What readers are saying...
In Off the Rails , Burrowes recalls how she and her husband thought they were living a near-perfect life—until their fifteen-year-old daughter, Hannah, became addicted to opioids and her life spun out of control. Theirs is a nightmare snapshot of the epidemic that is wreaking havoc on a broad swath of American families.
Burrowes tells her family’s intensely real story with deep angst and explicit language from page one. In absolutely beautiful form, it comes in the alternating voices of the mother and her daughter. Burrowes uses Hannah’s journals,
letters, and conversations to craft her parts of the book, doing an astounding job of capturing Hannah’s voice and pain, without interjections or alterations—certainly a painfully unselfconscious feat.
Stirring, raw, and personal, Burrowes’s and Hannah’s stories proffer rare cross-generational understanding. Burrowes faces agonizing decisions in the face of Hannah’s illness; Hannah recalls what worked, and what didn’t, for her
recovery. Together, they build empathy.
Their narrative portrays the pain of being a teenager, the bewilderment that parents face, and the horrifying ways that drugs transform people and ravage families. The long, messy road to healing and reconciliation is captured. It’s hard
to imagine a story of hope coming from such a dark place, but that’s the exact miracle that this family experienced.
Beyond commiseration, the story offers a path forward for families facing similar struggles. Burrowes paints a picture of healing that so many families are longing for. For young people recovering from addiction, this book can build
understanding about their parents’ suffering—not to create guilt, but to deepen love. It is an honest story of pain and healing.
Melissa Wuske for Forward Indies Reviews
In this fast-moving debut memoir, Burrowes traces her family’s attempts to treat her troubled teenage daughter Hannah’s drug addiction and violent behavior. After being diagnosed with bipolar disorder, cutting the heads off her sister’s stuffed animals, and accidentally overdosing on lithium, Hannah, her parents realized, required intense care. Burrowes felt her daughter, then in tenth grade, needed to be treated away from home, and she and her husband sent Hannah to a program in Utah, where she spent three months camping in the desert; she stayed in Utah to finish high school in a supervised residential home. Eventually, Burrowes and her husband learned that Hannah’s behavior had been caused by ecstacy use, and that she was not bipolar; Hannah later graduated from college, but the family’s “happy ending” left them “scarred and battle-weary.”
Each chapter is split into multiple sections, told in the present tense from both mother and daughter perspectives, though Burrowes wrote both; she notes that with Hannah’s permission, she recreated events using daily journals, boxes of letters, and hours of conversation... the narrative remains gripping and immersive, and it successfully recounts a mother trying to understand her daughter’s struggle and her own role in the recovery process.
Publisher's Weekly Reviews
A despairing mother and a defiant teenage daughter confront drug addiction in Burrowes’ debut memoir.
In the years leading up to ninth grade, Hannah Burrowes lived a happy, healthy life with her family. By the time she was 15, though, she’d progressed from “moody to malicious,” according to her mother, the primary author of this memoir. A self-proclaimed outsider, unimpressed by her “Mean Barbie” classmates, she gravitated toward the art-fueled scene of downtown Santa Cruz, California, where she was enthralled by what she calls its “wave of weirdness.” The memoir goes
on to relate how the teen’s recreational drug use spiraled into a full-blown, life-threatening addiction, involving regular use of Ecstasy, OxyContin, and psychedelics. The deterioration of her relationship with her family became such that her mother lived in fear of her, and in time, she was sent off to a tough residential rehabilitation program in Utah, where she
would face a brutally cold winter. It’s a desperate story of teen addiction, punctuated by misdiagnosis, overdose, and rehabilitation.
In the memoir’s foreword, Burrowes writes: “During our two years of treatment, I learned that there can be more than one truth, more than one way of thinking.” This revelation shapes the structure of the narrative, as each event is examined from both the mother’s and daughter’s perspectives. It effectively reveals the voice of a scared mom questioning her approach to parenting (“all I find are the taunts of an oppositional teenager and my angry words. Did I miss something? What have I done?”) and that of an equally frightened, confused young girl who lost control: “I really don’t know how many pills I took, I don’t fucking know how drinking or taking E makes lithium stronger, but they keep telling me it does and that I’m screwed.” As a result, the ugly anatomy of addiction is laid bare, using plain,
unadulterated language drawn from the rawness of personal experience. Those facing similar challenges will find courage and hope in this informative memoir’s outcome.
A brave, if harrowing, work that addresses the issues surrounding mental health, treatment, and rehabilitation head-on.
