by Kate Willette

He didn’t know how to stop, though. He was functioning, sort of. He had some relationships in the community, including one with a doctor who knew him better than he’d imagined.

by Kate Willette

There’s a grave, gentle quality to the way Dave describes his young self--as if, in middle age, he’d like to put a hand on the shoulder of the desperate young person he once was and tell him it will, somehow, be okay. What he’s describing in that quote is how it was in his first year of college, a time that would turn out to be the launching point of three decades of addiction and loss. By the time he was eighteen, he’d transferred to a different college and begun to use marijuana to manage his anxiety; pot was everywhere at the American University (AU) in Washington, DC. It was 1978, and he’d chosen to go there partly because it was known then as a “party school.” Maybe there would be less pressure.

by Kate Willette

When Janice talks about her life, a sort of portrait emerges. It’s a landscape of wide, rough territory with masses of dark clouds and a figure in the foreground: Janice, steady and upright. She’s a self-reliant, self-educated woman whose sharp mind has seen her through and allowed her to prosper--even to forge a kind of truce with the world. She didn’t grow up with support from the usual places, because the people she might have depended on for nurturance often just didn’t have it to give.