In her searing and revolutionary memoir First in the Family: A Story of Survival, Recovery, and the American Dream, writer and mental health advocate Jessica Hoppe discusses and inspects addiction and how ingrained the culture is within BIPOC communities, notably within the Latine community. In writing that feels deeply cathartic and personal, she recounts how she arrived to her ongoing recovery from alcohol addiction and utilizes the story of her upbringing, along with stories of her loved ones and their interconnectedness, to unpack and interrogate intergenerational trauma and its connection to addiction. She also connects this to the ways BIPOC experiences and narratives are erased from recovery institutions, such as through stoicism within these communities that creates a barrier from being able to seek help.
First in the Family approaches and scrutinizes the American Dream and its harmful role in perpetuating addiction in BIPOC communities. Hoppe exposes the snake pit that is the American Dream through telling of its negative influence on marginalized communities who strive for a life in a country whose societal standards weren’t created for them. It also asks how this concept has been able to capture and entrap generations of marginalized communities, people who only wanted a better life.
I got the chance to correspond with Jessica Hoppe via email about her journey writing this memoir, the model minority mold society forces upon marginalized communities, and how storytelling can liberate us.
Ruby Mora: Where and when do you feel was the start of your journey in writing First in the Family?
Jessica Hoppe: I’d been writing—pitching, freelancing, blogging—for about ten years. Chasing bylines, hoping they would amount to something meaningful. The goal of writing a book was there from the beginning, but the call didn’t come for a long time. Nor did I have any idea how to navigate the publishing industry.
An outline, I’d say a sketch of the idea, formed when my grandfather died. Though I was nowhere near prepared to write it, I felt what can only be described as a calling, cliche as it may be. I was a few months sober and visiting my family at my sister’s house when we received word from Honduras that he had passed. My mother was devastated and opened up to me for the first time about the cause of his health issues and, ultimately, his death: alcoholism. They had been estranged for most of her life and thus mine. I had no relationship with this man, but suddenly, I felt connected to him. I asked my mother how she felt to have had a father who was an alcoholic and now a daughter. When she snapped at me for calling myself (and my grandfather) an addict, I knew that what threatened to come between us was a story, a lie, and I wasn’t going to allow anything to divide us. I needed my mother; I needed my whole family if I was going to survive and get well. I sensed, once again, that delta, the story told to people at my bougie AA meeting in Tribeca, NY, and the propaganda sold to families like mine. I will never forget that moment. A version of me died, the perfect reflection, the twinkle in my mother’s eye, but I stepped into it. It felt like jumping off a cliff emotionally. I held her, and we cried hard as I assured her I was, in fact, an addict. My mother accepted it and said she loved me. You’d have to ask her if she loved me more than ever, but I know she loved me for who I was, not who I was struggling to pretend to be. And that’s recovery.
After several years of rebuilding my life, the book kept calling. I was compelled to listen and soon speak up. Then, in the summer of 2020, I worked with Hanif Abdurraqib and published a piece for GEN Mag (a popular albeit short-lived magazine on Medium) titled The First Step to Recovery Is Admitting You Are Not Powerless Over Your Privilege. The response was overwhelming. I was thrilled! That’s when I knew for sure—this is the book.
RM: It’s astounding how such a major life shift caused not only your mother to open up in this capacity, but also your own realization.
I needed to challenge the narrative we’d all absorbed about the addict.
JH: Yes, that was when my recovery became real—to me, my mother, to my whole family. I knew this wasn’t something where I could put my tail between my legs, go clean myself up in the corner, and return the perfect daughter again. I understood the assignment, and it was so much more than abstinence. I needed to challenge the narrative we’d all absorbed about the addict, about drugs and drug use. At this stage in my recovery, I identify more as a “person in recovery” than an “addict,” though I use the two to describe myself. But, at that moment, I understood the power of embodying that label in the face of my mother’s fears and prejudices. To reconcile the fact of it and my co-existing, it forced her to interrogate it. Which inevitably pushed her to have compassion for her father. And I became a bit obsessed with reclaiming our story, the whole and true story of what happened to us. I discovered that substance use disorder wasn’t a deviant act or moral failure—it was a perfectly human response.
RM: Two of the many topics I identified within your memoir were the pressure to fit the mold of a model minority and the model/protective child to your parents, and I couldn’t help but see how interwoven these two desires are. I especially connected with this sentence deeply:
“The weight of that responsibility hung heavily on me. I couldn’t relate to kids my own age. They seemed to expect the adults to care for their feelings, while I took my mother’s feelings upon myself and never felt safe to express my own.”
How did it feel reflecting on this during your writing process, and do you also believe they’re interconnected?
