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’s essays and book reviews appear regularly in The Millions and on NPR’s website, and in Heck, PANK, The Nervous Breakdown, Tin House blog, Bloom, Narrative, Cargo Literary, and Washington Independent Review of Books; her fiction in Catapult, Vol.1 Brooklyn, Yale’s Letters Journal, Slush Pile Magazine, Poetica E Magazine, Referential Magazine, and Inkapture Magazine. Her novel in progress is represented by the Einstein Literary Agency. She directs a social justice foundation focused on preventing and ending homelessness and on criminal justice reform.
Please visit her at; and tweet to her at. Pick a state, any state. In California,. In Massachusetts,. In Missouri, the number of.
In Ohio, heroin deaths are. Meanwhile, “Heroin deaths in Connecticut continue to skyrocket, a burgeoning, exploding crisis that requires immediate, substantial attention,” a U.S. In Oregon, former beauty queens are, which. In Utah, authorities say a recent mammoth heroin bust represents “a real shift in the narcotics problem.” In North Carolina, “Why are kids.from Charlotte’s wealthy neighborhoods and good schools, turning to the deadliest drugs?” In Rhode Island, the number of babies born addicted (“”) almost doubled between 2005 and 2012.
In Vermont, the governor spent his talking about a single subject. ”What started as an OxyContin and prescription drug addiction problem in Vermont has now grown into a full-blown heroin crisis,” he said, as he began. This is America in 2015, and as Sam Quinones describes in his astonishing, monumental new book, we’re in the midst of “the worst drug scourge to ever hit the country,” measuring by its death toll. Unlike the heroin plague of the 1970s or the crack epidemic of the 1980s, however, the current disaster is “happening quietly,” he writes. This has a lot to do with the population perhaps hardest hit: middle-class and affluent white folks. Shock and shame are powerful silencers. “Children of the most privileged group in the wealthiest country in the history of the world were getting hooked and dying in almost epidemic numbers from substances meant to, of all things, numb pain,” he writes.
“Crime was at historic lows, drug overdose deaths at record highs. A happy facade covered a disturbing reality.” 2.
Dreamland is really two stories, divided by a prescription pad. On one side is the painkiller OxyContin, which clocked a reported $3.1 billion in annual sales, even after its manufacturer, Purdue Pharma, paid a $634.5 million criminal fine in 2007 for misleading marketing practices. Laserinuktitut for mac.
On the other side is a “sticky dark substance known as ‘black tar,’ a semi-processed heroin.” Chemically, the substances aren’t so different. The story of black tar heroin traces back to a small, dirt-poor town in the Mexican state of Nayarit. Xalisco wouldn’t be noteworthy were it not a staging area for what Quinones - a former veteran L.A. Times reporter, who writes with clarity and confidence - describes as a “new kind of drug trafficking in America.” The trafficking system took root outside Los Angeles, in the late 1980s and '90s and has since spread to San Diego, Phoenix, Denver, Albuquerque, Indianapolis, Nashville, Cincinnati, Charlotte, and other cities. If you’ve heard about heroin in your town, there’s a good chance it came from opium poppies growing in the Mexican mountains. The Xalisco Boys aren’t the flashy, gun-slinging gangsters you’ve seen in Hollywood films, though.
The network’s foot soldiers - a near-endless supply of farm boys eager to make cash to send or bring back home - are polite, nonviolent, salaried, and sober. Their product is cheap and pure, and “Their job is to drive the city with their mouths full of little uninflated balloons of black tar heroin, twenty-five or thirty at a time in one mouth,” Quinones writes. “They look like chipmunks.with a bottle of water at the ready so if police pull them over, they swig the water and swallow the balloons.” Quinones, who has written two previous books about Mexico, is particularly good at taking us inside the minds of these low-level dealers. “Back in the ranchos, nothing said that a man had moved up in the world like walking around in public in dark-blue Levi’s 501s,” he writes. In one of the book’s more captivating chapters, he describes the establishment of a “cell” in Columbus, Ohio, from the perspective of regional manager identified as “the Man.” After arriving in town, the Man sends for more “kids from Xalisco,” finds a car lot willing to swap for new delivery cars every few months, and establishes twice-daily shifts of drivers who meet addicts at Burger King and in Kmart parking lots. Soon, the Man has to hire a tailor in L.A.
