Book Review: Shooting Up by Jonathan Tepper - A Memoir That Redefines What Family Means

"We dance because we cannot fly." — Shooting Up

Note: I received an advance review copy (ARC) of this book. Shooting Up: A Memoir of Love, Loss and Addiction will be published by Little, Brown on February 19, 2026.

Summary and Background

Jonathan Tepper's Shooting Up: A Memoir of Love, Loss and Addiction is not the book you think it is. Yes, it's about heroin addiction. Yes, it's about AIDS during the darkest years of the epidemic. And yes, it's about grief and loss on a massive scale. But more than anything, it's about love: the kind of radical, transformative love that shows up in the most unexpected places.

Tepper was seven years old when his missionary parents moved him and his three brothers from Mexico to San Blas, a struggling neighborhood in Madrid that had become Europe's largest drug marketplace. His father, Elliott, a former Harvard Business School student who found God after an LSD trip, and his mother, Mary, a Southern Baptist, didn't arrive with a grand plan. They came with faith, boxes of religious pamphlets, and four blond American boys who would soon be handing out flyers to heroin addicts in parks scattered with dirty needles.

What began as street evangelism evolved into something much bigger. When traditional rehab centers couldn't accommodate the overwhelming need, the Teppers and a small group of missionaries founded Betel, a residential drug rehabilitation program. The center was staffed almost entirely by recovering addicts themselves — men and women who had been shooting up under bridges just months before, now helping others detox in their living rooms.

The memoir traces Tepper's childhood and adolescence against the backdrop of Spain's heroin crisis and the subsequent AIDS epidemic that devastated the community he loved. It's the story of how a family of American missionaries became inseparable from a neighborhood of Spanish drug addicts, and how the bonds they formed transcended everything that should have separated them.

What Makes This Book Extraordinary

The Intimacy of the Storytelling

Tepper writes with a level of intimacy that made me feel like I was sitting across from him, listening to him recount these memories over coffee. He doesn't sensationalize the addiction or the AIDS deaths. He doesn't turn his friends into cautionary tales. Instead, he gives us Raúl, who taught him to play football and gave him collejas (smacks on the back of the head) when he cursed. He gives us Jambri, who sent him Italian books and poetry from his hospital bed in Naples. He gives us people, not statistics.

What struck me most was how Tepper balances the heaviness of the subject matter with moments of genuine joy and humor. There's the scene where Manuel El Vasco's glass eye keeps falling out during a football match, and everyone has to stop the game to search for it in the dirt. There's Veneno, who knows everyone's business and trades gossip like currency while scavenging for cigarette butts. These aren't tragic figures, but rather fully realized human beings with quirks, dreams, and an incredible capacity for resilience.

The Education Within the Memoir

One of the most fascinating threads in this book is Tepper's parallel education, both formal and informal. While he's teaching himself economics and chemistry from his brother's college textbooks (because his missionary school couldn't afford proper science labs), he's also learning about life from the recovering addicts around him.

The men in Betel taught him that dignity isn't about where you've been, but about how you treat others. They showed him that redemption is possible, that people can change. And most importantly, they demonstrated what it means to live fully in the face of death. When Raúl preaches his final sermon while dying of AIDS, sitting in an armchair because he's too weak to stand, the message isn't about suffering, but rather about why "we dance because we cannot fly."

This reminded me of Tara Westover's Educated in some ways, but where Westover had to escape her family to find education and freedom, Tepper found the truest education within his unconventional family — both biological and chosen.

The Complexity of Faith

Tepper navigates questions of faith with remarkable honesty. He doesn't give you easy answers. He shows you his doubts, his anger at God, his moments of losing faith entirely. When his nine-year-old brother Timothy dies in a car accident, and then his friends start dying of AIDS one after another, he grapples with the fundamental question: Where is God in all this suffering?

