Tag: recovery

When a promising student left a neighborhood full of heroin for the University of Pennsylvania, it should have been a moving story. But what does an at-risk student actually need to thrive — or even just to survive?

Katie Prout tries to untangle the story of her brother’s complicated, life-long battle with alcoholism against the backdrop of her family’s history of addiction.

Aaron Thier contemplates the connections between privilege, addiction, and recovery.

An unexpected pregnancy not long after her troubled mother’s passing forces Ashley Abramson to navigate a kind of dual citizenship she couldn’t have anticipated.

After suicides and heartbreak ravage her family, Jenny Aurthur finds she has no choice but be transformed.

Katie MacBride recalls her last days using alcohol before getting sober.

When Leslie Jamison got sober she wanted to know how a life lived without alcohol would affect her writing.

“How do I tell my kids that their dad just died? What are the words?”

Meeting an apparently less fortunate child in her daughter’s kindergarten class transports Amber Leventry back to her own painful youth.

Vietnam Veteran Ray Cocks, who’d eagerly enlisted in 1967, was forever changed by the realities of war.

Sarah Gerard digs into her failures as part of her ongoing recovery from anorexia and bulimia.

Years before Prince died of an overdose, his music provided a lifeline for Eva Tenuto.

The story of Zaine, Arianna, and Zoie Pulliam — three kids under 17 living in South Charleston, West Virginia. Deemed “opiate orphans,” they exemplify a generation of children whose parents have died of drug overdoses as a result of the opioid epidemic.

At Pacific Standard, Will McGrath reports on Fort Lyon — “a Betty Ford Center for the homeless — a radical experiment to rehabilitate some of society’s most vulnerable members.”

Novelist Benjamin Obler was feeling secure in his recovery from porn addiction. Then along came Franny, to test it.

A woman recovering from a kidney transplant finds solace in poetry: I began with C.K. Williams’s ‘Dream’ (‘Mad dreams! Mad love!’) and ended with Kyger’s ‘[He is pruning the privet]’: ‘You are not alone is this world / not a lone a parallel world of reflection / in a window keeps the fire burning.’ In […]