Jessica Hoppe wants to see more stories of addiction recovery, and she's beginning by adding hers to the canon.

Her new, powerful memoir, First in the Family, traces her own addiction,

inherited trauma, and the stories we tell ourselves about what it means to be the first.

Jessica's memoir, and this conversation include a lot of sensitive topics, including an

experience of sexual assault. Listen if and when you are ready.

Jessica, congratulations. Thank you so much. In First in the Family, you tell the story in vignettes,

and it is purposely disorienting, as you say, that is often the experience of addiction itself,

and you're mixing cultural criticism and your storytelling.

For the purposes of our conversation, I'd like to walk through your story and then talk

about what it is you learned at the other side of it.

So, um, great.

Where do you pinpoint, Jessica, the beginning of your addiction?

Wow.

Looking back, I can pinpoint so many moments because I honestly, like, I don't qualify my

sobriety by the time of abstinence.

I qualify my sobriety by my level of awareness, consciousness,

coherence is a word that I love that John Trudeau used often. And I don't really think of

substances as drugs and alcohol, which alcohol, by the way, is a drug. So, you know, from here forward, when I say

drugs, please know I'm talking about alcohol as well. I think that the pain that I discuss in the

book, the pain that causes that separation from ourselves, right? And I know that when I was little,

I was a really, really just excited child.

I was really alive.

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