Shooting Up
A memoir of love, loss and addiction by Jonathan Tepper
In the shadows of Madrid's most notorious drug slum, an American missionary family plants roots among heroin addicts and builds an unlikely church. Shooting Up is Jonathan Tepper's searing memoir of a childhood spent in San Blas, where syringes littered playgrounds and his closest friends were recovering junkies twice his age.
When Elliott and Mary Tepper arrive in 1985 with their four young sons, San Blas is ground zero of Europe's heroin epidemic. While other children play soccer, Jonathan befriends bank robbers and former prostitutes. His heroes aren't athletes but men like Raúl and Jambri, charismatic ex-addicts who transform their lives through the revolutionary drug rehabilitation center the Teppers help found.
What begins as eight men in an apartment becomes Betel, now one of the world's largest drug rehabilitation networks. But this isn't a story of institutional triumph. It's an intimate portrait of radical compassion amid the AIDS crisis, told through the eyes of a boy watching his parents choose the damned over the respectable, witnessing miracles and tragedies in equal measure.
Tepper writes with unflinching honesty about the magnetic pull of the streets, the seductive danger of heroin, and the complicated love between broken people healing together. His prose—elegant yet raw—captures both the squalor of addiction and the stubborn persistence of grace.
This is a memoir about choosing to see beauty in ruins, finding family among outcasts, and learning that the answer to suffering is always more love. It is a story of love and loss, but it is also a love letter to friends, family, and even learning. Part Angela's Ashes, part The Cross and the Switchblade, Shooting Up announces Tepper as a powerful new voice in memoir, one who transforms a harrowing childhood into an unforgettable testament to hope.
ADVANCE PRAISE
"An astonishing work that opens your eyes—and your heart—to a whole new world, one that is as beautiful and inspiring as it is gritty and harrowing…heartbreaking, gut-wrenching, and joyous."
— Amy Chua, Yale Law professor and author of Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother and The Golden Gate
“A powerful testament to the redemptive power of faith, friendship, and love. I couldn’t recommend it more highly; I cried, I laughed, I was changed.”
– Thomas Webber, author of Flying Over 96th Street: Memoir of an East Harlem White Boy
“Jonathan Tepper’s gut-wrenching, inspiring memoir Shooting Up immerses you so deeply in its characters that you feel as if you’re living—and suffering—alongside them. Set amid the ravages of the AIDS epidemic in Madrid, this gorgeously crafted coming-of-age story is both luminous and profoundly humane. An unforgettable read that’s impossible to put down.”
— Joseph Luzzi, author of My Two Italies and In a Dark Wood: What Dante Taught Me About Grief, Healing, and the Mysteries of Love
“Shooting Up recounts a young man’s coming of age in the unlikeliest of places, and finds joy, wisdom, and humour in the darkest of moments. Reading this book made me think anew about grace, and gratitude, and the hard roads that take us there. ”
— Daniel Swift, author of Bomber County and The Bughouse: The Poetry, Politics, and Madness of Ezra Pound
“Tepper’s story about addiction, AIDS and his parents’ work with addicts in Spain in the 1990s is a one-off insanely entertaining and wild account. In fact it’s the most riveting memoir I’ve ever read.”
— Frank Schaeffer, author of Crazy for God