To sew custom underwear for female members of his crew. “For more than a year, he sent two girls a month back to Mexico with a hundred thousand dollars in pure Columbus, Ohio, profit tucked in their corsets.” To addicts across the U.S., the little balloons from Xalisco Boys “became a brand every bit as dependable as a Coke can or a Holiday Inn sign,” Quinones reports. And the distribution network - which lacked a central power structure that could be easily toppled - grew resilient enough to absorb the largest joint DEA/FBI operation in U.S. History, involving more than 180 arrests in a dozen cities. After “Operation Tar Pit,” heroin deliveries in Santa Fe paused only for a day.
In the other half of Dreamland, Quinones takes readers over some of the terrain New York Times reporter Barry Meier mapped in his 2003 book on OxyContin,. Quinones introduces readers to the man Meier called a “scientific superstar:” Dr.
Russell Portenoy, a pain expert and opiate evangelist who helped usher in an era when patients’ pain is measured as a “fifth vital sign” alongside temperature, pulse, breathing rate, and blood pressure. We also meet Arthur Sackler, the fantastically rich (and now deceased) co-owner of Purdue Pharma whom Meier described as a hybrid M.D.-adman who, many believed, “cloaked his pursuit of profit and power behind the veil of science and research.” Dreamland picks up the same threads that Meier explored, and Quinones’s chapter-long riff on OxyContin’s rise is a masterpiece. I would reprint here it in full, if I could; it’s that important and well reported. But I’ll just quote a passage in which he frames the story: The decade of the 1990s was the era of the blockbuster drug, the billion-dollar pill, and a pharmaceutical sales force arms race was a part of the excess of the time. The industry’s business model was based on creating a pill – for cholesterol, depression, pain, or impotence - and then promoting it with growing numbers of salespeople.
During the 1990s and into the next decade, Arthur Sackler’s vision of pharmaceutical promotion reached its most exquisite expression as drug companies hired ever-larger sales teams. In 1995, 35,000 Americans were pharmaceutical sales reps.
Ten years later, a record 110,000 people - Sackler’s progeny all - were traveling the country selling legal drugs in America. Quinones adds layers of nauseating detail: the exorbitant bonuses for Purdue salespeople who peddled OxyContin to primary-care docs under-trained in treating chronic pain; the promotional videos that under-reported the pill’s addictive potential (never vetted by the FDA, as they ought to have been); the OxyContin-branded hats, toys, mugs, golf balls, CDs, pads, and pens that rained down on doctors; the Purdue lawyers who made phone calls to folks talking candidly about addiction in small-town newspapers. At one point, during a 2007 sentencing hearing for Purdue executives, the mother of an OxyContin overdose victim tells them, “You are nothing more than a large corporate drug cartel.” Dreamland's chapters jump in time and place from a heroin trafficker’s childhood in Nayarit to a legless addict in Portland, Ore. To a grief-stricken parent in Southern Ohio, and so on.
It’s an ambitious approach reminiscent of Eugene Jarecki’s sweeping 2012 documentary, which offered a devastating, pointillist portrait of the War on Drugs, through interviews with professors from Ohio State and Harvard, drug cops from Florida to New Mexico, a federal judge in Iowa, and a prisoner in Oklahoma who tells Jarecki, “I have life without parole for three ounces of methamphetamine.” In Dreamland, so many names, facts, and breakdowns of complex concepts can be overwhelming, at times; I found myself pausing to give my brain a chance to breathe. But such a wide-reaching approach seems necessary to convey the “catastrophic synergy” when the paths of Purdue Pharma and the Xalisco Boys cross. “And so it went,” he writes: OxyContin came first, introduced by reps from Purdue Pharma over steak and dessert and in air-conditioned doctors’ offices. Within a few years, black tar heroin followed in tiny, uninflated balloons held in the mouths of sugarcane farm boys from Xalisco driving old Nissan Sentras to meet-ups in McDonald’s parking lots. “I’ve yet to find one who didn’t start with OxyContin, a family physician in Southern Ohio said. “They wouldn’t be selling this quantity of heroin on the street right now if they hadn’t made these decisions in the boardroom.” 4. Will never solve its deadly opiate epidemic if we don’t first admit we have a problem.
