Some childhoods unfold on playgrounds and soccer fields. Jonathan Tepper’s unfolded in syringe-littered parks, abandoned apartments, and the margins of Madrid’s most notorious heroin slum.
In Shooting Up: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and Addiction, Tepper tells the story of growing up in San Blas in the mid-1980s, where his American missionary parents chose to live and work among people most of society had written off: addicts, former criminals, and the desperately ill at the height of the AIDS crisis. While other children played after school, Jonathan handed out tracts to heroin users, befriended recovering junkies twice his age, and bore witness to the daily churn of suffering, relapse, death—and, sometimes, astonishing grace.
What began as eight men detoxing in a small apartment eventually became Betel, now one of the world’s largest drug rehabilitation networks. But Shooting Up is not an institutional history. It is a boy’s-eye view of a radical experiment in compassion, told with cinematic detail, emotional clarity, and deep moral complexity.
Part Angela’s Ashes, part The Cross and the Switchblade, this memoir captures the grit and squalor of addiction alongside the stubborn hope of lives remade. Tepper writes with tenderness and restraint about faith, love, loss, and the cost of choosing to live among society’s outcasts—not as saviors, but as neighbors.
Though Tepper is best known as the author of acclaimed financial and economic books including The Myth of Capitalism, Shooting Up marks his debut in memoir and introduces a powerful new literary voice. It is a story that feels urgently relevant in an era shaped by the ongoing opioid crisis, yet it transcends politics and ideology, offering instead a human story of resilience, community, and grace.
Shooting Up: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and Addiction is available in hardcover, ebook, and audiobook formats through the publisher’s website, Bookshop.org, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple Books, and Spotify. It will also be published in the UK by Little, Brown.
Review copies can be requested at Edelweiss and NetGalley. For bulk orders and media inquiries, contact Otterpine at media@otterpine.com.
We’re honored to partner with publisher Infinite Books to help bring this unforgettable story to readers.
