Shooting Up is Jonathan Tepper’s memoir of growing up as a blond American missionary kid in San Blas, a rough working class neighborhood in Madrid that became one of Europe’s main heroin markets during the AIDS crisis. He moves from childhood scenes of handing out tracts to yonkis in the park to the birth and growth of Betel, his parents’ faith based rehab community, and then into the years when AIDS, overdoses, jail, and sheer bad luck tear through the people they love. The book blends family story, street life, and spiritual struggle and it slowly tracks how those experiences shape Tepper’s own sense of faith, vocation, and home.

On the surface, the voice is very calm and clear, almost plain, yet underneath I could feel grief and shock moving like a current. Tepper writes about heroin, dirty syringes, and AIDS wards with a reporter’s eye and a son’s heart, and that mix hit me hard. The early chapters, where the kids fold pamphlets at the coffee table and then walk out among needles on the ground, feel almost playful until you realize what you are actually seeing. I liked how he lets small details carry the weight, like the sound of the lifts rattling in a housing block or a junkie’s burnt fingers from falling asleep with a cigarette. The style stays very readable, but it is not simple; it keeps coming back to the same people, the same corners of San Blas, and each return adds another layer of history and hurt. I thought of them long after a chapter ended, as if they were people I knew and might meet again.

I also liked the way the book handles faith and power. Missionary stories often slide into self-congratulation; this one does not. Tepper shows the costs of his parents’ calling on everyone in the family, and he lets the contradictions sit in the open. I admired his father’s courage and stubborn love, and at the same time, I felt uneasy at how the boys had so little say in the life they were given. The book lets me feel both things at once and does not tidy it up with easy lessons. I appreciated that the addicts are never just “souls to save” or cautionary tales; they are friends, tormentors, stand in uncles, people with awful choices and a strange kind of honor. The scenes in the rehabs and hospitals, and the constant roll call of who relapses, who disappears, who dies, left me tired in a good way, like I had walked a long road with them. When the narrative jumps forward, and we see what became of Betel and of Tepper himself, it felt earned.

I came away thinking of this book as both a love letter and a lament. It is a love letter to a very broken neighborhood, to parents who were flawed and brave, and to the addicts who trusted them enough to risk change. It is a lament for the lives that burned out in the years when heroin and AIDS cut through Spain and the state and the church were slow to respond. I would recommend Shooting Up to readers who care about memoir, about addiction and recovery, about faith lived in messy real life rather than in slogans. It will suit anyone who wants a story that is gripping and easy to read but not easy to shake off, and who is willing to sit with pain, compassion, and complicated gratitude all at once.

Pages: 311 | ASIN : B0G1FFWSL9