Shooting Up: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and Addiction

'Powerfully moving….An extraordinary memoir.'

—George Stephanopoulos, Good Morning America and ABC Sunday News


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In 1985, Elliott and Mary Tepper moved their four young sons into San Blas, Madrid’s most notorious heroin slum—ground zero of Europe’s drug epidemic. While other children played soccer, seven-year-old Jonathan was handing out tracts to addicts in syringe-littered parks and befriending bank robbers, former prostitutes, and recovering junkies twice his age.


What began as eight men detoxing in a small apartment grew into Betel, now one of the world’s largest drug rehabilitation networks. But Shooting Up isn’t an institutional history—it’s a boy’s-eye view of a radical experiment in compassion during the AIDS crisis, full of unforgettable characters, street danger, and moments of unlikely grace.


Part Angela’s Ashes, part The Cross and the Switchblade, Tepper’s memoir captures the grit and squalor of addiction alongside the stubborn hope of lives remade. For readers of literary memoir, narrative nonfiction, and stories of resilience, Shooting Up announces Tepper as a powerful new voice in memoir, one who transforms a harrowing childhood into an unforgettable testament to hope.