If You Love Me

May 7, 2018
Debut author Cavanagh paints a vivid but depressing portrait of her attempts to deal with her daughter Katie’s heroin addiction in a small town outside of Boston. Katie’s addiction leads her to steal, prostitute herself, and run away from rehab—but it’s Cavanagh’s story that takes center stage. As Katie repeats a rotation of shooting up, detoxing, rehabbing, and relapsing (she attends over 40 treatment programs and survives 13 overdoses), Cavanagh cycles through anxiety, relief, hopefulness, and despair. She cruises drug neighborhoods to find Katie, attends therapy sessions, and takes Zoloft, and even threatens to beat her daughter’s drug dealer to death with a baseball bat. Because she can’t save Katie, she tries to save others, developing a peer support network for the families of drug users called Magnolia New Beginnings, which places addicts in treatment centers and brings together mothers who share similar experiences. Though Cavanagh aims to reduce stigma by framing addiction as an involuntary medical disease, she also argues that the key to sobriety is “to want it.” Katie is sober by the book’s end, but there’s no guarantee that she’ll stay this way, leading to Cavanagh’s final epiphany, that each day “is a new beginning,” echoing Alcoholics Anonymous’s one-day-at-a-time slogan. Some readers may find Cavanagh’s story comforting in its familiarity; others may find it all too predictable.

June 15, 2018
Another heartbreaking tale of opioid abuse and the toll it takes on an entire family.Missing money, bent and burned or missing spoons, and missing jewelry: All of these served as clues that eventually led Cavanagh to the realization that her daughter, Katie, was a heroin addict who had stolen from her in order to buy drugs. The author's grief and suffering are consistently palpable as she traces the numerous paths she took with her ex-husband, Mike, over the course of several years, to get Katie into treatment centers. She shares the anguish and dismay she felt each time her daughter slipped away again, returning to her life of drug abuse and abusive boyfriends. "I've seen so much pain in the last few years," she writes. "I hadn't known just how much pain the world could contain. It crushes me sometimes, not just my own but the pain of so many others also trying to hang on to whatever shred of their loved ones they can. I don't know how I got here. There is never a day that goes by that this does not feel very surreal." Cavanagh describes her powerful feelings of both fear and shame and how her need for support led her to reach out to others experiencing the same trauma. Because of her deep involvement in this crisis and her discovery that help was limited, the author founded a nonprofit group, Magnolia New Beginnings, to aid parents and drug users in finding treatment and the necessary emotional support for those struggling with all kinds of substance abuse. While Cavanagh's story is unique, it's also, sadly, fairly common. When she discovered the shockingly widespread nature of the problem, the author devoted herself to addressing the crisis--and its attendant stigmas--head-on.An emotionally fraught tale of a mother's love and her actions to save her daughter from opioid addiction.

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September 1, 2018
Debuting author Cavanagh shares a personal side of the U.S. opioid crisis. Cavanagh's daughter, Katie, started experimenting with drugs in high school. Only when Cavanagh discovered Katie's theft of treasured family jewelry did she realize how bad her daughter's drug use had become. Living in a small town outside Boston, she painstakingly tried to keep Katie's heroin addiction secret, but when Katie wound up on the police blotter, arrested for prostitution, Cavanagh realized secrecy would not save her daughter?or herself. In a 180-degree turn, she opened up and sought out other families dealing with substance abuse, helped other addicts when she couldn't help Katie, and even founded a nonprofit dedicated to the cause. Cavanagh's writing is honest and straightforward, her pace fast and tone foreboding; all this makes for a page-turner that puts readers beside her on the emotional roller coaster that dealing with a loved one's substance abuse is. Perfect for readers anticipating the upcoming film Beautiful Boy, based on David Sheff's bestselling 2007 memoir.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)