Review by New York Times Review
WHEN MAUREEN CAVANAGH, a hardworking small-business owner and resident of the charming, historic town of Marblehead, Mass., clicked on a link to a Salem News story headlined "Marblehead Honor Student Arrested for Prostitution," her first thought was: "How sad. How very sad." As she read further, however, her feelings turned to horror. Because, as she recounts in "If You Love Me: A Mother's Journey Through Her Daughter's Opioid Addiction," the honor student in question was her daughter, Katie, who in the few short years since leaving high school had devolved from a sweet, compassionate and talented teenager into a troubled 23-year-old advertising her "escort services" online. All because, like millions of her fellow Americans, Katie had succumbed to the cruel realities of opioid abuse. In Katie's case, the drug of choice was heroin. "If You Love Me," an initially compelling but ultimately frustrating memoir, opens at the point when Katie's habit has exploded beyond the scope of what her mother can successfully keep under wraps. Enormously worried about her daughter's reputation in their small and prosperous New England community, Cavanagh is above all consumed in the days after the news report by what she views as the cosmic "unfairness of exposing Katie." But then a remarkable letter to the editor appears online in The Marblehead Reporter. It is from Katie herself, who suggests that making her desperation public isn't, perhaps, such a bad thing. "Maybe if people read that they will understand the pain addicts go thru on a daily basis," she writes. "I would just like people to know addicts are good people who believe they need to do bad things because they don't deserve any better." This is a turning point. Cavanagh's shame turns to rage. In the time since the article's publication, she realizes, only one person in her prosperous town has reached out to express compassion or support. The stigma of drug addiction is such that friends and colleagues consider it kinder to say nothing. Or, as Cavanagh reflects, "My neighbors can continue to plow their own snowflakes, never needing to look over the fence, never knowing what is going on next door - here, now. Katie can recover from this, and we will look back on it as a bad patch in an otherwise good life." Cavanagh is well acquainted with this mode of non-engagement. The daughter of alcoholics, she grew up in an often violent home, and was schooled from a very early age in the keeping of sordid family secrets. From her childhood, she adopted a number of magical beliefs: If you don't acknowledge a problem, you can make it go away. If your parents only love you enough, they'll stop drinking. She begins the book hostage to an adult vestige of that old mythmaking system: "If she loves me, why won't she stop?" she thinks about Katie. Conversely, as the mother of a heroin addict, she hangs her hope on the belief that if she only loves Katie enough, she'll be able to corral her into beating her habit. Realizing that none of these articles of faith are true - that, in fact, the disease of addiction is more powerful than even the very strongest parent-child bond - is the essence of Cavanagh's maternal "journey," which will offer readers facing similar struggles some useful information and, above all, the comfort of knowing that they are not alone. (Readers seeking something beyond emotional community, however, will find a much more satisfying reading experience in strongly reported books like Maia Szalavitz's "Unbroken Brain: A Revolutionary New Way of Understanding Addiction" or Paul Raeburn's "Acquainted With the Night: AParent's Questto Understand Depression and Bipolar Disorder in His Children.") In the course of Cavanagh's motherdaughter odyssey, she comes to realize that the quest for sobriety is only - and can only be - Katie's own. Once Cavanagh steps back and gives her daughter the space to try to save herself, Katie does rise to the occasion. As the book ends, she is 25, working and saving money, and hoping to get involved with her mother's peer support group, Magnolia New Beginnings. She is "currently sober," Cavanagh writes, somewhat tentatively. One lesson of her book is that "sober" always requires a qualifier. And that a hopeful pause is a safer bet than a happy ending. JUDITH WARNER is the author, most recently, of "We've Got Issues: Children and Parents in the Age of Medication."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [August 23, 2019]
Review by Booklist Review
Debuting author Cavanagh shares a personal side of the U.S. opioid crisis. Cavanagh's daughter, Katie, started experimenting with drugs in high school. Only when Cavanagh discovered Katie's theft of treasured family jewelry did she realize how bad her daughter's drug use had become. Living in a small town outside Boston, she painstakingly tried to keep Katie's heroin addiction secret, but when Katie wound up on the police blotter, arrested for prostitution, Cavanagh realized secrecy would not save her daughter or herself. In a 180-degree turn, she opened up and sought out other families dealing with substance abuse, helped other addicts when she couldn't help Katie, and even founded a nonprofit dedicated to the cause. Cavanagh's writing is honest and straightforward, her pace fast and tone foreboding; all this makes for a page-turner that puts readers beside her on the emotional roller coaster that dealing with a loved one's substance abuse is. Perfect for readers anticipating the upcoming film Beautiful Boy, based on David Sheff's bestselling 2007 memoir.--Kathy Sexton Copyright 2018 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Debut author Cavanagh paints a vivid but depressing portrait of her attempts to deal with her daughter Katie's heroin addiction in a small town outside of Boston. Katie's addiction leads her to steal, prostitute herself, and run away from rehab-but it's Cavanagh's story that takes center stage. As Katie repeats a rotation of shooting up, detoxing, rehabbing, and relapsing (she attends over 40 treatment programs and survives 13 overdoses), Cavanagh cycles through anxiety, relief, hopefulness, and despair. She cruises drug neighborhoods to find Katie, attends therapy sessions, and takes Zoloft, and even threatens to beat her daughter's drug dealer to death with a baseball bat. Because she can't save Katie, she tries to save others, developing a peer support network for the families of drug users called Magnolia New Beginnings, which places addicts in treatment centers and brings together mothers who share similar experiences. Though Cavanagh aims to reduce stigma by framing addiction as an involuntary medical disease, she also argues that the key to sobriety is "to want it." Katie is sober by the book's end, but there's no guarantee that she'll stay this way, leading to Cavanagh's final epiphany, that each day "is a new beginning," echoing Alcoholics Anonymous's one-day-at-a-time slogan. Some readers may find Cavanagh's story comforting in its familiarity; others may find it all too predictable. (Sept.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Another heartbreaking tale of opioid abuse and the toll it takes on an entire family.Missing money, bent and burned or missing spoons, and missing jewelry: All of these served as clues that eventually led Cavanagh to the realization that her daughter, Katie, was a heroin addict who had stolen from her in order to buy drugs. The author's grief and suffering are consistently palpable as she traces the numerous paths she took with her ex-husband, Mike, over the course of several years, to get Katie into treatment centers. She shares the anguish and dismay she felt each time her daughter slipped away again, returning to her life of drug abuse and abusive boyfriends. "I've seen so much pain in the last few years," she writes. "I hadn't known just how much pain the world could contain. It crushes me sometimes, not just my own but the pain of so many others also trying to hang on to whatever shred of their loved ones they can. I don't know how I got here. There is never a day that goes by that this does not feel very surreal." Cavanagh describes her powerful feelings of both fear and shame and how her need for support led her to reach out to others experiencing the same trauma. Because of her deep involvement in this crisis and her discovery that help was limited, the author founded a nonprofit group, Magnolia New Beginnings, to aid parents and drug users in finding treatment and the necessary emotional support for those struggling with all kinds of substance abuse. While Cavanagh's story is unique, it's also, sadly, fairly common. When she discovered the shockingly widespread nature of the problem, the author devoted herself to addressing the crisisand its attendant stigmashead-on.An emotionally fraught tale of a mother's love and her actions to save her daughter from opioid addiction. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
