Everyone knows that we in America have a drug problem. It's easy to look at the numbers of people who are addicted, at how many we have lost to their addictions, to talk about how to fix the problem. It's easy to forget the human beings that are behind those numbers, the families that hold addicts together and that tear them apart. Janet Peery takes a look at those family dynamics in her riveting The Exact Nature of Our Wrongs.
Family matriarch Hattie Campbell has brought all her children together for their father's birthday. Although he may not have been a perfect parent, Abel was a good provider, a military veteran, a successful lawyer, and a respected judge in their small Midwestern town. Hattie knows that he doesn't have many birthdays left--honestly, neither does she, now that she's in her 80s and had that little heart attack last year. But she wants to make a nice family evening, so she invited her daughters Doro and ClairBell as well as sons Jesse, Gideon, and even Billy.
While Doro has made it out of Kansas (she lives in Boston, where she works at a small liberal arts college), the rest of the kids have stayed local, making their alcohol abuse, divorces, DUIs, and financial struggles part of the local gossip. And then there's the youngest, Billy.
Billy is a gay man, HIV positive, a sharp talker, and a drug addict. When he keels over into his chocolate cake at the birthday celebration, Hattie announces to her other kids that she can't handle him anymore and asks for help, something it is not in her nature to do.
As the siblings put their heads together and try to come up with a solution to Billy's addiction, years of old resentments and bitterness come to the forefront. An addict is a function of a larger system, and many times that is the family. There are a thousand things that come together to create dysfunction, and author Janet Peery shows us the path that this family (like so many other families) find themselves on.
Although The Exact Nature of Our Wrongs doesn't offer up easy answers (do those even exist?), it does give us a moving, beautiful, intricate, intimate look at the inner workings of an American family, in all its glory and shame. This is not a happy story where everything works out in the end, but it is powerful and honest and makes us look at ourselves and our choices in new ways.
Galleys for The Exact Nature of Our Wrongs were provided by St. Martin's Press through NetGalley.com, with many thanks.