Excerpted from Chapter 2, “A Long, Strange Trip: Drugs, Alcohol and Us.”

The students I taught over my five years at the inpatient drug and alcohol rehabilitation center for adolescents in Vermont would stay from a few weeks to a few months while they learned how to live their lives as sober people. The first days were always rough, as the numbness faded away and they had to face, then experience, the uncomfortable emotions and trauma they’d been working so hard to forget. I supported that work by making my classroom a safe place to remember. We hardly ever confronted their demons head-on; rather, we came at them tangentially, through metaphor and stories.

One of their favorite books was Jarrett J. Krosoczka’s graphic memoir, Hey, Kiddo: How I Lost My Mother, Found My Father, and Dealt with Family Addiction, because they identified with the author’s longing for love, stability, and a coherent history. The book recounts Krosoczka’s childhood through words and pictures, first with a heroin-abusing mother, and later in the custody of his grandparents, searching for a father he never knew.

I asked my students to bookmark moments in the text or illustrations that resonated. Some chose the day Krosoczka goes to live with his grandparents; others selected the day he sees his father for the first time and realizes, “He was shorter than I imagined him to be.” Then the kids created their own “memoir of a moment,” combining text and pictures to describe a pivotal story from their own lives. They wrote what they could, drew when the words came hard, and the back-and-forth between these two expressive forms allowed difficult moments in their history to materialize on the page.

I watched Mark*, a seventeen-year-old boy who had arrived at the rehab just a few days before, stare helplessly at the boxes he’d drawn on the page that would eventually contain the words and images of his story. His fingers traced the black lines, empty boxes floating in the white space of the page, and he quickly became overwhelmed, desperate for a starting place. Chaotic lives beget chaotic memories, not easily confined to neatly drawn lines and square angles.

I crouched down beside him and asked him to tell me a story, a short one, just to get started.

“I can’t. There’s too much, and it’s all jumbled up,” he said.

I opened Hey, Kiddo to the pages where Krosoczka reveals to his friend Pat that his mother is addicted to heroin. These facing pages tell a complete story in the author’s life, I said. Tell one story, and you’ll discover another, I promised. 

So goes any attempt to chronicle human history. Truth, or what passes for it, is elusive, subject to the honesty and will of the teller. The story of how any one child moves from first use to substance abuse tends to follow a common trajectory, but the unique devils live in the details of nature and nurture.

*The names and identifying details of all minors have been altered to protect their privacy.