What do you think?
Rate this book
Unstitched : My Journey to Understand Opioid Addiction and How People and Communities Can Heal
With a heightened sense of both empathy and fear because of her own struggles with alcoholism, the mental illness of her ex-husband and a mother's reflexive desire to protect her daughters, Stanciu is determined to learn more about the nature of addiction and what each of us can do in our own communites to stem the opioid epidemic and stitch them back together. Why do we recoil from those struggling with addiction rather than reach out?
A stranger, rumored to be a heoin addict, repeatedly breaks into the small-town library Stanciu runs. After she and her board try to get law enforcement to do something about it -- the elementary school children and young parents with babies frequent the place after all -- he commits suicide. Why had she refused to offer him any concern or aid? When she realizes how little she knows about opioid abuse, and how much she fears it, she sets out on a mission, seeking insight from people in recovery, treatment providers, the town police chief, and Vermont's US attorney. She witnesses how tenaciously and often invisibly the threads of addiction tangle into our communities. Unstitched portrays the complexity of interpersonal relationships thrown into relief against the overarching question of what do we owe our neighbors? Stanciu's quest forces her to see her small town, and herself, in unexpected ways. Her page-turning book will enable others to do the same.
A stranger, rumored to be a heoin addict, repeatedly breaks into the small-town library Stanciu runs. After she and her board try to get law enforcement to do something about it -- the elementary school children and young parents with babies frequent the place after all -- he commits suicide. Why had she refused to offer him any concern or aid? When she realizes how little she knows about opioid abuse, and how much she fears it, she sets out on a mission, seeking insight from people in recovery, treatment providers, the town police chief, and Vermont's US attorney. She witnesses how tenaciously and often invisibly the threads of addiction tangle into our communities. Unstitched portrays the complexity of interpersonal relationships thrown into relief against the overarching question of what do we owe our neighbors? Stanciu's quest forces her to see her small town, and herself, in unexpected ways. Her page-turning book will enable others to do the same.
- GenresMemoirNonfiction
224 pages, Paperback
Published September 14, 2021
2 people are currently reading
72 people want to read
About the author
Brett Ann Stanciu
4 books11 followersA single mother of two daughters, Brett Ann Stanciu believes in stellar writing, using clotheslines, and eating fresh greens from the garden. Well-versed in the agricultural life, she writes from Vermont.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
November 22, 2022
Part memoir/part research, a librarian from a small Vermont town faces up to her own personal addiction as she studies the opioid crisis in Vermont. I loved her descriptions of living in Vermont and the efforts being made to understand and help those trying to break free from their addiction. Sometimes the information seems a bit simplistic, but overall I appreciated her attempts to understand a complicated situation.
October 24, 2021
Brett Stanciu, writer, recently-divorced single mother of two girls, has taken a job as director of the one-room library in Woodbury, Vermont to supplement her meager income. One Monday morning, she opens the library’s door and finds the room filled with cigarette smoke. Calling a library trustee, Stanciu learns that “everybody knows” Woodbury resident and rumored heroin addict John Baker has a history of breaking into the library, ignoring the “no trespass” served him by the school’s lawyer. Alarmed, Stanciu calls the state police. Told that she needs proof that Baker is the intruder, she borrows a game camera and gets his picture, but to no avail. One winter night, the library trustee sees the lights on in the library, bursts in on Baker, and shouts at him as he flees. He goes home and shoots himself.
