Suburban Junkie - Jude Hassan

Title: Suburban Junky: From Honor Roll to Heroin Addict

Author: Jude Hassan

Published: Genre: Memoir

Rating: 3/5- Good. Read it, have a good time and move on. Or not.

Book Source: Library

Recommended if you like: Memoirs, Family and Relationships, Drug Culture

 
What Its About:  
Jude Hassan was always a "good kid": good grades, involved in sports, close to his family. He had a lot to look forward too.  After moving to a new town however, Jude decides he wants to be something new, something fun. He wants to be popular. He wants to make friends and date girls and have a good time. Jude makes a new friend, a buddy who can hook him up with friends, girls...and drugs.

Peer pressure, naiveté, and curiosity lead Jude down a steep, scary slope. What begins as an innocent couple of drinks and tokes of marijuana turns surprisingly quickly to a heroin addiction. Within a few months, he is hooked and his perfect life has slipped away. 

Losing his parents trust doesn't reach him. Ending up in trouble with the law doesn't reach him. It's only by the sheet grace of God that Jude is able to get control, with the guidance and love of his dying father, as well as a burning guilt of what he has done and lost. 

The Bottom Line: 
A very interesting read. Hassan spares nothing in his honest and detailed explanation of how quickly drug use can get a hold of you and lead to poor choices, bad decisions, and loss of control. Some of the book (particularly how his mother spoke to him) felt a bit contrived, silly. Of course, I can't possibly know...but I chose to believe that he was rewriting her words for ease. But overall this book was well written. Worth a read.

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Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors (Throwback Thursdays Review)

I am a fan of memoirs and biographical non-fiction. Within that genre I am fairly flexible about what types of stories I enjoy. Stories about illness, families, work, pets and animals, I read it all. One of my favorites is adventure and survival stories.  

Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors by Piers Paul Read and Scott P. Werther is a classic in this area. Time has not changed the impact of their story, most well known for the desperate survival tactic utilized by survivors. But this story is about so much more: desperation, fear, love and loss.

In October of 1972, an Uruguayan rugby team was on its way to a game in Chile. Unfortunately, their plane had trouble and crashed in Argentina in the snowy Andes Mountains. The forty-five or so survivors gathered together to wait for rescue, but after weeks many more had died and hope was gone.

Survivors huddled in what was left of the fuselage of the plane, with no food or supplies. A small group of boys set out to find help when the original search was called off. Eventually, the survivors found themselves in the most direst of positions and were forced to cannibalize the bodies of those who had died in the hopes of lasting long enough for rescue to arrive.

This book was an extremely well written story of tragedy and human endurance. The accounting of those harrowing and horrific days is also a tribute to those who were lost. An excellent read for anyone interested in survival stories, but definitely not for the faint of heart.

3/5- Good. Read it, have a good time and move on. Or not.

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When Katie Wakes - Fowler (Throwback Thursday Review)

Out of difficult and sometimes horrific times, artists often grow. No where is this more obvious than the case of Connie May Fowler. A product of an abusive and dysfunctional childhood, Fowler grew into a beautiful writer.

In her memoir, When Katie Wakes, Fowler shares her personal experiences growing up in a family with a multi-generational history of domestic violence. With stark candor, and such an air of normalcy and acceptance, she shares heartbreaking stories of the physical and emotional violence she endured as an adult when she too found herself in the same sort of relationship, as is common in  abused cases. The cycle perpetuates.

It seems only through unconditionally loving another, in her case a puppy named Katie, she is able to experience true love and acceptance for herself She clings to Katie with the need for hope and a reason to go on. And it is ultimately Katie who enables Fowler to gather the strength to walk away from the horror and sadness of her situation and find redemption and happiness.

This memoir touched me deeply. My personal background, though not quite similar, isn't very far either. Thankfully, my loved ones were able to break this cycle and move on to healthier and happier lives. Reading this book I saw not only a story, but the reality in the acceptance of this horrible situation. I saw, and felt, the truth of why abused women often return to their abusers, time and time again. I saw my childhood.

Unassuming, yet so well written.

I loved this book.

 5/5- Excellent. Keep it, treasure it, reread it.

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Breathing For A Living - Rothenberg (Throwback Thursday Review)

When Laura Rothenberg was born, in 1981, the average life for expectancy for a patient with cystic fibrosis was 18 years old. Now, thanks to advancements in diagnosis and treatment, the average life expectancy is 35 to 40 years. And while this is a significant difference, it is still a very, very poor prognosis.

Rothenberg spent her entire life fighting the disease and facing the knowledge that she would die young. She even admits to having spent her childhood planning out her funeral and trying to figure out how to ensure that she is not forgotten after her death.

Effectively, Rothenberg published a memorable memoir (which supposedly originated from a class assignment) entitled Breathing For A Living. She also presented an NPR "radio diary" in 2002 called "My So-Called Lungs" (a play on the teen popular television show "My So Called Life), which featured recordings from two years of her struggle. 


