In the shadows of Madrid’s most notorious drug slum, an American missionary family takes root among heroin addicts and builds an unlikely church. Shooting Up is Jonathan Tepper’s searing memoir of growing up in San Blas, where playgrounds were strewn with syringes and his closest friends were recovering addicts twice his age.

When Elliott and Mary Tepper arrive in 1985 with their four young sons, San Blas is the epicenter of Europe’s heroin epidemic. While other children play soccer, Jonathan befriends bank robbers and former prostitutes. His heroes are not athletes, but men like Raúl and Jambri—charismatic ex-addicts who transform their lives through the revolutionary rehabilitation center the Teppers help to found.

What begins as eight men in a cramped apartment becomes Betel, now one of the world’s largest drug rehabilitation networks. Yet this is not a story of institutional triumph. Instead, it is an intimate portrait of radical compassion during the height of the AIDS crisis, told through the eyes of a boy watching his parents choose the outcast over the respectable, witnessing miracles and heartbreak in equal measures.

Tepper writes with unflinching honesty about the magnetic pull of the streets, the seductive danger of heroin, and the complicated love that binds broken people healing together. His prose—elegant yet raw—captures both the squalor of addiction and the stubborn persistence of grace.

This is a memoir about finding beauty in ruins, forging family among outcasts, and learning that the answer to suffering is always more love. It is a story of love and loss, but also a love letter to friends, family, and the act of learning itself. Part Angela’s Ashes, Shooting Up announces Tepper as a powerful new voice in memoir—one who transforms a harrowing childhood into an unforgettable testament to hope.

https://www.amazon.com/Shooting-Up-Memoir-Love-Addiction/dp/1964378133

http://www.yourlotandparcel.org