Baker’s suicide haunts Brett. In retrospect, she realizes her efforts to get him arrested have stemmed from fear—not just of Baker (whom she doesn’t know) but of addiction itself. She remembers passing him one day as he sat on the church steps. Would it have helped if instead of looking away, she’d stopped and talked to him? That question is followed by a larger one: what does she know about opioid addiction? Nothing. The following spring, Stanciu attends a workshop given by the Department of Libraries to train librarians in the use of Narcan, the nasal spray that can save addicts who have overdosed. At that session, she hears a talk by a recovering alcoholic, who calls addiction a disease and mentions its genetic component. That speech starts her on a quest to understand addiction in small Vermont towns like her own. In a series of chapters lovingly set in Woodbury and its environs, Stanciu describes her conversations with three addicts in recovery who talk of their unspeakable pasts, their terror of arrest, and the guilt that has followed them into recovery. She portrays her diner lunch with a nurse at the Hardwick Health Center, who introduces her to the concept of MAT (medical assisted treatment) and the importance of treating addiction as a disease, not a moral failing. She relates her discussion of Vermont’s place in drug transfers with the Hardwick police chief. Most movingly, she describes her meetings with a couple who are setting up a recovery center in name of their beautiful daughter who overdosed after years of addiction. At home by her wood fire, Stanciu studies the history of OxyContin, whose prescription sales grossed the Sackler family a billion dollars each year for twenty years, the CDC’s 2016 crackdown on opioid prescriptions, and the heroin dealing that increased geometrically after OxyContin was no longer easily available. And gradually, amidst Stanciu’s reflections on her past as she cooks delicious meals and swims with her kids, her own struggle with alcoholism emerges—one that she kept secret, feared, and overcame out of love for her two daughters. By the end of her quest, she has faced her fear and allowed herself to talk of her own addiction when she talks with other addicts in recovery and those who have helped them.
The book’s title comes from the conversation between Stanciu and the father of the girl who overdosed. Looking at the church that will become a social center not just for those in recovery but for everybody in town, Stanciu remarks “everyone’s so busy working that no one seems to have time or energy to put into groups . . . that used to keep people connected.” He replies, “We’ve come unstitched, …. We’ve got to stitch the darn thing back together.” The stitching, as they have both learned, involves depriving addiction of its social stigma, and realizing that inclusion, support, and understanding can help to cure what fear, the threat of prison, and social ostracism cannot. This is a deeply compassionate and extremely important book. Every Vermonter should read it.
Baker’s suicide haunts Brett. In retrospect, she realizes her efforts to get him arrested have stemmed from fear—not just of Baker (whom she doesn’t know) but of addiction itself. She remembers passing him one day as he sat on the church steps. Would it have helped if instead of looking away, she’d stopped and talked to him? That question is followed by a larger one: what does she know about opioid addiction? Nothing. The following spring, Stanciu attends a workshop given by the Department of Libraries to train librarians in the use of Narcan, the nasal spray that can save addicts who have overdosed. At that session, she hears a talk by a recovering alcoholic, who calls addiction a disease and mentions its genetic component. That speech starts her on a quest to understand addiction in small Vermont towns like her own. In a series of chapters lovingly set in Woodbury and its environs, Stanciu describes her conversations with three addicts in recovery who talk of their unspeakable pasts, their terror of arrest, and the guilt that has followed them into recovery. She portrays her diner lunch with a nurse at the Hardwick Health Center, who introduces her to the concept of MAT (medical assisted treatment) and the importance of treating addiction as a disease, not a moral failing. She relates her discussion of Vermont’s place in drug transfers with the Hardwick police chief. Most movingly, she describes her meetings with a couple who are setting up a recovery center in name of their beautiful daughter who overdosed after years of addiction. At home by her wood fire, Stanciu studies the history of OxyContin, whose prescription sales grossed the Sackler family a billion dollars each year for twenty years, the CDC’s 2016 crackdown on opioid prescriptions, and the heroin dealing that increased geometrically after OxyContin was no longer easily available. And gradually, amidst Stanciu’s reflections on her past as she cooks delicious meals and swims with her kids, her own struggle with alcoholism emerges—one that she kept secret, feared, and overcame out of love for her two daughters. By the end of her quest, she has faced her fear and allowed herself to talk of her own addiction when she talks with other addicts in recovery and those who have helped them.
The book’s title comes from the conversation between Stanciu and the father of the girl who overdosed. Looking at the church that will become a social center not just for those in recovery but for everybody in town, Stanciu remarks “everyone’s so busy working that no one seems to have time or energy to put into groups . . . that used to keep people connected.” He replies, “We’ve come unstitched, …. We’ve got to stitch the darn thing back together.” The stitching, as they have both learned, involves depriving addiction of its social stigma, and realizing that inclusion, support, and understanding can help to cure what fear, the threat of prison, and social ostracism cannot. This is a deeply compassionate and extremely important book. Every Vermonter should read it.
January 15, 2022
"We’ve developed into a society of people who don’t want to feel any pain."
What do you get when you strip the stigma off of an addict?
