Sidetracked

A recovered addict and his wife reconstruct a life from the notebooks he kept before and during ten years of cocaine and heroin addiction in this unguarded chronicle of obsession, art, and survival that turns personal recovery into collaborative storytelling.

When a footlocker filled with Johnny's illustrated journals from the late 1990s and early 2000s arrived on our doorstep, shipped across the country two decades after he got clean, we decided to finish the story together. Sidetracked is the hybrid memoir that emerged from that process, told through the journals Johnny kept just before and during his addiction to cocaine and heroin in the late 1990s and early 2000s and our collaborative reflections 25 years later. It presents a dual-perspective, illustrated hybrid narrative of addiction, the cycles of recovery and relapse, memory, love, and the heart of a hopeless romantic.