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

Longlisted for the 2025 Brooklyn Public Library Book Prize

In this deeply moving and lyrical memoir, Jessica Hoppe shares an intimate, courageous account of what it means to truly interrupt cycles of harm.

“A powerful thunderclap of a memoir.” —Lilliam Rivera, author of Dealing in Dreams

During the first year of the pandemic and the ensuing isolation, fatal drug overdoses spiked to numbers previously unseen. 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, Hoppe had been in recovery for nearly four years, but she hadn’t told anyone.

In First in the Family, Hoppe shares her journey as the first in her family to recover from addiction and takes the reader on a remarkable investigation of her family’s history, the American Dream, and the erasure of BIPOC from recovery institutions and narratives.