Off the Rails: One Family’s Journey Through Teen Addiction

In this fast-moving debut memoir, Burrowes traces her family’s attempts to treat her troubled teenage daughter Hannah’s drug addiction and violent behavior. After being diagnosed with bipolar disorder, cutting off the heads of her sister’s stuffed animals, and accidentally overdosing on lithium, Hannah, her parents realized, required intense care. Burrowes felt her daughter, then in ninth grade, needed to be treated away from home, and she and her husband sent Hannah to a program in Utah, where she spent three months camping in the desert; she stayed in Utah to finish high school in a supervised residential home. Eventually, Burrowes and her husband learned that Hannah’s behavior had been caused by ecstacy use, and that she was not bipolar; Hannah later graduated from college, but the family’s “happy ending” left them “scarred and battle-weary.” Each chapter is split into multiple sections, told in the present tense from both mother and daughter perspectives, though Burrowes wrote both; she notes that with Hannah’s permission, she recreated events using daily journals, boxes of letters, and hours of conversation. Unfortunately, Hannah’s sections don’t have the same impact or sense of verity as Burrowes’s. Still, the narrative remains gripping and immersive, and it successfully recounts a mother trying to understand her daughter’s struggle and her own role in the recovery process. [em](Aug.) [/em]