JH: Absolutely, I had always assumed my mother and I were super close—and we were. We are. But that assumption was based upon how much she revealed to me. I felt like there were no lies or secrets between us because she told me everything. What I realized when I got sober was I was the one withholding—I wasn’t telling her my secrets. I didn’t want to worry or burden her, sort of protecting her from my truth while undermining her capacity to love me for who I am.
As the daughter of Honduran and Ecuadorian immigrants, I became addicted to measuring my value and self-worth by my achievements, unable to simply exist as a daughter to my mother and father. Identifying as an addict disrupted everything my family and I had been programmed to believe about the American Dream. And it was those toxic ideas—which we all internalize—that were keeping us apart, not us.
That’s why I felt it was so important to offer a sort of blueprint for understanding how systems affect substance use disorder, for just as we must understand how a drug operates within our bodies, we must also understand how systems of domination are at work in our lives. I was able to narrate and contextualize this imperative work by telling the story of my recovery from substance use disorder—along with my family’s history of chronic illness—as a legacy of colonialism and examine the two against the broader historical context of the criminalization and racialization of drug use in the Americas, in order to interrogate the American Dream as the ultimate gateway drug.
RM: With your memoir—in which you were able to cover and interrogate so much—you not only identified this legacy of colonialism in the context of addiction, but also stressed that the fault behind why addiction occurs doesn’t stem from the individual, but from the overall systems that work against Black, Indigenous, and People of Color, in a culture that has put the blame on the hurt.
JH: Precisely. It’s the classic cycle of control—create the conditions that cause the “problem” so you can sell the solution back to the victim. In the case of drugs, propaganda is key because the story justifies the policy that exacerbates the conditions creating symptoms that seem to affirm the propaganda. It’s all about the story and who controls the narrative.
We use drugs when we are sad and lonely and hopeless. But this story is not good for American business.
The great American drug story is one of sin, of the individual falling out of step with society by succumbing to weakness, indulging the taste for the devilish spirit inside us all to the point of degradation. The only result of this wayward path of bad behavior is punishment or redemption. Historically, fatal drug use has risen alongside colonization, industrialization, and times of collective societal pain, such as war and economic depression. We use drugs when we are sad and lonely and hopeless. But this story is not good for American business. Drug use is best framed as a morality tale, one narrated by white supremacy, specific drugs coded to specific groups—cannabis as Mexican locoweed, cocaine ghettoized as crack. Among other forms of oppression, such coding triggers the need to assimilate, align, and aspire to whiteness in order to survive.
This was the story I wanted most to tell because it was the key to my recovery. And I knew I had to be explicit in exposing it because shame is what stands between us and the help so many rightly need and rightfully deserve. The shame the system has codified into stigma is by design—it costs lives. That shame is not ours.
RM: One of the most impactful parts of your book was the chapter “Unreliable Narrator” and the subsequent chapter “Rock Bottom” where you talk about the near-death experience you had that led you to self-interrogation, along with writing out your entire first dialogue you shared at the AA meeting. In recollecting these events in order to add them to your memoir, what went through your mind?
JH: I was in avoidance for a long time. In many ways these were the hardest chapters to write, but once I was there, it was all flow. Writing “Rock Bottom” via stream of consciousness was a device I used, like morning pages, to get it out and onto the page. I thought I would go back and polish, giving it more of a narrative structure, but I just loved how the voice popped. What was interesting about relating this experience was that I have no memory of the event. I have blotted, minimal recall, but as I say in the book, my body remembers. What I do have is the testimony of the stranger who saved my life, and I keep our correspondence hidden, safely hoarded (lol) in the back of the credenza in my office. I knew in order to write this I’d have to read it again. I hadn’t faced that conversation in years, and it’s still very painful. But it also transported me right back to that feeling of insanity which jolted me into this rapid desperate expression that you read (and hear) in my book, a transmutation. The anger of being disembodied, of being so careless with myself, and then the miracle of that seed being planted when someone sees you, and offers you kindness at the lowest possible moment of your life. Seeing what you don’t or can’t see within yourself, and not giving up on you. It’s salvation.
“Unreliable Narrator” was the result of numerous revisions. I was reading How Not to Drown in a Glass of Water by Angie Cruz, and I fell in love with her narrator, Cara! That voice was like a sucker punch, and I sensed a hesitancy in my prose. I was still studying and comparing and justifying and fearing my past while suppressing my voice. I remember I started singing. I got on YouTube and watched the old vocal exercises I did as a kid. I breathed from my belly, opened my mouth as wide as I could, and let it all boom out. I heard the sound of my own voice. It was uncomfortable at first, but ultimately, a liberating exercise.
I also love Cruz’s use of documentation to generate unique forms of narration, so I had a lot of fun writing that police report. The reader and I deserve it.
