Shooting Up: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and Addiction

In 1985, Elliott and Mary Tepper moved their four young sons into  San Blas, Madrid’s most notorious heroin slum, ground zero of Europe’s  drug epidemic. While other children played soccer, seven-year-old  Jonathan was handing out tracts to addicts in syringe-littered parks and  befriending bank robbers, former prostitutes, and recovering junkies twice his age.

What began as eight men detoxing in a small  apartment grew into Betel, now one of the world’s largest drug rehabilitation networks. But Shooting Up isn’t an institutional history, it’s a boy’s-eye view of a radical  experiment in compassion during the AIDS crisis, full of unforgettable  characters, street danger, and moments of unlikely grace.

Part Angela’s Ashes, part The Cross and the Switchblade, Tepper’s memoir captures the grit and squalor of addiction alongside the stubborn hope of lives remade. Shooting Up announces Tepper as a powerful new voice in memoir, one who transforms a  harrowing childhood into an unforgettable testament to hope.