MOTHER NOISE

An essayist recounts her struggles with addiction and her concerns about its ramifications for her young son.

Addiction and the challenges of parenthood are the focus of House’s debut. “I carry the possibility of disaster,” writes the author, who is best known for her regular spot as an opener for David Sedaris on his nationwide tours. In 2017, that fatalistic attitude is what led House to tell Atlas, her then-9-year-old son, about her past as a heroin addict. Raised in Connecticut, she spent her early adulthood in Chicago, a period that began with her “self-medicating, mostly with alcohol, plus any drug I stumbled upon,” before full-on heroin addiction took its toll. House describes those memories in uncomfortable detail, such as the time she “almost killed someone on Sacramento Boulevard in Chicago ” when she looked away to withdraw heroin from a packet and ran a red light; and her months at the Yale Psychiatric Institute for clinical depression, where Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried showed her that “humans had survived far worse than depression and had even gone on to write about it.” Some essays are written as graphic shorts, with House’s illustrations, and the book doesn’t quite add up to a satisfying whole, as some pieces are too underdeveloped to resonate. But the best essays are powerhouses. Among them are a long piece about the Chicago apartment house she moved into with other recovering addicts, “bloated from a cocktail of prescribed psychotropic drugs,” and an essay that describes her 30-year friendship with Sedaris, which began in 1987 when the not-yet-famous author showed students in his writing class an example of a complicated plot by having them watch One Life To Live. Despite the often depressing material, there is hope and considerable beauty in these pages, most notably in a section in which Atlas, showing uncommon compassion for his age, visits his dying teacher and holds her hand.

A grim yet hopeful portrait of one woman’s emergence and triumph over drug dependency.