The resilience required to survive addiction and the courage to write about it — to share the lowest moments of a personal history with the world — compels me to seek out memoirs about it. Reading personal stories also contextualizes the news about drug use and abuse and the rising rates of alcohol use, particularly among middle-aged women. Perhaps because of this, memoirs by women about their struggles with addiction draw me in especially.
I came to Unstitched envisioning a similar narrative, of casual substance use crashing to a rock bottom, then lifting into an inspiring recovery.
What I got was much more holistic, engrossing, and lasting.
In Unstitched, Stanciu writes not as an opioid user but as a bystander. The journey referred to in the subtitle begins with a man repeatedly breaking into the library where Stanciu works. She finds evidence that he has been spending the night there — a clue was the pervasive smell of cigarette smoke in the mornings — and that he had stolen petty cash from the library. Stanciu doesn’t sugarcoat her reaction, or pretend an empathy she doesn’t feel. “I know this guy’s been breaking in. The rumor around town is that he’s using drugs,” she tells a victim’s advocate at the prosecutor’s office. Like many of us would have in her position, Stanciu does not see a man, but a problem.
When the incident ends with the man’s suicide, Stanciu can’t get it out of her mind. She looks for answers about opioid use in small towns like hers beyond the basic news coverage. She wonders what she should have done differently, and what she can do in the future. She speaks with police officers, drug counselors, former drug users, and, in an especially touching exchange, the mother of a woman whose daughter died of a drug overdose. These interactions help Stanciu evolve her own understanding of addiction and her relationship to it, as well as the ways that opioid use has unstitched small towns and families across the country.
While Unstitched is a valuable and important book for its discussion of opioid addiction, the writing is quietly beautiful, every word appreciative of the Vermont landscape and its seasons, on mothering girls while grieving with a mother who lost her own daughter, on the stark class divides that hinder our efforts to grow past this crisis, and the joy of community, no matter how much mending it requires.
Steerforth Press (2021)