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Feb. 13, 2020 – Hitting Bottom “Stray” is a literary coming to terms with her parents’ substance abuse, as well as her own periods of heavy drinking, cocaine and sedative use. Her father is a recovering alcoholic, opiate and crystal methedrine addict who left the family when Ms. Danler was 3, Ms. Danler writes in the book. Therefore, she wrote in an email, “hitting bottom in ‘Stray’ is less about wrecking the car or overdosing or degrading sexual encounters, and more admitting that I need to let people go. Hitting bottom is a boundary.”

Getting Clean While the author was able to steer clear of an addictive spiral without rehab, her mother, she said, is a lifelong alcoholic now disabled from a brain aneurysm she suffered in 2005; her father, she said, has been in and out of recovery. “When I let him go, it wasn’t a reaction to one of his disasters,” she writes in the book. “It was finding myself in the right temperature, the right light.”

@NYTimes