The addiction memoir was my gateway drug into the nonfiction genre; my love for the genre has not waned. I first met Jessica Hoppe at the Center for Fiction event for Laura Cathcart Robbin’s memoir, Stash: My Life in Hiding. Hoppe was on the panel and spoke with so much enthusiasm and excitement about the topic of recovering that I thought she might levitate off the stage. She met each simple question with complexity and thoroughness, and listening to her love of sharing her findings and her own story was addictive. At the end, she mentioned her memoir would be out within a year, and immediately I couldn’t wait to read it.
Jessica Hoppe’s debut, First in the Family: A Story of Survival, Recovery, and the American Dream (Flatiron Books, 2024), is more than a straightforward addiction memoir. Hoppe writes about herself in the vast context of oppressive and complex systems, both structural and familial, and doesn’t sit in the depths of the worst days of addiction. Instead, she reveals to the reader the disconnection and loneliness she experienced, what she says the substance of her addiction was trying to soothe. Hoppe writes about the good, bad, and places for improvement in treatment programs, particularly Alcoholics Anonymous. Most impressively, she suggests to the reader to leave thinking of addiction as a problem of individuals. The message is ultimately a rally cry for everyone to open their eyes and see the broken systems in front of them and to earnestly connect with one another.
I spoke with Hoppe via Zoom about revising the over-achieving Latine narratives, why she loves being a #noninstitutional girlie, and the importance of investigating how systems and bias uphold outdated beliefs within cultures and ourselves.
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The Rumpus: How has the initial reception been to First in the Family?
Jessica Hoppe: To be honest, the response to the work, at least for daytime television, has been that the book is “too dark.” I was really disappointed when I got that first round of feedback. I hate when the response to my work is, “Oh, it’s intense.” Yeah, it is. This is life. These are the conditions that human beings are living under. These are the experiences that are manifest without any kind of resources or understanding. This is what happens. I think now more than ever, people want the truth. They want to talk about what’s going on with their families, how they can navigate within the system and understand themselves better, and therefore understand the world better. People want to show up differently. I hope that changes. If not, viewers and readers think that people just want to escape. It is disappointing to be labeled “dark” because I feel like it is also something that is reserved for writers of color.
Rumpus: Was the reception from early readers different from critical reception
Hoppe: The lovely thing is, I’m hearing from readers. I got a lovely email from an [advance reader copy] reader yesterday that was like, “This was such a mirror that I just want to thank you.” The interviewer from Electric Lit was similar and said she found the book so comforting.
I was listening to the audio book, and I realized there certainly are [difficult] things that happened that I don’t shy away from, but I think that that’s important, especially for the canon of Latinx literature, because we really do go for “excellence narratives.” You know, the excellence girlies? Hashtag Latina genius, bootstrapping, and, “You made it, and it’s great!” What if you’re not those things? What if we interrogated that for a moment? What will we find, and therefore rethink, [about] how we feel about our families and where we come from, and about ourselves?
Rumpus: Another word I see attached particularly to women—and people of color, particularly essayists—is “brave,” which I hate! Nobody says that to men. Can you imagine calling David Sedaris brave? We’re all just trying to tell something true. For men, its always, “He’s insightful! What a thinker!”
Hoppe: Leslie Jamison said that too!
Rumpus: Addiction memoirs are what made me fall in love with reading and writing. Your memoir, however, does not read like a classic addiction memoir. What is your history with the genre?
Hoppe: I don’t have one—I had never read one. It was similar when I went to my first [Alcoholics Anonymous] meeting. Sure, I had heard of it, but no one in my family went, at least not knowingly. I had heard the opener, “Hi, my name is Jessica, and I’m an alcoholic,” but I went into both totally blind.
It really helped me because I was just so overwhelmed by the information. The initial warmth that I found and freedom that followed was overwhelming. When I got in [to the meetings], people suggested I read Abandon Me by Melissa Febos. I had just gone through a breakup too. Soon after, I discovered Leslie Jamison and Marry Carr. Leslie became a personal marker for me in my journey because I was new when I discovered her work. I feel like she can describe things in the body deeply. You can feel it everywhere when you read her. One of the big obstacles for me was that I didn’t know where I felt. I wanted to improve my writing because that’s where it felt hollow to me. I had been really disembodied for such a long time. I was not connected to my body at all.
Those were my firsts, and I didn’t really seek them out. Later I discovered Tove Ditlevsen’s The Copenhagen Trilogy. Halfway through the book, I had to go and lay down in my bed because I could just feel it. It was the most direct, clear language. I didn’t feel so bad about my writing after that. Before, I didn’t feel like I was a writer. I really wanted to be a writer like Melissa Febos. The way she really takes a lot of research, philosophy, and medical research, and it’s poetry. Every other paragraph is a lot of braiding. Tove is straight up storytelling, and she doesn’t hold back. That was the top for me.
Rumpus: How has your family responded to the book?
Hoppe: I’m close with my mother, and she’s the most proud and excited. I asked her repeatedly, “Do you want to read it? Do you want to read it?” She didn’t. She said, “No, I’m fine with it. I support you.
