Does Your Fabulous Book Have A Life After It’s Published?
The “Afterlife” of The Fix: A Father’s Secrets, A Daughter’s Search
The question “What does recovery mean to you?” was written on a hand-out I recently received at a recovery meeting where I was invited to present the proposal, “Expressing Our Creative Selves With Step Four of the Twelve Steps,” a workshop program I hope to share at recovery centers in my area. Though I was just a guest at the meeting, I was asked to respond to the question along with everyone else. It was a good way for all of us—staff members, regulars, drop-ins, and guests—to introduce ourselves.
So why did I suddenly feel so insecure, as if I were back at my very first recovery meeting eight years ago? Why was it so hard for my brain to assemble my definition of recovery? Aren’t I a veteran at recovery now that I have written a published book about being the adult daughter of a father who suffered from heroin addiction? Not only that. After KiCam published my book six years ago, The Fix: A Father’s Secrets, A Daughter’s Search, they gave it further life by arranging for me to be interviewed by talk-show hosts and to write articles for magazines emphasizing different slants and approaches to my topic, how a parent’s substance use disorder affects the entire family.
So why, I asked myself again, am I so beset with the jitters? The truth is I will always be in recovery, and this meeting I was attending, intent on offering what I had to share, was also where I needed to be in order to deepen and sustain my own recovery.
“I am the adult daughter of a father who suffered from heroin addiction,” I announced when it was my turn. “I was seventeen when my father died of an overdose of bad stuff, and I still feel guilty about never having confronted him about his problem. I’m recovering from excessive self-blame.” Of course, I realize now, at age 78, how silly it is to still feel guilty about a problem I had no control over. Nevertheless, the emotions do not always grow up with the adult.
The first way I thought of giving my book a life beyond publication was to think of what would have helped me as a teen in my pressure-cooker family. I wished back then I could have brought out the shameful secret I was harboring inside myself. I wished I could have lifted my burden and found other teens who wanted to share what they were going through. Writing and keeping a diary was my way out, but surely other kids had other outlets for letting out steam. I never let my secret out until very late in life, after I retired from teaching, when I wrote and published the book I thought would magically change my life forever. Inevitably, though, the year one’s book is published does not freeze the flow of time. As the initial fanfare of publication receded and the huge emotional weight I had been carrying lifted, I asked myself: What’s Next?
With my book in hand, I thought of helping teens in my community. Writing helped me; maybe other forms of art could also be healing. So, I organized workshops in different kinds of creative expression, workshops in storytelling, improv, music making, painting, paper maché, dance, cuisine, and others, to channel teens’ fears and anxieties.
My book became my credential to show to parents, teachers, guidance counselors, grants, and funding sources. Collaborating with a committed group of artist-teachers, a museum that wished to host our project, and a school district that wished to address teen despair during the opioid epidemic, I coordinated Creative Outlets, Finding Your Voice Through Arts. I led a writing workshop using selections from my book as prompts. For four years, and especially during COVID when our program went online, we engaged hundreds of teens.
Life is always changing. I had to stop coordinating this fulfilling program that required full-time hours. My husband of thirty-six years had a stroke, and I became his full-time caregiver. Once again, my insecurities reared up. I never had children of my own; I was too afraid of repeating destructive family dynamics. My husband’s children were already adults. Could I be the competent caregiver my husband needed? Would he have enough trust in me to keep him alive and safe if I had never been a mom? My worries piled up.
I steadied myself by going back to my book and re-reading it. This time, I connected my adult self in recovery to the teenager I was in the book. And here I thought I was over that trauma of my father’s death! But no, I’m still thinking my husband’s death—from aspiration pneumonia—is on me. Isn’t there something more I could have done to prevent my husband’s dying? The emotions do not always grow up with the adult.
So here I am now, proposing a series of three workshops to recovery programs, not only to strengthen my own recovery but also to prepare for an exciting new venture: turning my coming of age story into a movie that has the potential to reach wider audiences.
In the workshops, Expressing Our Creative Selves With Step Four of The Twelve Steps, participants use prompts from The Fix to use their inner talents and skills to clarify self-doubts, externalize them, and transform them into positive, creative forms of expression: writing, visual art, song, improv, storytelling, video, and others. It’s a mini-Creative Outlets for adults in recovery. One thrust of the workshops will be for participants to represent in their own ways a “searching and fearless moral inventory of themselves” (Step Four of the Twelve Steps).
I was fortunate to find a script writer interested enough in my book to turn it into a script. By combing my mind of all those people I knew throughout my lifetime who had anything to do with film production, after one year, I finally found two women filmmakers who want to produce The Fix. They have interviewed me to find fuller answers to questions raised in the book and the film script. And they have asked me to identify the scenes in the book and the film script that are the most significant turning points in my life. In the recovery workshops I hope to lead, I will ask the participants: If you were to make a movie of your own life, what 5 turning points are the ones that stand out?
And what about you, the reader of this blog? If you made a movie of your own life, what 5 experiences would you select as having the strongest impact? Now try arranging them in a storyline, and you have the beginning steps for creating a narrative feature film.
Feeling good enough about myself to follow through with the decision to make this movie is my sign that happily, I’m still on the road to recovery. Hopefully others will benefit from learning about my journey.
About the Author:
Sharon Leder is the award-winning author of The Fix: A Father’s Secrets, A Daughter’s Search. Sharon taught English, women’s studies, and Jewish studies on several campuses of the State University of New York before beginning the second half of her life as a fiction writer and poet. As a teacher, she wrote books and articles on women writers, on the literature of the Holocaust, and on women in academia. An earlier draft of her novel, The Fix, was a finalist in Merrimack Media’s Outstanding Writer Award (2015). As an advocate for addiction recovery, Sharon provides vital resources to teens and adults in the Cape Cod area who have been impacted by addiction, offering support, guidance, and providing a space that encourages creativity as a way of healing.