HIDE AND SEEK

Summers recounts getting sober to maintain custody of his daughter in this memoir.

As a professional musician, the author managed to make it into his 30s living life on his own terms—partying, sleeping in, and eschewing traditional responsibility. When his much younger girlfriend got pregnant, it was finally time for Summers to grow up. Unfortunately, by that point, his addiction to pain pills and speed made rising to the occasion all but impossible. On the day his daughter was born—three weeks early—Summers remembers jealously eyeing his wife’s epidural, given that he’d run out of pills the night before. (He visited his dealer within the hour.) His wife, too, was an addict; less than a month into motherhood, she had a possibly drug-induced seizure and almost crushed the infant on the floor. The author and his wife managed to buy a house in “an area in Southeast Portland nicknamed Felony Flats—neighborhoods full of ex-convicts, drug dealers, prostitutes, an abnormally high percentage of registered sex offenders, and at least one house with two dope-fiend parents. We move[d] in on Halloween.” Things continued to spiral until, a few years later, Summers’s wife left him, taking their daughter and filing a restraining order for good measure. Defying all expectations, the author found it within himself to get clean—even as his estranged wife remained an active addict. With this memoir, Summers describes both his process of achieving and maintaining sobriety and his struggle to gain custody of his daughter. The author writes with great lyricism, particularly regarding his addiction: “I find myself chasing some fleeting apex—an imaginary, constant moving bullseye. The high I desperately want to feel again ends up becoming more like a mirage.” Summers is a natural storyteller, and the book flies by despite its length. From failed rocker to family man, this is a deadbeat dad redemption story for the ages.

A stylishly told, heartfelt tale of addiction, recovery, and parenthood.