The one person in my family who read it and gave me notes was my sister, Carla. In the book, I write about the time she lost her daughter. My nieces and nephews are in it a bit. Joshy [my nephew], in my view, kind of gets to be a hero, and that’s sort of how I see him. I think my family is very, very supportive. My father has read the acknowledgments page because that is the page fully in Spanish. He thought it was a bit much, but he was just ecstatic. My father doesn’t read in English, so he’s not going to read it. I imagined he would read it when—and if—it gets translated. The only person who’s read [the book] whole is my sister. She gave me some notes for my parents, in particular. I took those notes.
In a way, I think the star, surprisingly, ended up being my grandfather, who has passed away. I think that might be very difficult for my mom to read, because she definitely has unsettled feelings. But [my family] is just so proud. The book has inspired them in different ways in their lives. It’s been extremely positive. I’m sure it will feel different once the book is out in the world, and there’s commentary and feedback, and people have a way of judging me and judging my parents.
Rumpus: The addiction memoirs I have read usually tell exactly what an addict did while in the worst throes of addiction. Certainly, you give us very important glimpses into your addiction and what that looks like, but it doesn’t dwell on addictive behavior. I really appreciated the newness of this narrative, and wondered if this is how you write, naturally? Did you leave pieces of your active addiction out on purpose?
Hoppe: I really don’t think addiction has anything to do with a specific substance. The substance comes in and it fills the space, and it’s the thing we focus on because it drives us. I’m focusing on a disconnection, and [the substance] does fill up that space, pushing things up and out. I believe this happened to me, but writing about the using and what I was doing with the substance wasn’t interesting to me.
In my sobriety, I realized I had ADHD. I had all these feelings about medication. I made my choice to be abstinent from medication, but I don’t quantify my sobriety by my abstinence. What helps me is that I asked myself the reason I wanted to take medication, and it was because I wanted a magic bullet. The reason I was drinking, or using cocaine or whatever drug, was because I wanted a magic bullet. I didn’t believe [sobriety] was in my power but having what I needed to get that thing.
Halfway through this [writing] project, I felt sure I couldn’t finish it. I felt sure that I was a total imposter and that I couldn’t do this. And so, the reason that I wanted to take medication was because I thought, “I’m not this, I’m not whole, I don’t have it.” Once I’m making that kind of calculation, I know that I’m going down a bad road because I will become attached to that thing. And I will believe it’s all that thing. And I will use it, use it, use it, use it, until it’s right under that feeling that “not-enoughness”—that’s what’s toxic: the belief that I’m not enough. Substances are, in general, neutral.
Rumpus: How did you go from discovering writing nonfiction to publishing with Flatiron.
Hoppe: I’d been writing in journalism for a while, chasing bylines, and got published in some notables like the New York Times, Paper magazine, and Vogue México y Latinoamérica. I’m fortunate to live in New York City, where there are countless workshops and classes for writers. I took many of them but needed to learn how to transfer my work into a book proposal. It might sound silly or ignorant, but I was unaware of the MFA for years. At my age and stage in life—hysterical survival mode with tons of student loan debt—an MFA didn’t seem feasible. A friend suggested I try applying to some of the publishing programs for emerging writers, the idea being that institutional support might pad my resume and lead to the right connections or attention. I applied for everything—many times. I never got into any of them. It was demoralizing, but I’ve never been an institutional girlie. I guess I don’t pop on paper. It’s just never been the path that has opened for me, and now I love being able to represent what is commonly referred to as the “nontraditional pathway.” I want people to know it’s possible and an asset creatively.
Rumpus: In some ways, it’s great that there are so many new pathways to publishing, but then that can feel confusing too! Ultimately, what helped you find your way?
Hoppe: What did work for me was doing the legwork and the research. My partner says I follow publishing the way fans follow sports. I subscribed to Publisher’s Weekly and read literary journals like The Rumpus. I went to every panel known to man—I asked questions. I waited in long lines for two minutes, just to tell an author what their work meant to me—how much I learned from them. That’s how I met Hanif Abdurraqib, an editor at the time for GEN Magazine [a former publication from Medium about politics, power, and culture]. I published a few pieces with them, one called “The First Step to Recovery Is Admitting You Are Not Powerless Over Your Privilege,” which led to my book. I also used resources like Latinx in Publishing and Jenn Baker’s Minorities in Publishing podcast. In fact, Jenn’s Twitter feed is an incredible resource! One night, it led me directly to an open call for submissions and subsequently got me an agent. Things moved quickly from there—it felt like luck and timing colliding, but it had been many years of hard work, which many have seen as sheer determination.
Rumpus: Do you have a daily writing practice now, or did you while working on the book?
Hoppe: I must admit it’s a lot of hair pulling, hand wringing, and days of staring at a blinking cursor on a blank white page. When inspiration strikes, I sprint for as long as it lasts.
Writing this book challenged me in a way that brought me closest to feeling rock bottom again since the day I got sober. I was forced to learn how my brain works and develop tricks to flow with that current instead of against it. I have ADHD, so I use the Pomodoro method, which works sometimes but not always. Gabor Mate’s book on the subject resonated with me and pulled me out of a rut.
I also love to read poetry before I dive in or feel blocked—John Trudell, Vanessa Angélica Villarreal, Warsan Shire, Hala Alyan, Saeed Jones, Mosab Abu Toha, and Paul Tran are favorites I always keep nearby.
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Author photograph by Beowulf Sheehan
