Jessica Hoppe
First in the Family: A Story of Survival, Recovery, and the American Dream
Flatiron Books / September 10, 2024 / 272 pp / $29.99
Reviewed by Hope Kidd / November 2024
Jessica Hoppe finds herself drunkenly stumbling across the West Side Highway in New York City, but is miraculously not pummeled by speeding vehicles. A bystander helps Hoppe reach safety away from the highway, calls her an Uber, and asks the question that begins a realization for the author. As opposed to a blaming method of questioning (such as What’s wrong with you? How could you do something so stupid?), she asks, “Do you know what’s happening to you?”
In her debut book, First in the Family: A Story of Survival, Recovery, and the American Dream, Jessica Hoppe writes much more than a recovery memoir. In fact, the focus is not on the recovery itself. Hoppe, eager to analyze what drew her to addiction in the first place, takes a deep dive into the past and her family. She researches her Honduran and Ecuadorian roots, interviewing family members, and asking hard questions. The book is partly an examination of personal and family history. “I knew our family tree was rooted in the secrets that kept us sick,” she writes. “I started digging.”
It is hard to provide a plot summary of the memoir; it is not told in a linear manner, but rather, a fragmented one. The author traces her own past from her beginnings in Texas and a move to New Jersey, to months-long homelessness when her family lived with acquaintances. She recalls racism in grade school (another girl tells her she looks like a monkey), as well as undiagnosed dyslexia, and sexual violence committed against her as a teenager, followed by self-blame for the incident.
In addition to pondering familial addictive tendencies, biological components, and personal trauma as factors for addiction, Hoppe also examines colonization, racialized trauma, and systemic inequalities as roots of substance use disorder. The book exposes the disparity between society’s views of white addicts versus addicts of color. She calls out how “systemic inequities perpetuate a narrative that drug use among white people is recreational, while drug use among people of color is criminal.” She admits her frustration with often being the only person of color in an Alcoholics Anonymous circle. This relates back to society’s frequent default method of questioning Blacks and people of color who struggle with addiction with inquiries ready to lay blame. Hoppe hopes that society can change its quick-to-judge stance and pause long enough to ask questions more along the lines of her rescuer’s question, “Do you know what’s happening to you?”
While forever grateful to Alcoholics Anonymous for saving her life, Hoppe also writes very directly of the racism that can exist within AA. She writes of times that she feels the need to speak up in meetings, on political and racial issues, but is silenced or shamed. “Today, the culture of white supremacy is easily (and often) perpetuated by any AA member by simply referencing Tradition Ten,” writes Hoppe. (Tradition Ten states, “Alcoholics Anonymous has no opinion on outside issues; hence the AA name ought never be drawn into public controversy.”)
Hoppe was once told after a meeting not to refer to herself as a person of color, that the group values the principles of AA over personalities. Another time, she was told that it was her ego which was looking to blame her parents, the systems that be, and patriarchy for her dependency; that she needed to just “stick to alcohol” as a way of taking personal responsibility. It was as if AA was using its principles to ignore racism and inequities, making it a potentially dangerous place for anyone vulnerable.
Hoppe seamlessly weaves research into the memoir (there are eleven pages of bibliographic notes), but in a way that does not make the reader feel as if they are reading an academic paper. For example, she reports how white settlers introduced distilled liquor to Indigenous communities in the US in the 1700s, making their land easier to pilfer. She tells of Handsome Lake, a late 1700s Seneca chief who believed in holistic sobriety. She describes reading in the book The Red Road to Wellbriety: In the Native American Way (White Bison), about how Handsome Lake’s teachings are the root of group therapies, and how the recovery movement began among Native American peoples hundreds of years before AA was established.
Hoppe’s voice is both introspective and expressive. Speaking about President George H. W. Bush’s September 1989 televised national address on drugs (https://catalog.archives.gov/id/54630), Bush said drugs were a great threat, that drugs “were being smuggled from the same places my family came from,” Hoppe says. She goes on, “That night, as a little girl desperate to fit in, I feared the implication of what I had heard and how that reflected what I was experiencing at school. Kids already treated me differently.” Later, during recovery, Hoppe begins journaling. “Eventually, I learned the voices in my head—the shrieks and the murmurs—were a part of me, echoes of the harms I’d endured, projections of prejudice and fears. I would have to get used to interrupting them, challenging and speaking over them.”
While I did not go looking for a tell-all, juicy memoir revealing the messy road to recovery (a là Augusten Burroughs’ Dry), I admit I kept wishing for more focus on the recovery itself. I had unanswered questions: What were those first few days without alcohol like? What withdrawal symptoms did she have? What happened the first time she had to say “No thanks” to a drink at a social event? How did she tell work and friends she was in recovery? Did she lose any friendships because of her decision to seek sobriety?
But I believe her choice to leave out the sordid alcoholic-becoming-sober details points to a deeper reason for telling her story. Hoppe hopes that her own story will encourage others to seek help, especially other BIPOC. “I wanted more stories of our [BIPOC] recovery,” she writes. Furthermore, she aims to change the fact that drug use among people of color and poorer communities is considered criminal, while it is considered worthy of rehabilitation for wealthy and white communities. And she starts this change with herself, a woman of color. “My confession [of substance use disorder] does nothing to prevent the disorder from arising, but by offering myself as an example, I could initiate a new conversation,” she writes. She wrote this book “not because I believe my story can save you but because I want you to know: yours will.”
The book provides much to ponder. What is the collective responsibility of white people in acknowledging the existence of unequal treatment of BIPOC with substance use disorder, versus the white and/or wealthy people with substance use disorder? Have I myself treated addicts with a blaming, discriminatory stance, instead of pausing to see the human behind the addiction? Hoppe’s story reminds the reader to be aware and to recognize our role in perpetuating social and racial injustices in the area of addiction.
Told through the lens of her own recovery, First in the Family is part memoir, part social criticism upholding the power of storytelling and the strength of family. It sings of the beauty of healing, of freedom from secrets, and of sobriety.
Hope Elizabeth Kidd lives in New York City with her husband, five children, and an assortment of pets. She enjoys writing about motherhood, mental health, and body image. She is working on a memoir about her childhood in Zimbabwe and recently completed her MFA in creative writing from the City College of New York. She’s been published in MUTHA magazine, Halfway Down the Stairs, The Manifest Station, and a print anthology by Horns and Rattles Press. For two years, she worked as an editor on Promethean, City College’s literary journal. At any given moment, you can find her drinking a mocha or complaining about laundry. You can find her on Instagram at @hopeelizabethwrites.