You'd Be Home Now (102)

When we think about the twenty million people facing substance abuse disorders, we also have to think about the people not included in that number who are touched by it in some way. Family members. Friends. Schools. Communities. And when you add those people, the number of people affected by addiction rises exponentially. This is not an invisible crisis. It’s a public health crisis. It’s in your house, your town, your school. It’s sitting next to you on the bus. It’s in the face of the person who asks you for spare change outside the store. It’s the person who does your taxes, polishes your nails, takes your ticket at the movies, or tells you it’s time to register for the SATs.

    The face of addiction is you and me and everyone.

I chose to write this book not from the point of view of Joey but from that of his sister, Emory. She’s watching from the outside as her brother wrestles with addiction. When I visit schools to talk about my books, I often give a writing exercise called “My Biggest Secret.” I ask students to write down the biggest secret they’ve never told anyone on a piece of paper. I don’t ask them to read it aloud, because it’s a secret, after all. When they’ve written their secret, we talk about using that as the first line of a book and how to answer the questions the secret raises, at which point the secret is no longer a secret: it belongs to fiction, and thus, a story is born.

One afternoon after students had left the school library, I was helping put chairs back into place when I saw a yellow sticky note on the floor. I picked it up.

I love my sister but I hate my sister because she is on drugs. That is all my parents care about, not me. It’s like I’m invisible.

I pinned that sticky note to my laptop when writing Emory’s story of invisibility. Because when we talk about addiction, we have to talk about collateral damage: the mental health of the kids and adults surrounding the addict. How do you live when your life has been upended by someone else’s health crisis? When you feel guilty about wanting to go to a dance, or be kissed, or go away to college, because right next to you, someone else is suffering?

    Emory’s feeling of invisibility leads her to make some faulty choices, but in the end, it also awakens her to something larger: you have to make a choice to fight to help those you love survive, but you have to fight to let yourself live, too. After all, as Liza tells Emory, “And if you’re not, like, solid with yourself, how can you help somebody else?”

We need to get solid with ourselves and change the conversation surrounding addiction and mental health from a punitive one of “You did this to yourself” and “You’re weak” and “That’s not my problem” to one of empathy, compassion, and care. We need to demand full access to care for everyone, not just those lucky enough to have insurance (which is pretty meager for most people, let’s be honest).

Because you know what? There are millions and millions of Joeys and Emorys out there, and they should not be invisible.

They live here, too.





RESOURCES



Al-Anon and Alateen

al-anon.org


Alcoholics Anonymous (AA)

aa.org


The Fix

thefix.com


Narcotics Anonymous (NA)

na.org


National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) nami.org/Home


Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network (RAINN) rainn.org


Smart Recovery: Self-Management and Recovery Training smartrecovery.org


Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration samhsa.gov/?find-help/?national-helpline


The Trevor Project

thetrevorproject.org





ACKNOWLEDGMENTS


I had a writing teacher once who told my class that you never really know how to write a book until you reach your eighth book. Gasps and despair filled the small seminar room. After all, most of us were struggling with finishing a draft of what we hoped would be our first book. An eighth book? That seemed distant and unlikely.

I’m not even close to an eighth book, but I can say You’d Be Home Now, my third book, the very one you are holding in your hands right now, was the most difficult for me to figure out how to write (and this is coming from a writer whose previous two books tackled self-harm and grief). It started as the seed of an idea gifted to me by Delacorte publisher Beverly Horowitz: “Why don’t you write a contemporary Our Town and focus on the opioid epidemic?”

Maybe you’ve seen a production of Our Town, Thornton Wilder’s 1938 play about small-town life in Grover’s Corners, or perhaps you’ve seen the 1940 film version. It’s a grand and touching story about life and appreciating it while you have it (that’s the short version).

I spent a lot of time thinking about the play and the characters and taking notes and musing and wondering how to fold the opioid crisis into this story of what was, in the beginning, a story about a girl, Emory, and a boy, Gage, and the small town of Mill Haven. I tend to overwrite everything in the beginning (Big pharma! A house fire! Robbery!), and it’s only with the help of my magnificent editor, Krista Marino, and my agent, Julie Stevenson, that I was able to rein things in and realize the story was really about Emory and her brother, Joey.

    So I wrote the story of a quiet girl, the “good one” in her family, who experiences addiction through the struggles of her wild brother, Joey. And I owe all the gratitude in the world to Krista Marino, Lydia Gregovic, and Julie Stevenson for shepherding this book and helping me fine-tune the story of a girl and her brother and the long path they’ll walk together. Extra thanks to this trio for agreeing to do virtual meetings with me during a pandemic, when I often couldn’t leave the house for days and desperately needed to talk to someone other than my dogs and cats.