Kirkus Reviews
With two healthy children and rewarding careers, educator and communications expert Burrowes and husband Paul were shocked when, within only a few months, their lives were thrown into upheaval as daughter Hannah’s ordinary teen moodiness shifted into vicious anger. “If she’s willing to hit me, what else is she capable of,” asks Burrowes at the start of this often disturbing, raw, and uncut account written from both the author’s and Hannah’s perspectives. Readers follow Hannah as she’s admitted to a psychiatric hospital then completes progressive treatments at the Second Nature Wilderness Family Therapy program and comes to understand Austrian neurologist Viktor Frankl’s idea that “caring is the last human freedom.” After Hannah completes a strict regimen at the wilderness program, she is treated at a residential center. Burrowes reflects on the experience: “when you have a child in treatment, everything you see, hear, and do is filtered through a lens of frustration, failure, and shame.
Readers will appreciate Hannah’s final move toward redemption when Hannah returns home and healing begins.
VERDICT A powerful work of unfiltered truth about addiction, mother-daughter relationships, and the importance of working together.
Library Journal
Off the Rails is a searing account of a family’s struggle with their daughter’s descent into drug abuse. Told from the perspective of both mother and daughter, it is at once heartbreaking and hopeful, but always devastatingly honest. Eye opening and unforgettable.
Lauren Kerwin PhD, Psychologist
Off the Railsshould be required reading for parents and professionals who deal with families coping with teen addiction. With courage and searing honesty, Susan Burrowes shows the complexity and heartbreak of having an adolescent daughter whose erratic behavior from addiction spins the entire family “off the rails.” Writing a two-narrator memoir, Burrowes invites the reader to enter into the intimate thoughts and raw feelings of both mother and daughter as they struggle to chart a path to health and recovery. A dynamic, inspiring read.
Maureen Murdock, author of Unreliable Truth: On Memoir and Memory
In Off the Rails: One Family’s Journey Through Teen Addiction, Susan and her daughter, the wildly defiant Hannah, take us through Hannah’s misdiagnosis, overdose, and treatment for addiction. We hear from both sides: mother and daughter. Susan describes the agonizing decisions parents face in navigating our tangled mental health and addiction rehab system, while struggling with confusion and blame in a society that is not set up to help parents or struggling teens. Hannah shares her innermost thoughts and details from her perspective; a true gift to readers.
Struggling families and teens will connect with this compelling book. It clarifies what happens when you send your child to wilderness therapy or a residential treatment center and will help readers understand how high-risk kids fall through the cracks, how families seek help that feels impossible to find, how necessary long-term treatment can be prohibitively expensive, and how schools, professionals, and parents must work together.”
D’Anne Burwell
Author of Saving Jake: When Addition Hits Home
Susan Burrowes provides raw insight for families faced with the unexpected chaos of a troubled teen. This honest account of one family's journey from a stable, loving home through the bowels of downtown Santa Cruz and three separate treatment centers is a great read for anyone interested in taking a peek behind the rehabilitation of a child gone "Off the Rails."
Kristin McCandless
Recovery Counselor
Alternating voices, a frantic mother and her troubled young daughter, narrate an all-too-frequent tale: a beloved child’s rapid spiral into addiction and chaos coupled with a woefully inadequate health care system. Off the Rails shines with clarity and unstinting honesty about the pitfalls and sources of help needed not just for a child, but a family to recover.
Linda Dahl
Author of numerous published books, a screenplay and articles, including The Bad Dream Notebook, and Loving Our Addicted Daughters Back to Life.
Off the Rails discusses various treatment options for teens and the overwhelming distress that can arise when advocating for your loved one. I truly enjoyed how the book was stuctured, giving the perspectives of all of the characters. In all honesty, this story is inspiring. It is helpful for other parents to hear about how mistakes can help us learn and grow into more effective parents.
Dr. Catherine Towson
LMFT
Off the Rails is full of very personal, very real thoughts, emotions, doubts, anxieties, and fears, but also full of stories of effort, concern, caring, hope, struggle, and love.It is also full of detail, very up close detail, told with clarity in the raw, not glossed-over memories, and that makes it very compelling and authentic. The two voices in the book are both very genuine. The detailed view inside treatment is so helpful to families facing similar challenges. I found it captivating.
Robert Vallone
Early Reader
After months of living in fear of our own daughter, our family finally came to a decision. Devastated, hoping we weren't making a terrible mistake we sent our child away to live in the sub- zero cold of the Utah winter. There she slept in a sleeping bag in the snow, cooked in a rusty coffee can and hiked miles over unforgiving terrain. When she was well enough we moved her to a locked down residential treatment center. It broke my heart. She said it saved her life.
This is the story of a mother and daughter first losing, and then trying to find each other through the fog of drug addiction and self-harm. It is told through both of their voices, for a rare, honest and compelling view inside wilderness and residential treatment programs.
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Crystal Patriarche
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