pill poppin' palooza

Despite the fact that I brought 4 books with me on my trip to Mobile, I wound up with nothing to read on my last day there thanks to 2 books that were less than stellar. Thankfully, my mom is more obsessed with books than I am. Her kitchen has 2 sets of floor-to-ceiling bookshelves that are double stacked and running out of room. A second bedroom has the same setup with children's books. As a math nerd, people always ask why I love English, reading, and writing; I get it honestly is all I can really say. We were always doing summer reading at the library and constantly had books growing up. I said all that to say, I went pursuing through the mom-brary and stumbled upon All Fall Down from Jennifer Weiner. Side note: If I were a famous author and went by a pseudonym as so many do, I sure wouldn't choose anything that could make middle school boys (and their former teachers) giggle when they saw it. Just keeping it real, y'all! Weiner reminds me a lot of Emily Giffin. If you like her work, you will probably like this one.

Weiner weaves a tale of suburban mom Allison Weiss who has become addicted to prescription painkillers and her subsequent fall from grace. This story is especially relevant for our time; I just read here that Xanax is now the #2 cause of DUI in the state of Alabama. If there were ever a "time" for a book like this, it is now. Allison finds herself unhappy with where her life is: her weight, her overly-sensitive / might need medication at age 7 daughter, her husband who is slipping away and eventually finds a work wife, her father's progression toward Alzheimer's. She is simply at a place where she can no longer "handle" all that life throws her way. Conveniently, she threw her back out several years before and has a Percocet prescription. But soon, that's not enough; it takes more than one for her to survive the day. Then it's Vicodin; next it's OxyContin. She has several doctors on speed dial who will call in prescriptions for her at a moment's notice. She even begins shopping the black market online to get her fix. 

While her blogging career takes off, her personal life continues to spin out of control. She is eventually caught by a teacher at her daughter's school when she shows up to carpool stoned. Her husband then tries to intervene and she tries to take herself off the pills - bad decision. She goes into full withdrawal mode and tries to get more pills from a doc-in-a-box, which lands her in the hospital and eventually a rehab facility where she is miserable. She even breaks out for her daughter's birthday party. She returns and finds / realizes for herself that she actually needs more time in rehab than her original 28 days. Suddenly we find Allison back at home with her daughter, out of rehab and learning to adjust to life as a recovering addict - no tales of the 60 days she spent in rehab. All is suddenly right in the world, or so it appears.

I loved the fact that Allison spoke her mind freely in the book and that the book was written first-person. I love that she was occasionally vulnerable in spite of her addiction-ladeled craziness. I didn't love the way we jumped directly from returning to rehab to out of it. Seriously, I wanted some "scoop" on what she really endured when she committed to her own healing. I also didn't love the way the book bogged down in the middle and lost my attention. It started strong and kept me entertained at first, but then I found myself just wanting it to end. I'm a fairly quick reader, but this one took me over a week (granted, we nested and cleaned out the future nursery and organized all the things, plus I had a day-long workshop), and that was just not cool with me. It was decent but it is not a book i will put on my list of things I have to tell people to read.

2.5 (of 4) dusty book jackets.