A House on Stilts
ISBN: 9781609386603
Platform/Publisher: Project MUSE / University of Iowa Press
Digital rights: Users: Unlimited; Printing: Chapters; Download: Chapters
Subjects: Mothers and sons; Drug addicts; Teenage boys; Mothers; Heroin abuse; Parents of drug addicts;

A House on Stilts tells the story of one woman's struggle to reclaim wholeness while mothering a son addicted to opioids. Paula Becker's son Hunter was raised in a safe, nurturing home by his writer/historian mom and his physician father. He was a bright, curious child. And yet, addiction found him.

More than 2.5 million Americans are addicted to opioids, some half-million of these to heroin. For many of them, their drug addiction leads to lives of demoralization, homelessness, and constant peril. For parents, a child's addiction upends family life, catapulting them onto a path no longer prescribed by Dr. Spock, but by Dante's Inferno . Within this ten-year crucible, Paula is transformed by an excruciating, inescapable truth: the difference between what she can do and what she cannot do.

Paula Becker is the author of Looking for Betty MacDonald: The Egg, The Plague, Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle, and I , and coauthor of The Future Remembered: The 1962 Seattle World's Fair and Its Legacy . She lives in Seattle, Washington.

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