Thunig often describes the faces of interlocutors drawing down or away or simply collapsing when she relates her experience to them. We are enabled to listen. Yet, this cannot be enough. Not all explanations may be shaped into existentially meaningful stories. Some cannot be fathomed. Who can really measure the extent of what drugs or violence might do to a person? As substances, and as actions, their force is the force of incomprehension. There is no putting them in a drawer labelled: Oh, I get it. Rather, there is involvement. There is implication.

Thunig describes growing older, learning to make peace with who her parents were and what they did, locating it within a material context and structure that is itself violent. “My parents,” she writes, “have experienced high levels of trauma – generational and individual – and all without the supports needed to actively heal. And when you carry high levels of pain – in your body, in your mind, in your heart – to suddenly be released into a state of quiet is like nothing else. They weren’t choosing heroin over me; they were choosing quiet over the overwhelming noise.”

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This brings us to an unanswerable conundrum: why do people experience more or less identical forms of pain, hurt, and, yes, care – and still become radically different people, capable of making radically different choices? Escaping noise: that’s something heroin can offer. But it’s not synonymous with it. (A child whose parents or guardians have died from addiction knows it wasn’t an overdose of silence that killed them.)

The conundrum remains implicit throughout Thunig’s memoir. Thankfully, she does not try to answer it. When she considers the differences in personality and temperament and outlook between different members of her family, they remain simply that: differences. The mystery of where and how the apple may fall is both a parent’s greatest fear and, paradoxically, their greatest comfort. No matter what we do, we only have so much control. And probably less than that.