And Dreamland is one of those rare books that’s big and vivid and horrifying enough to shake up our collective consciousness. In that sense, its comparable to Nick Reding’s 2009 book, which landed on the cover of the New York Times Book Review thanks to a quoting Reding’s description of what it’s like inside an exploding meth lab: “His skin was dripping off his body in sheets.His nose was all but gone now, too, and he ran back and forth among the gathered neighbors, unable to scream, for his esophagus and his voice box had cooked inside his throat.” Methland covers different ground than Dreamland, chemically and geographically. But it’s a similar attempt to sweep startling images into readers’ minds.
Consider these passages from the books’ introductions. First, an excerpt from Dreamland, after Quinones describes the heroin overdose death of a private-school-educated 21 year old from Columbus, Ohio: Drug overdoses were killing more people every year than car accidents.Kids were dying in the Rust Belt of Ohio and the Bible Belt of Tennessee. Some of the worst of it was in Charlotte’s best country club enclaves. It was in Mission Viejo and Simi Valley in suburban Southern California, and in Indianapolis, Salt Lake, and Albuquerque, in Oregon and Minnesota and Oklahoma and Alabama.
For each of the thousands who died every year, many hundreds more were addicted. Via pills, heroin had entered the mainstream. The new addicts were football players and cheerleaders; football was almost a gateway to opiate addiction. Wounded soldiers returned from Afghanistan hooked on pain pills and died in America. Kids got hooked in college and died there. Some of these addicts were from rough corners of rural Appalachia.
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But many more were from the U.S. Middle class. They lived in communities where the driveways were clean, the cars were new, and the shopping centers attracted congregations of Starbucks, Home Depot, CVS, and Applebee’s.
They were the daughters of preachers, the sons of cops and doctors, the children of contractors and teachers and business owners and bankers. This section from Methland, meanwhile, follows an idyllic description of Oelwein, Iowa, (population 6,772), where much of the book is set: And yet, things are not entirely what they seem.
On a sultry May evening, with.temperatures approaching ninety degrees at dusk, pass by the Perk and Hub City on the way into Oelwein’s tiny Ninth Ward. Look down at the collapsing sidewalk, or across the vacant lot at a burned-out home.
At the Conoco station, just a few blocks south of Sacred Heart Catholic Church, a young man in a trench coat picks through the Dumpster, shaking despite the heat. Here, amid the double-wides of the Ninth Ward, among the packs of teenage boys riding, gang-like, on their Huffy bicycles, the economy and culture of Oelwein are more securely tied to a drug than to either of the two industries that have forever sustained the town: farming and small business. This is the part of Oelwein, and of the small-town United States, not visible from the plane window as the flat stretch of the country rolls. After sundown in the Ninth Ward, the warm, nostalgic light that had bathed the nation beneath a late-afternoon transcontinental flight is gone. Against the oppressive humidity, the night’s spells begin to take shape. Mixed with the moist, organic scent of cut grass at dew point is the ether-stink of methamphetamine cooks at work in their kitchens.
Main Street, just three blocks distant, feels as far away as Chicago. For life in Oelwein is not, in fact, a picture-postcard amalgamation of farms and churches and pickup trucks, Fourth of July fireworks and Nativity scenes, bake sales and Friday-night football games. Nor is life simpler or better or truer here than it is in Los Angeles or New York or Tampa or Houston. Life in the small-town United States has, though, changed considerably in the last three decadesMain Street was no longer divided between Leo’s and the Do Drop Inn, or between the Perk and the Bakery: it was partitioned between the farmer and the tweaker.
