Shooting Up
 

Shooting Up: A Memoir of Heroin, AIDS, Love and Loss is a coming-of-age memoir about the AIDS epidemic among heroin addicts through the eyes of a child who becomes a young man. Jonathan Tepper grew up as a precocious American missionary kid in San Blas, a neighborhood of Madrid, Spain. San Blas had the highest rate of heroin use and juvenile crime in all of Europe in the 1980s. As an act of love, his parents started a drug rehabilitation center. Recovering addicts and criminals in the drug rehab become Jonathan’s best friends. Almost all the addicts shared needles and were HIV+. Over the coming years, almost all of them would die of AIDS. Jonathan befriends Raúl, the first addict in the program, and comes to love him as an older brother. He helplessly stands by his side as he suffers from AIDS. Yet it is the death of Jonathan’s youngest brother Timothy in a car accident that shocks him and leads him to understand grief. He develops a greater empathy with his friends dying of AIDS. Grief and death become central themes of the book, in a profoundly moving story.