My heart…

In this honest and raw glimpse into the struggles of addiction - what it means to be in it, and what it means to love someone who is fading away. This story hit close to home for me, having loved ones who have journeyed the path of addiction, recovery, and relapse, this story will stay with me.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for early access to this book!

Holding by Karleigh Frisbie Brogan is a raw, deeply personal, and unflinchingly honest portrayal of addiction and recovery. What sets this memoir apart is Brogan’s fearless commitment to truth—she doesn’t sugarcoat the chaos, pain, or complexity of addiction, nor does she romanticize recovery. Her storytelling feels real in a way that few books about addiction manage to achieve. The power of Holding lies in its authenticity. Brogan invites readers into the most intimate corners of her life, sharing the shame, the fear, and the small, hard-won victories. Her prose is sharp, poetic, and grounded—never preachy, never performative. She captures the jagged edges of her experience while also offering hope without false promises. This is not just a book about addiction; it’s about survival, identity, and the everyday struggle to choose life, again and again. It’s a story for those who have been there, those who love someone who has, and those who want to understand the grip of addiction through the lens of brutal honesty and deep humanity. Karleigh Frisbie Brogan’s Holding is courageous, beautifully written, and achingly real. It stays with you long after the final page.

This is the kind of book I generally gravitate toward, a personal memoir of a challenging life replete with reflection on the author's past and an explanation of challenges and the growth that ultimately resulted from them. Brogan is a fluid writer and a keen observer of her own thoughts and experience. That said, I found this book tough to stick with for long periods of time, not because her life and thoughts were uninteresting or because the writing was bad but simply because in the process interweaving the stories of her childhood, her later heroin addiction, and her relationship with her mother, she goes off on so many tangents and brings in so much reflection on larger issues in the midst of it all that I found it hard to follow the overall trajectory of her story.

Heartbreaking and enchantingly told. Mother and daughter relationships are my absolute favorite thing to read about and boy with this a moving story.

Stunning, stunning, stunning book, raw and honest, on every page at least one sentence that made me weep with envy. The mirror that Brogan holds up to her past self leaves nowhere to hide. Much more than a generic addition memoir, it's about abandonment and hope. I can't wait to see what she writes next.

5 stars, no notes
I will say that this was a difficult & heavy, but simultaneously hopeful & healing read exploring the author's complicated relationship with her mother, her mixed identity, her addiction & recovery journey.
She has such a way with words, she writes beautifully, capturing her story in a real, raw, hard-hitting manner, I was sobbing by the end of the book.

This is a remarkable book going inside the mind of heroin addict. Instead of being riddled with the ugliness of the outward symptoms, the dangerous situations and people, this author goes inside her own my and family structure to try to root out what unmet needs and fears and subsequent shame she lived with a child of an absent mother and various "dads" that enabled her to turn to heroin for relief.

She documents her young life, her constant need to be loved and recognized yet feeling invisible. Feeling like she was never anyone's priority. She goes through boyfriends and during the worst of her addiction sells her body for drugs and tolerates abuse from the men she seeks love from. We see her try to quit many times but the pain of being alive and having nobody to depend on psychologically as well as no skills for meaningful work bring her back to the drug.

When, eventually, be completes a methadone maintenance program she finds her life very slowly improving. The last third of the book details her move from the area where all her relatives, friends, drug abuse has taken place to a different part of country. It is there she creates a new life for herself. Although this is sometimes called "pulling a geographic", it seems the move benefits her in ways to discover her independence.

Very well written, thought out, and enlightening.

Thanks to NetGalley for the eARC.

A courageous account of the author's life and relationships. It explores addiction, motherhood, wounds, and lots of trauma. It's not a light story, but such an important one. Bravo and extremely brave! Thanks to NetGalley for the ARC.

This is definitely a riveting read, with great details and huge courage and honesty. I appreciated the way the writer handled very difficult subject matter with grace.