In her memoir, The Brown University student shares the good times, when she is healthy and able to return to school and her friends, as well as the bad times, when she is hospitalized for weeks struggling with illness. She offers a brutally honest and open look at what life looks like for a young women who is marked for an early death and how one goes about living life to the fullest before it passes you by.  She discusses her loss, guilt and fear at having lived longer than many fellow CF sufferers/friends and points out how time presents additional struggle, rather than relief.

She even falls in love.

Eventually, the disease took its toll and Rothenberg and her family decided to move forward with a double-lung replacement, a surgery which sadly bought her only about a year and a half.  Sadly, the new lungs eventually failed her and she passed away at the age of 22. But she lived as full a life as she could and her writing speaks to what a mature, insightful young woman she was, a fighter to the end.


Living in the Boston area, I used to travel into the Longwood Medical area every day for work. I often sat on the subway system with those who were headed to one of the many hospitals in the area: Brigham and Women's, Boston's Children's, Dana-Farber, Josline Diabetes, among others. I have a distinct memory of sitting near a young woman and her beau (husband, boyfriend) one day and being, I'm embarrassed to say, annoyed at her constant coughing. I recall thinking that I did not want to catch whatever cold or flu she was carrying.

It was only a year to two after that I found and read this memoir. It dawned on me that it is not at all beyond the possibility that that young woman was, in fact, Laura Rothenberg herself (I think I recall her talking about traveling to Boston for medical care). Even if it was not, it is entirely possible that the woman, whoever she was, was a CF patient and not just sick, as I had assumed. A learning moment.

Only partly due to this chance encounter, I enjoyed this read quite a bit. The writing is strong.  The story is moving, while being educational and interesting. Anyone who has an interest in such memoirs would most definitely enjoy this read.


 3/5- Good. Read it, have a good time and move on. Or not.

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A Tree Grows in Brooklyn - Smith (Throwback Thursday Review)

Throwback Thursday Reviews

Another favorite read was A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith. Written in 1943, this American classic is the coming-of-age story of a young Irish girl in turn of the century Brooklyn, New York.

Francie Nolan is the product of her home life. She is an idealistic dreamer, but also a practical fact checker. She loves her father dearly, but he is battling his own demons and is unable to support his family. They live in poverty. Francie's mother struggles to ensure that Francie and her brother never lose sight of the harsh realities of life, so that they will hopefully make better choices. Francie's aunt is looking for someone to love her, most often in all the wrong places.

Francie struggles to understand and find beauty in her world and latches onto what she sees as its one sign of beauty, a tree that grows outside her apartment window. The Tree of Heaven, a metaphor for Francie herself, survives despite hunger, despite the struggles of living in a harsh urban environment, forced to figure out its world all alone.

This book is beautifully written. The reality it offers about the harshness of life is heartbreaking, while being touching and maintaining hope for the future, like Francie herself. I do not know how I missed reading this as a child. I was well into my thirties the first time I read it, and yet I cried a little and fell in love with this young girl, struggling to to find her place in life.

If I was a re-reader, this would be top on my list...and that is saying a lot!

5/5- Excellent. Keep it, treasure it, reread it.

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All Souls - McDonald (Throwback Thursday Review )

Throwback Thursday Reviews

One of my favorite reads is made even more timely by the recent conviction and sentencing of gangster James "Whitey" Bulger.

All Souls, by Michael Patrick MacDonald, caught my interest not because of the gangster story - in fact I typically have no interest in such a thing - but rather because of its draw as an Irish family story, from South Boston (close to where I lived at the time), and its 1970's/1980's time frame.

MacDonald and his many siblings were born and raised in the enclave of "Southie", the southern section of Boston. The Irish hub of Boston, Southie is known for its closeness, its Irish pride, its racism towards outsiders, and for its poverty.

With a mother who was known to wear miniskirts and play her accordion in local bars to supplement her public assistance funds, while searching for the next male companion to help support the family (which all too often brought additional children, but no additional income), the MacDonald household was not all that different than many in the Old Colony projects of South Boston. The MacDonald family, however, seems to have had more than their fair share of troubles. Mental illness, drug abuse, deaths, and an unending amount of heartbreak.

While this book is about this family and their trials, it is also about the South Boston neighborhood and its struggles. Sadly, with the rise of James "Whitey" Bulger and his gang of organized crime mobsters, this close knit community and the MacDonald family quickly became victims.  A center for drug trafficking, murder and poverty, Southie and its inhabitants struggled with the ravages of the crack heyday of the 1980's and the crime associated with such a trade.

More than, perhaps, anything else though Southie struggled with the ridiculous denial that this organized crime existed. While family members got hooked on drugs and died, Southie inhabitants refused to admit, or even see, the horrible things happening in their own backyards - whether out of fear and denial or just hard headedness.. Many years of struggle have followed to clean up and strengthen the community, though it will never be what it once was. Whether that is good or bad, I will leave up to the reader.

MacDonald's account of his family and community's struggles through the 1970's and 1980's is heartbreaking, and yet reeks of tragic honesty and truth. This book is wonderfully written and well worth the read!

5/5- Excellent. Keep it, treasure it, reread it.

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