Why does a person who has been broken, fail to or retract themselves from helping someone who is going through something similar? Why do they choose to abandon the truth they found along the way to submerge themselves in the cloud of lies left by society's ignorance?
When a former alcoholic feels guilty after failing to prevent an addict's suicide, she takes on a journey to understand and unravel the truth behind opioid epidemic in her small town.
The autobiography sheds light on the diversity of causes which lead one to this deteriorating and dingy path making them a marionette of a neverending cycle. But the more the light is shed, the more hopeful it can made.
This book is an elegy of and about all those who lost their ways and through their stories, the author is asking us to unstitch our fears and stigmas and stitch them back together with threads of love and patience, to counter retracting of our steps with extending of our hand to help save these precious lives who tend to have lost their way home.
What do you get when you strip the stigma off of an addict?
Why does a person who has been broken, fail to or retract themselves from helping someone who is going through something similar? Why do they choose to abandon the truth they found along the way to submerge themselves in the cloud of lies left by society's ignorance?
When a former alcoholic feels guilty after failing to prevent an addict's suicide, she takes on a journey to understand and unravel the truth behind opioid epidemic in her small town.
The autobiography sheds light on the diversity of causes which lead one to this deteriorating and dingy path making them a marionette of a neverending cycle. But the more the light is shed, the more hopeful it can made.
This book is an elegy of and about all those who lost their ways and through their stories, the author is asking us to unstitch our fears and stigmas and stitch them back together with threads of love and patience, to counter retracting of our steps with extending of our hand to help save these precious lives who tend to have lost their way home.
October 26, 2021
Brett is "haunted" by the suicide of a heroin addict in her tiny Vermont town; this book is the result of her soul searching. Lots of research and interviews lead her to share that addicts are fellows on this trip we are taking on this planet. Hiding, labeling, dismissing and othering addicts is exacerbating the problem. The rugged individualism that Americans romanticize is completely at odds with the drug issues we face. Every addict has a family and that is affected by their addiction. Every drug on the street came from somewhere and is part of a large distribution system running right under our noses. Recovery is not an isolated process and when supported by community has greater potential for success.
There is no magic bullet hidden in these pages, this is a well written easy read to introduce the humanity of this social ill. I recommend it.
There is no magic bullet hidden in these pages, this is a well written easy read to introduce the humanity of this social ill. I recommend it.
November 25, 2021
This was an interesting book to learn about addiction and how each person has an impact on another. It was informative as it discusses addiction and contained peoples stories about they became an addict and how they tried to get help and into recovery. As someone who does not have a lot of experience with addiction, it was informative and makes you realize how each person can impact your life and others, and without realizing it the impact you can have. The author is also learning about addiction so it really starts at the beginning and delves into a bigger picture.
March 20, 2023
This book hit close to home, literally. The author lives in my community, and many of the people and places in the story she so beautifully weaves are quite familiar to me. Not only does her writing on opioid addiction (and addiction generally) provide me a powerful reminder to always see the humanity in people and to consider my role in fixing what’s broken in our society, but it’s also a heartbreaking love note to life in Vermont.
February 24, 2023
A different perspective on addiction than the typical memoir, with the added pleasure of Stanciu's quietly beautiful descriptions of small town Vermont.
May 9, 2023
3 stars for intention
2 & 1/2 for execution
2 & 1/2 for execution
May 5, 2025
It was pretty good.
October 13, 2021
Thanks to Edelweiss+ for the advanced digital reviewer's copy of this title.
From a library worker's point of view, I was a little surprised Brett didn't already know more about the opium crisis but it was still a thoroughly enjoyable read to travel along with her to learn more. There have been many books written in regards to personal stories with drug abuse/addiction but what makes "Unstitched" feel fresh was Brett's interwoven personal history and connection with the emotions at the heart of the crisis.
From a library worker's point of view, I was a little surprised Brett didn't already know more about the opium crisis but it was still a thoroughly enjoyable read to travel along with her to learn more. There have been many books written in regards to personal stories with drug abuse/addiction but what makes "Unstitched" feel fresh was Brett's interwoven personal history and connection with the emotions at the heart of the crisis.
April 19, 2023
Wanted to like this more than I did. It's her memoir, not a book about opioid addiction.
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews