Claire Conger

Stray: A Memoir by Stephanie Danler is a story about coming of age with a drug-addicted father. She doesn’t realize he’s an addict until much later, when he loses himself in meth.

“I never once thought he as an addict, maybe an alcoholic, but that judgment is relative to the people you spend time with. From him I inherited the belief that it was pedestrian to have one’s consumption render one out of control.”

The idea is new to me, that addiction is a judgment relative to one’s life experience. It seems I’ve been directed to think of addiction in absolutes.

But I, too, inherited the idea that it’s unseemly to allow one’s consumption to be visible to others. I don’t know how. My parents drank little, only at parties, and they certainly did not use drugs.

A narcissist, Ms. Danler’s father spins the truth to lay blame and make himself the hero. He demonizes Ms. Danler’s mother, an alcoholic, who must endure toasts to his lies at Ms. Danler’s high school graduation party. “’It is no wonder,’ my [Ms. Danler’s] sister says now, ‘she [their mother] hated him.’”

Ms. Danler’s father’s behavior becomes untenable in a car trip taking her to college. She discovers he’s been shooting meth between his toes.

For the most part, Ms. Danler’s life experiences, what she chooses for herself, are far different from mine. She simultaneously dates two men, both attached to others, one, the Monster, is married, and the other, the Love Interest, is in an open relationship with his girlfriend. A reader might think: No good can come of this. A reader might be wrong.

“It’s not because I’m clever that I avoided addiction, . . . It’s because I love these people,” her “parents, lovers, and friends.”

I want to sink into Ms. Danler’s story; I want her memoir not to end. Her voice enters my head, and “writerly thoughts” emerge. But I write nothing, and my stories vanish.

Ms. Danler’s previous book is a novel, Sweetbitter, made into a TV series of the same name.