A Mother-Daughter Story of Substance Abuse and Recovery

“By my sixteenth birthday, this is the list of drugs I used constantly: massive amounts of marijuana, LSD, mushrooms, PCP, cocaine and alcohol. A couple of days after my sixteenth birthday, I tried crystal meth for the first time.”

“Addicted Like Me,” co-written by mother Karen Franklin and her daughter Lauren King, offers readers a vivid, first-hand look at their family’s experience with the “beast of addiction.” The dual voices tell a story of overcoming denial, a relentless search for treatment, and the struggle to regain one another’s trust to move beyond three generations of addiction and finally find the road to recovery.

“There were times while writing about this part of my life that I didn’t think I would be able to finish sharing the sort of person I used to be,” Lauren writes in the introduction. “I had doubts about opening myself up to admit my failures, mistakes, and vulnerabilities.”

But open up, she does, bringing readers through her tumultuous experience being taken to bars every night with her alcoholic father, watching her brother get physically abused by her stepmother, having a drug addict for a boyfriend, and getting to the point where she willingly took a drug without even knowing what it was.

“I asked the guy what it was that I had taken, and before he told me, he just looked at me as if I were kidding, so I had to sit there and wait for his response, secretly freaking out. I didn’t know what I had just inhaled into my nose. He finally blared, “Crystal Meth!”

Lauren’s confessions are complemented by Karen’s straightforward advice to other parents:

“Acknowledge the fact that your child has a serious disease and has spun out of control because of it…This will be a major challenge due to embarrassment or a different emotion that you may associate with addiction having taken over your family. Please consider the fact that we did not cause that and we cannot let any shame we may feel cause us to try to hide the truth from those who are close to us.”

A story full of advice and inspiration from two women made wise from their experiences, “Addicted Like Me,” aims to help others view addiction in a new way.

Read an excerpt from Addicted Like Me.