There is a David Lynch-y vibe to both of these passages, where, like in Twin Peaks or the opening sequence of, we zoom in on wholesome archetypes to find them broken, corrupted - a Norman Rockwell painting on a rotting canvas. But there’s a key difference between Lynch’s work and Pain Killer, Methland, and Dreamland, which, together, make a searing nonfiction triptych of 21st-century American life.
Switching off the TV won’t make these stories disappear. While reading Jessica Soffer’s lush and layered debut novel, I was reminded of one of those sayings you hear about life: “Life is like a box of sardines,” something, something something Sadly, I could not remember how it finished.
But I was sure it had to do with some type of fish. And so I did an Internet search for quotes about life, and what it’s like, and I found life is indeed like a box of sardines (according to Alan Bennett), but it’s also apparently like: chocolates (Forrest Gump), artichokes ( Thomas Aloysius Dorgan), pasta ( Fellini), pudding ( W.S. Gilbert), soup (Flaubert), an onion ( Carl Sandburg), and a bowl of cherries ( Erma Bombeck). There is a pattern here. A favorite and more knotty take is from Jim Crace’s wonderful cornucopia of a book, a collection of riffs and vignettes all having to do with meals and booze. In one, he ponders a lone enigmatic tin can, no label, found sitting in a cupboard: “It’s tempting just to stab it with a knife.
See how it bleeds. What is the color of the blood? What is its taste? We should all have a can like this.The choice is wounding it with knives, or never touching it again.” This gets much closer, I think, to the essence of food and our fraught relationship with it. Food is mystery. It’s sensual, decadent, delicious, and healthful - yes - but also allergy, gluttony, poison, and pain.
It’s one of memory’s fastest streets, and delivers life-sustaining and death-haunted thoughts, depending. This is the food of Soffer’s story, which feels like one of Crace’s lovely vignettes, given sufficient room to grow.
The story proper belongs to Lorca, a 14-year-old girl, raised by her mother, a famous chef, and to Victoria, a recently widowed ex-chef, who has just lost her husband to cancer. Both live in New York City. Lorca is precocious in all the right ways, curious, intelligent, funny, and mature. She also wants nothing more that to crack her mother’s icy exterior - “I had a habit of asking her if she loved me. She had a habit of not answering.” She does so by worshipfully watching and copying her mother’s every move in the kitchen (a real chef in the making), oh, and by cutting her own body. In fact, the opening scene tells of Lorca’s suspension from school (and subsequent threats to send her away) because a classmate found Lorca, in the bathroom: “with my skirt high up, my tights down, my shoeless foot on the toilet seat, the paring knife to my thigh.” Lorca is a self-harmer, a cutter, and Soffer’s depiction of her cutting is admirably unflinching.
There are the secreted tools she prefers, box cutters, nail clippers, razors. And yes there is blood. At one especially bad time, the poor thing looks as if “splattered with someone else’s death.” This isn’t easy reading, and there are readers who will be surprised by it in a book so sunny.
Because despite her “problem,” Lorca’s just a kid, a good kid, and so her days are also filled with thoughts of school, and what she wants to be when she grows up, and boys (she’s in love with a 19-year named Blot), and the dream of making her mother’s favorite dish, masgouf, Iraqi grilled carp. Victoria, an Iraqi-Jewish immigrant, is headstrong and lonely, even before she loses her husband after his long sickness. This happens in the first few pages and comes as no surprise. What does surprise is her reaction; painfully in mourning, she refuses sentimentality. Unable to leave the apartment, those first few days, she is goaded by a meddlesome neighbor into conducting a cooking class in her home. Lorca finds a flyer advertising the class, and decides Victoria (for lots of reasons) will teach her the secrets of a perfected masgouf. Like a double helix, the novel is narrated by mostly these two voices of significantly different generations, leading the reader toward what seems the inevitably heartwarming and redemptive conclusion: are Victoria and Lorca more than just neighbors?
