First in the Family

A Story of Survival, Recovery, and the American Dream

By: Jessica Hoppe

Narrated by: Jessica Hoppe

Length: 7 hrs and 39 mins

Publisher's summary

An unflinching and intimate memoir of recovery by Jessica Hoppe, Latinx writer, advocate, and creator of NuevaYorka.

A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK OF 2024: Today, LupitaReads, Electric Literature, Esquire

In this deeply moving and lyrical memoir, Hoppe shares an intimate, courageous account of what it means to truly interrupt cycles of harm. For fans of The Recovering by Leslie Jamison, Somebody’s Daughter by Ashley C. Ford, and Heavy by Kiese Laymon.

During the first year of quarantine, drug overdoses spiked, the highest ever recorded. And Hoppe’s cousin was one of them. “I never learned the true history of substance use disorder in my family,” Hoppe writes. “People just disappeared.” At the time of her cousin’s death, she’d been in recovery for nearly four years, but she hadn’t told anyone.

In First in the Family, Hoppe shares her journey, the first in her family to do so, and takes the listener on a remarkable investigation of her family’s history, the American Dream, and the erasure of BIPOC from recovery institutions and narratives, leaving the listener with an urgent message of hope.

©2024 Jessica Hoppe (P)2024 Macmillan Audio

Critic reviews

"Jessica Hoppe writes with grace and gripping candor about being the first in her family to recover from addiction in this fiery debut memoir."—Esquire

"Jessica Hoppe’s First in the Family crackles like a bonfire: fierce and wise, bearing light and warmth. I read it in a single sitting, breathless and grateful, spellbound by a voice vibrating with insight, compassion, and candor, and a reckoning unafraid to wrestle fully with the important truths and histories at stake. Like so many American traditions, recovery in the U.S. has been dominated by whiteness that claims what it did not discover and refuses to listen to what it doesn’t want to hear, but Hoppe’s stunning book invites us into the next, necessary chapter of our collective recovery from our deluded dreams, challenging us to remember James Baldwin’s call: 'Everything now, we must assume, is in our hands; we have no right to assume otherwise.' Hoppe does not assume otherwise. Instead, she tells her story and follows it outward into a stunning illumination of American life."–Leslie Jamison, New York Times bestselling author of The Recovering and The Empathy Exams

“A powerful thunderclap of a memoir, Jessica Hoppe’s First in the Family is a rich excavation of one woman’s descent into addiction and the power found in laying it all bare. Hoppe’s uncompromising voice doesn’t hide behind platitudes but gently unravels damaging legacies tied to the “American Dream” with a much-needed critique of the recovery movement. A triumphant example of hope where breaking harmful cycles is not found in the individual achievement but in a collective one.”–Lilliam Rivera, Award-winning author of Dealing in Dreams