conversation with Amber van de Bunt
In her debut memoir, Overcome, Amber van de Bunt is living life as Karmen Karma, porn star extraordinaire and alcoholic addict careening off the rails. Between childhood depression and a sex work...
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Voices on Addiction: Advice
So a friend’s daughter is using drugs. Do I know anything? What can she do? What I know has taken a long time to learn, and even longer to accept. There is nothing she can do. There was nothing I could...
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Voices on Addiction: How to Stay
One night in my early forties, I came to bed and said something curt to my husband. His reply jolted me. “Have you noticed how we only fight at night?” he said. “Why is that?” He wasn’t joking or...
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Voices on Addiction: A Conversation with Emily Arnason Casey
I met Emily Arnason Casey while we were students earning our MFAs in writing at Vermont College of Fine Arts in 2011. I read Emily’s debut book, Made Holy: Essays, several years ago in manuscript form,...
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Voices on Addiction: The Promises
We will regain control of our lives. “Do they know my name,” he asked, “the people in your group?” It was summer in Texas. I unpeeled my thighs from the driver’s seat and crossed the street toward my...
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Voices on Addiction: Chicken Marsala and Meth
My sister, who is indisputably the best cook in the family, once whipped up chicken Marsala from only what was already in her fridge. I was impressed by this feat, and by how good it tasted with the...
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Voices on Addiction: Jokerman
When my sister and I were teenagers, in the mid-90s, my family took a couple of trips to Fort Myers to stay with my uncle and aunt during spring breaks. After decades in Madison, Ohio, Clyde and Ruby...
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Voices on Addiction: Jack and the Boss
I mean, I’m sure he’s taken a drink or two a few times in his life, but he was never a drinker either. And he eats right and he’s in the gym. Well, that’s what happens. [Laughs] Don’t do drugs. Don’t...
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Voices on Addiction: The Opposite of Hallelujah
My brother keeps his shoes on a stacked wooden shelving system, one pair per compartment. Everything in his home is labeled in careful, imperfect handwriting. He eats with his fist closed tightly...
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Voices on Addiction: We Love Our Sons, We Raise Our Daughters
About a year after the sentence “indelible on the hippocampus was the sound of their laughter” became a rallying cry for all women who have been ridiculed by the boys and men who hurt them, I was...
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Voices on Addiction: A Conversation with Erin Khar
I eagerly ripped Erin Khar’s debut memoir, Strung Out: One Last Hit and Other Lies that Nearly Killed Me, from the envelope at the mailbox and read as I walked home, so absorbed that I narrowly avoided...
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Voices on Addiction: Katie Calls
Katie calls at noon on Monday. I’m making breakfast for my two young daughters—their favorite—scrambled eggs and pancakes. They start to fight over the pink plate. Emerson goes for it, quick. Brenner...
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Voices on Addiction: A Body Full of Ghosts
When you grow up in a conservative Christian household it feels like the world is always ending. We really started going to church after my dad got sober. We went to church in other church basements,...
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Voices on Addiction: Call Us Beautiful
The first time I wrote about addiction was in the mid-1990s, in a creative writing class at Columbia University. The professor asked us to write about something beautiful from our childhood. I wrote...
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Voices on Addiction: The Economics of Gentrified Vice
On a dark night last spring I discovered how accustomed I had grown to my nighttime view, drowned out by Amante’s pulsating pizza ad. Its vibrant hum syncopating with the corner’s streetlight:...
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