First in the Family: A Story of Survival, Recovery, and the American Dream

An unflinching and intimate memoir of recovery by Jessica Hoppe, Latinx writer, advocate, and creator of @NuevaYorka.

In this deeply moving and lyrical memoir, Hoppe shares an intimate, courageous account of what it means to truly interrupt cycles of harm. For readers of The Recovering by Leslie Jamison, Somebody’s Daughter by Ashley C. Ford, and Heavy by Kiese Laymon.

During the first year of quarantine, drug overdoses spiked, the highest ever recorded. And Hoppe’s cousin was one of them. “I never learned the true history of substance use disorder in my family,” Hoppe writes. “People just disappeared.” At the time of her cousin’s death, she’d been in recovery for nearly four years, but she hadn’t told anyone.

In First in the Family, Hoppe shares her journey, the first in her family to do so, and takes the reader on a remarkable investigation of her family’s history, the American Dream, and the erasure of POC from recovery institutions and narratives, leaving the reader with an urgent message of hope.

About the Author

Jessica Hoppe is a Honduran Ecuadorian writer and creator of @NuevaYorka. She has been featured on ABC News, and Pa’lante! Max. Her work has appeared in Latino Book Review, the New York Times, Vogue, and elsewhere. Jessica is a board member of Time of Butterflies, a nonprofit supporting families through domestic abuse recovery, and is an organizer with the CentAm & Isthmian Writers group. She lives in New York City. First in the Family is her debut memoir.