Are they family? Will a well-prepared dish fix all?
You can’t help but think of Nicole Krauss’s wildly popular novel, when reading Tomorrow There Will Be Apricots, and yet what Soffer does so well here is employ that same sort of familiar structure, while quietly undermining its typical devices. A novel about food becomes so much more than some simple story of domestic affirmation found in the kitchen (where it was waiting all along.) because, in the end, we always have Grandma’s recipe tin. Instead, it becomes a story of food’s very foundational and fluid place in our understanding of the world.
Here is Victoria on her husband’s remains: What would I carry him home in?A shopping bag? A cashmere shawl?
What could bear the weight of him, of everything he did? Nothing felt right.I couldn’t bear the thought of him like that - like almond meal, cake flour, or sand.
There is also the masgouf itself, the National Dish of Iraq, which serves not only as the object of Lorca’s mission, but enables Soffer to sneak in the undercurrent of a relevant political narrative. Soffer herself is of Iraqi-Jewish heritage, and knows all too well the story of her father’s emigration to the United States after the Jewish expulsion from Iraq. Most fled for Israel, but some chose the States, finding little community here.
Or anywhere really. The Iraqi Jewish identity is a rare one.
Recent reports put as little as 100 Jews left currently living there. It’s a sadly fading perspective, much like masgouf itself, a dish now impossible to cook in the traditional style. As Victoria tells Lorca, since the fish must be caught in the Tigris or Euphrates, “no one will ever eat this meal the same way again. As we did growing up. With all the dead bodies in the rivers, they’ve declared a fatwa on the fish.” A notion like this is good warning against nostalgia. In fact, much of the book does the same: upending comfortable notions of womanhood, motherhood, and what makes for a nurturing family. What is perhaps most remarkable about Tomorrow There Will Be Apricots is the ways in which it resembles what reviewers like to lazily think of as “women’s fiction,” even as it dispels those very trappings.
This is story about family and love, and how food feeds both of these, but also a story of loss and pain and the empty stomachs of those still learning how to feel. For that I find it, much like life, alive and sobering, buoyant and blue, at times dark, but only until the light fills the room. When I picked up, I expected the usual array of smart, twisted, unfortunate and hilarious characters that traditionally abound in William Boyd novels. I was pleasantly surprised at what I saw instead.Boyd, it seems, opted for a new genre in his last novel. Restless is a mystery that unfolds in a series of letters provided by an aging mother to a confused daughter.
Ruth, a single mom and struggling PhD candidate at Oxford, is in a rut. Her inability to make decisions affecting her life and desire to be a good mother create an inescapable conflict and further plunge her to despair.Now, imagine for a second that you are 28 years old and your mother, a frail old British woman who lives in peace tending her garden at a countryside home, sits you down and says: 'I used to be a spy, someone is trying to kill me on unfinished business, you will help me get that person.' That's what happens to Ruth.And thus the reader is drawn into a historic journey beginning in the 1930s and ending in the late 1970s. Intertwined with Ruth's thesis and her professors is the beginnings of her mother Sally Gilmartin's career. And while the daughter struggles to find emotional satisfaction, the mother's emotions are being abused. Whereas Ruth battles modern day evils attacking the individual, Sally is busy spreading misinformation in New York to draw the U.S.
Into World War II, being chased by Nazi spies and suspecting her own comrades in the fight against Hitler and communists.And of course there are the Boyd antics: Ruth's son Jochen's German father's brother settles in her house announced; his anarchist girl follows; a student of hers falls in love with her and she fails to handle the situation delicately, and so on. In the meantime, the young Sally is hopping from France to England, Belgium, the U.S. And Canada.Boyd's spy world makes for a read accurately captured in the title: restless.
And although I missed the absurd histrionics of the writer in his latest work, a trace of wry humor lingers in the book and the piecemeal narrative tying past and future is, simply put, entertaining and gripping. As with all other Boyd novels I read, Restless left me thinking, really, is this the end, can't I have some more, please?