RM: Storytelling can bring healing, and you share not only your story, but your family’s—your grandfather, especially— and how both knowing his story and reflecting on what he could have struggled with helped in your recovery, break generational cycles, and strive towards liberation. In what ways do you feel storytelling can liberate us as marginalized individuals?
JH: As it relates explicitly to addiction recovery, I’d say it’s crucial. Experts in the field of substance use disorder agree that stigma, particularly for Black, Indigenous, and people of color, is one of the biggest obstacles to treatment. And the most effective way to combat stigma is by telling our stories. The erasure of the historical record of BIPOC voices within the recovery movement resulted in a paucity of archival material, leading to conflicting narratives and the success of the white agenda not only to paper over the truth but also to prioritize and elevate a “norm” rather than crediting the roots.
That shame intimately affects us and divides our families and communities. The dominant cultural narrative of the addict remains the same—we’re immoral people, doing bad shit and refusing to stop because we’re selfish. Seeing me fully would require my family to interrogate that. Which would inevitably shift their understanding of the disorder and, in a way, rewrite our family history.
Dysfunction persists through silence, and silence is facilitated by shame.
It took me a while to realize and even longer to admit that I had a problem with drugs and alcohol. The only people in my family who suffered similarly wound up dead, deported, or in jail, and it has taken consistent effort to undo the programming attached to those outcomes. Understanding the true role of our country’s government in spreading this epidemic of addiction to poor communities of color—those denied fair access to resources and care, both medicinal and therapeutic—was crucial to me. It helped me shift the focus of blame for my condition from myself and my family to the truly responsible and to work consistently with my family to identify and understand this.
Dysfunction persists through silence, and silence is facilitated by shame. The isolating symptoms of addiction inevitably lead to a cycle of demoralizing behavior—a perpetual state of humiliation. And I was determined to change that. As I mentioned before, the moment I told my mother I was an alcoholic and sort of forced her to hear it—to process it and see me as its embodiment—that felt like reclamation.
Trust me, it was hard. I wanted to be the perfect daughter, the perfect tía to my nieces and nephews, someone they could admire and look up to. And I know being open about my recovery doesn’t inoculate them, but by offering myself as an example, I could initiate a new conversation. They can see there are other fates for those afflicted besides death and disgrace—I can be a realistic vision of a person who looked like them in recovery. I could tell them the true story.
RM: That silence and the shame that facilitates it causes so much harm, and the steps you’ve taken and shared in your memoir towards breaking the cycles of shame, silence, and dysfunction are tremendously inspiring. Opening up about these topics and mental health, overall — especially as it connects to addiction—is a very taboo topic in the Latine community. What are some of the hopes you have in how these conversations shift with the release of your book?
JH: Thank you for saying that. It’s been eight years, so I sometimes take my recovery for granted and forget to acknowledge the hard work—how incredible it is. Received and much appreciated.
In the book’s first few pages, I say, “I’m writing this book not because I believe my story can save you but because I want you to know: yours will.”
I want all of us to move beyond the fear and shame that shrouds the conversation about addiction so we can begin the healing journey together. To dispel the mystery around every taboo subject (mental wellness, abuse, etc.) and unburden ourselves from the lies spoon-fed to us by the empire.
I also don’t want to continue to think of addiction and drug use as this otherized issue—this is a human story about the human condition. And I hope my book can illustrate that.
RM: Returning to the chapter “Rock Bottom,” the last thing you say during your first time speaking at an AA meeting was that you have never been able to face yourself, and that takes a lot for anyone to admit. Who do you feel is the self you face presently?
JH: One of my favorite threads in the book is this concept of being desalmado—a word my mother used to describe her father to me, a man with no soul, she said. There are many religious and cultural beliefs surrounding the power of alcohol to sap the soul. But I learned through the work of Eduardo Duran, Indigenous teachings also reflected in Bruce Alexander’s dislocation theory of addiction, that it is the pain of disconnection—the violence of being forcibly separated from who we are to survive—that is the thief that injures us. What Duran calls the “soul wound.” At that moment in the story, I, too, was desalmada.
Over the summer, I traveled to Izalco, El Salvador, with my partner to visit the Nawat pueblo he’s from. There, I learned a prayer of thanks to the earth’s four corners. But it’s not just about reciting words of thanks to Mother Earth—you offer gratitude from the heart of your essence to the heart of Earth: to the heart of the sky, to the heart of the air, and to the heart of the water. I say that prayer every day, several times a day, and I can feel it radiating from inside me, a profound and grounded awareness of who I am, my right to exist in my fullness, and the integrity of my soul that I offer to those I am in service to and in community with.
My soul has found its home, and it’s safe with me.
