First in the Family

April 1, 2024

Hoppe centers her debut on the first year of the COVID pandemic, when drug overdoses spiked, leading to many deaths, including that of the author's cousin. A Honduran Ecuadorian writer and creator of @NuevaYorka, Hoppe takes readers into her investigation of recovery programs and how they center whiteness, her own family's history, addiction, stigma, and more. With a 250K-copy first printing. Prepub Alert.

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Starred review from July 15, 2024
Hoppe debuts with a bold and illuminating account of getting sober and her attempts to “decolonize recovery” by deconstructing ingrained narratives about people of color and substance abuse. Writing that “the most powerful weapon in this American arsenal is the story,” Hoppe begins with her own, recounting her childhood in Texas and New Jersey as the daughter of Honduran and Ecuadoran immigrants. In college, after her parents divorced and her sisters left home, Hoppe started drinking heavily and using drugs. Following a near-death experience, she enrolled in Alcoholics Anonymous on the advice of a therapist. She got sober, but was unsure how to share the news with her family, so she kept it to herself. Then, in 2020, Hoppe’s cousin died of an overdose, and she learned that her family had a long, silent history with addiction. Newly empowered with that knowledge and struggling to maintain her own sobriety, Hoppe grew curious about what moved her and her cousin to stay silent about their addictions. Her curiosity led her to investigate BIPOC-led sobriety programs, including White Bison’s book The Red Road to Wellbriety, as well as her own discomfort with majority-white AA meetings that introduced her to openly racist sobriety partners. She presents her findings in sharp, forceful prose, effortlessly weaving together her personal story and her insights into the intersection between race and sobriety. This is essential reading. Agent: Johanna Castillo, Writers House.

July 15, 2024
A Honduran Ecuadorian journalist and mental health advocate explores substance abuse in her family and its relationship to immigrant and racial trauma. Born in San Antonio in 1982, Hoppe was the first-generation American child her parents believed would have everything they did not. Coming into the marriage, her parents achieved their own personal firsts like mothering without abandonment and fathering without violence. What they didn't realize was that the American dream they chased across the country would demand "the sacrifice of our physical and mental health." It would also cause the author to fall victim to the alcoholism that destroyed her maternal grandfather. College, the great American gateway to a shining future, brought with it stresses for Hoppe, as well, including a heavy work and class schedule and expectations of moving directly into a well-paying job. It also became the place where, overwhelmed by responsibility, she learned to see alcohol as the cure-all "solution" to hardship and the systemic injustices she faced as a brown-skinned woman. As her drinking worsened, Hoppe began forgetting incidents involving extreme, often dangerous levels of intoxication. She eventually found her way to therapy and Alcoholics Anonymous, only to discover that AA had no room for stories that involved the social inequities Hoppe knew had fueled her alcoholism. "Race-related trauma was labeledterminal uniqueness," she writes, "and dismissed as a false projection of my self-centered ego." As the author fought her way back to sobriety, she uncovered healing truths about relatives who had suffered from addiction and about the real yet unacknowledged founders of the modern recovery movement, Native Americans. As this raw, at times unsparing memoir probes the meaning of the American dream for immigrants, it also reveals the sickness inherent in all white supremacist projects, including those meant to heal. An illuminating and intense reading experience.

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August 1, 2024
In her debut memoir, Hoppe, a New York-based, high-fashion-focused social media influencer, presents a gripping narrative of generational addiction. Drawing deeply from her personal experiences, Hoppe delves into her family's trauma, which ranges from abuse to neglect, and illustrates how these hardships drove them to use drugs and alcohol as coping mechanisms. As someone who has battled alcohol abuse herself, Hoppe provides a firsthand account of its devastating effects and the journey to recovery. She challenges the stigma surrounding addiction among non-white individuals, portraying it as a survival strategy rather than a moral failing. Her narrative unfolds in fragments, capturing the faulty memory and emotional wounds inflicted by alcohol, interwoven with personal anecdotes and broader societal issues like the exploitation of Latinx workers and the criminalization of drug use, especially among people of color, and the omission of BIPOC individuals in recovery practices, institutions, and chronicles. This is an essential read, offering profound insights into the complexities of addiction in families and the often-obscured and difficult path to recovery.

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