What I appreciated most was that Tepper doesn't resolve this neatly. He doesn't give us a conversion moment where everything makes sense. Instead, he shows us how faith can coexist with doubt, how you can question everything you've been taught and still find meaning in the rituals and relationships that faith creates. The book isn't preachy, and if anything, it's one of the most honest accounts of struggling with belief I've ever read.

Moments That Stayed With Me

The First Time Handing Out Pamphlets

When seven-year-old Jonathan first approaches addicts in the park to hand them religious pamphlets, he's motivated by the promise of ice cream from his father. The scene is both touching and slightly absurd — this tiny American kid, barely speaking Spanish correctly, walking up to people who could be dangerous and offering them salvation and a phone number. One addict tells him, "If I were you, I'd lose that f*ing accent." It's a perfect encapsulation of Tepper's childhood: innocent yet exposed, protected by his very vulnerability.

Raúl's Transformation

The arc of Raúl's story is the emotional spine of the memoir. We meet him as a street addict with track marks on his arms and the nickname "El Tocho" (Stocky) because he somehow never lost weight despite his heroin use. We watch him detox in Lindsay's apartment, become a leader in Betel, marry Jenny, and essentially become an older brother to the Tepper boys.

When Raúl is diagnosed as HIV-positive and slowly wastes away, the tragedy is compounded by how much life he had finally found. What hits hardest is reading about Raúl's final words to the Betel community: "Si no nos rendimos, venceremos" (If we do not surrender, we will conquer). Even facing death, his message was about resilience and hope.

The Hospital Visits

Tepper's descriptions of visiting friends at Ramón y Cajal Hospital paint a vivid picture of those years. The infectious diseases ward becomes a second home. He memorizes which floors to take, learns to recognize different opportunistic infections, and develops a routine of racing his father up the stairs to patients' rooms. But it's the small details that stand out, like how Jambri keeps working from his hospital bed in Naples, coordinating the furniture restoration shop via his "telefonino," or how Raúl sits with an oxygen tank next to a table covered in books and tapes, still trying to teach and encourage even as he's dying.

The Accident

The chapter about Timothy's death is devastating. Tepper doesn't look away from any of it — the moment of the accident, his brother lying in the grass, his own panic and rage. What's striking is his honesty about the aftermath: the panic attacks in cars, the guilt about forgetting his brother's face, the way grief doesn't follow a neat timeline.

This personal tragedy occurs roughly in the middle of the memoir, and it fundamentally changes the tone. After Timothy's death, when Tepper's friends in Betel start dying of AIDS, he has a different understanding of loss. The grief isn't theoretical anymore — it's lived in his body, in his memories, in the empty bunk bed he can't bring himself to clear out.

Learning to Be Joyful Again

One of the most compelling elements is watching Tepper struggle with happiness after so much loss. He describes putting away his jazz tapes after Timothy dies because the music is too joyful. He can't listen to Miles Davis without thinking of his brother. For years, he denies himself joy as a form of grief.

The turning point comes when he wins the Rhodes Scholarship and calls his parents in Madrid. After hanging up, alone in his apartment, he finally puts on Milestones again. The music floods back, and for the first time in years, he lets himself feel happy. "Timothy was right," he writes. "You couldn't listen to Milestones without being happy to be alive." That moment of choosing joy, of honoring the dead by living fully — it's powerful and beautifully rendered.

What This Book Taught Me

Privilege and Perspective

I've never thought of myself as particularly privileged, but reading Shooting Up made me reconsider what privilege actually means. Tepper grew up financially struggling— his family lived on irregular donations from churches, ate sardines and lentils when money was tight, and couldn't always afford to send all the kids to school. But he also grew up surrounded by books, with parents who valued education above almost everything else, in a household where learning was woven into daily life through dinner table discussions and bedtime readings.

The men in Betel had none of that. Many came from homes with domestic violence and poverty that made the Teppers' financial struggles look comfortable by comparison. And yet, through Betel's informal "university" of life experience, mutual support, and sheer determination, many of them became eloquent speakers, skilled craftsmen, and compassionate leaders.

