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Shooting Up is a powerful memoir of growing up in Madrid’s San Blas neighborhood during the height of Europe’s heroin epidemic and the AIDS crisis. What made you decide to write this memoir now?
I started writing this, believe it or not, about 20 years ago. I was working as an analyst at SAC Capital and living in the Upper West Side. One weekend, I went to Barnes and Noble on 82nd Street and saw this book with a beautiful cover by Bruce Davidson titled Flying Over 96th Street, Memoir of an East Harlem White Boy by Tom Webber. I picked it up; the prose is beautiful. It is the story of a blond-haired, blue-eyed boy. His parents had moved him to East Harlem in the 1950s, and he grew up in the 50s and 60s during the Civil Rights era.
I just thought it was such a beautiful evocation of a time and a place and his friends, some of whom had passed. It was sort of very elegiac. And I just thought, someone needs to do this for my friends. My friends had passed, so that was the impetus for writing Shooting Up.
The memoir touches on the emotional cost of missionary life for children. Why was that important to include?
If your parents are engineers, plumbers, or lawyers, it doesn’t matter one bit to your life, but if your parents are missionaries, it changes everything. You can’t pick your parents, but they get to pick your life. They decide where you’ll live, when you’ll pack your bags and go, and you’ll get roped into their work saving the lost.
Being a preacher’s kid, and more specifically being a missionary kid, means that everything about your life is conditioned by your parents’ work. You can’t just be yourself. We were representing our parents, the drug rehab, and even the Christian faith. You’re always under a microscope trying to be a good example to others. You can’t skip church services or drug rehab meetings or trips to distant drug rehabs, and we were generally working in the drug rehab during our summers in our teenage years, so it takes over your entire life. It is hard to imagine now, though, what I would have done if I hadn’t worked in Betel. Perhaps I would have played more fútbol in the neighborhood or hung out more with kids my age. I do know many preachers’ kids who have reacted strongly against their upbringing, and their experience was not as fortunate as mine.
What was the most challenging part of writing your memoir, and what was the most rewarding?
The book is full of love and humor, but it is also full of tragedy and sadness. Writing some scenes, particularly losing loved ones, was difficult. But I had to do it to tell a story honestly.
Recalling events was often difficult. No one’s memory is photographic, and reconstructing conversations was the most difficult. I tried to recreate them as faithfully as I could. I have many specific memories, but in some cases, I had to interview the mothers of the early addicts to know what they talked to my parents about when we went to their homes. I interviewed Lindsay and Myk about conversations with the early addicts, and I interviewed my parents about things like our first discussion of AIDS. I tried to be as true to my memories and theirs as possible. I hope the cross referencing of perspectives made it more accurate.
As I got older, for the later chapters, I often had letters, emails, diaries, or newsletters and recorded sermons or news articles where I had quotes that could be used, and that was easier.
What do you hope is one thing readers take away from your story?
I hope readers walk away with a deeper sense of human dignity, love, and compassion for others. For those who are suffering and grieving, I hope they know that they are not alone. For those struggling with addiction or sickness, I hope they know they have dignity and worth.
Author Links: GoodReads | Website | Amazon
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.
Shooting Up: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and Addiction
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
