Holding: A Memoir about Mothers, Drugs, and Other Comforts

"Brogan is a fearless and intuitive storyteller, spinning the world's harshest truths into golden, beautiful sentences." -- Chelsea Bieker, author of Madwoman

Featuring electric, immersive prose and universal insights about human relationships--especially between daughters and mothers--this unflinching and deeply moving excavation of her own history is equally revealing about the American experience in our time.

At age 20, Karleigh Brogan and her boyfriend, Dale, moved into his parents' home. The young couple hid their heroin addiction and promised they would only be there temporarily. What started as a two-week stopgap became two years of habitation. Karleigh and Dale's mother, Glorianne, developed a complex relationship that was both toxic and tender. Glorianne became a stand-in for Karleigh's mother, whose affection and trust Karleigh had always longed for. Simultaneously, Glorianne, an adoptee, searched for the birth mother she never knew.

In Holding, Karleigh Brogan brings the reader into her life before, during, and after her time with Dale and his parents, following the road that led from her endless lies to her family and herself, along the long, crooked, path to breaking the chains of her addiction so she could dream again of achieving the life--and the relationship with her own mother--she longed for.