It made me think about how we define success and education. Is it the degrees on your wall, or is it the wisdom to help someone through withdrawal? Is it memorizing facts, or is it knowing how to restore a broken person — or a broken piece of furniture — with patience and care?

Chosen Family

The traditional narrative says you're born into your family, and you choose your friends. But Shooting Up shows how those categories can blur completely. The recovering addicts in Betel became as much family to Tepper as his biological brothers. When Timothy dies, it's Raúl who flies from Spain to North Carolina to speak at the funeral. When Tepper is struggling with whether to accept his friends' deaths, it's Jambri who sends him books and letters of encouragement from Italy.

The book made me reconsider what family actually means. Is it blood? Shared DNA? Or is it the people who show up, who cry with you, who refuse to let you give up? Tepper's family was both his parents and brothers AND Raúl, Jambri, Manolo, Ángel, and dozens of others. They taught him, protected him, and shaped who he became just as much as his parents did.

The Poetry of Everyday Life

Tepper is clearly someone who has read extensively — the book is threaded with references to Dante, C.S. Lewis, T.S. Eliot, and countless others. But what struck me most was how he finds poetry in the mundane details of life in San Blas. The way the afternoon light hits the dusty football fields. The smell of fresh paint mixes with summer heat. The sound of men singing in a circus tent at a Betel revival meeting.

He writes about restoring furniture with the same attention he gives to classical literature, seeing in the process of sanding and varnishing a metaphor for human transformation. "As I inspected it more closely," he writes of a restored closet, "the faint outlines of old scratches beneath became visible... The woodworm remained hidden, but the ravages of time could never fully be reversed."

It reminded me that beauty and meaning are in the everyday acts of care, in the work of rebuilding what's broken, in the choice to keep showing up even when it's hard.

Final Verdict

Shooting Up is not an easy read, but it's an essential one. It's a book that will hit you hard emotionally, but it will also make you laugh, make you think, and ultimately make you appreciate the fragility and beauty of life in ways you might not expect.

What sets this memoir apart from other books about addiction or grief is Tepper's refusal to simplify or sentimentalize. He doesn't present his parents as perfect saints or the addicts as one-dimensional victims. Everyone is complicated, flawed, and trying their best in impossible circumstances. The messiness is what makes it real.

The writing itself is gorgeous — literary without being pretentious, emotional without being maudlin. Tepper has a gift for the telling detail, the scene that captures an entire relationship or turning point in just a few sentences. And his ability to weave together his personal story with the broader social history of AIDS in Spain, while also exploring deep questions about faith, education, and identity, is remarkable.

If I had to compare it to other memoirs, I'd say it has the raw honesty of Educated, the lyrical quality of The Glass Castle, and the profound humanity of When Breath Becomes Air. But ultimately, Shooting Up is its own singular achievement and a testament to the transformative power of love and the resilience of the human spirit.

This is a book that changed how I think about addiction, about faith, about family, and about what it means to live a meaningful life. It's a book I'll return to again and again, finding new layers each time. And it's a book I'll be recommending to everyone I know.

What Tepper ultimately shows us is that if Raúl and Jambri could choose joy in the face of certain death, if they could build lives of meaning from circumstances that would break most people, then maybe there's hope for all of us. We can all find reasons to dance, even when we cannot fly.

Rating: 10/10

Shooting Up: A Memoir of Love, Loss and Addiction by Jonathan Tepper will be published by Little, Brown on February 19, 2026. Please go get yourself a copy!

About the Author: I'm Jophy Lin, a high school senior and researcher. I blog about a variety of topics, such as STEM research, competitions, shows, and my experiences in the scientific community. If you’re interested in research tips, competition insights, drama reviews, personal reflections on STEM opportunities, and other related topics, subscribe to my newsletter to stay updated!