Jonathan Tepper Shares True Christian Values in 'Shooting Up: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and Addiction

In his first memoir, Shooting Up: A Memoir of Love, Lost, and Addiction, Rhodes Scholar and acclaimed financial author Jonathan Tepper writes a powerful and moving memoir about his childhood growing up in San Blas, a district in Madrid known for its pervasive heroin problem. In his book, he explains that in 1983, his parents, both missionaries, relocated the family to this area and upon arriving, felt an overwhelming need to help the heroin addicts that lived all around them. A couple of years later, they founded Betel, a drug rehabilitation center that is still run by his father today. “My parents probably took about, I think, over 60 addicts to programs and trips outside Madrid, but the need was overwhelming that my parents realized they had to have a drug center in Madrid that could help the young men and women.” Between the time they moved to Madrid to when the center opened, Tepper’s home became a place where the addicts would seek help and attend support group meetings. As a result, many of Tepper’s friends were junkies from the streets who became more like brothers and sisters to his family rather than strangers with substance abuse issues.

As for why he decided to write a memoir about growing up around heroin addicts, he recalled reading a book he had come across titled Flying Over 96th Street: Memoir of an East Harlem White Boy by Dr. Thomas Webber. In it, the author had moved from an Upper West Side apartment in New York City to East Harlem in the 1950’s. While there, his father founded a church, his mother worked in a literacy program, and the kids he grew up alongside were black and Puerto Rican. Although the setting differed, the book resonated with Tepper’s own childhood. “It felt like reading some of my life… and I just thought, no one’s really written a book like this about my friends and… I wanted to write a book that would honor the memory of my friends and it would capture a time and place in a story that hadn’t really been told, so that was the motivation for writing it was that random discovery of the book at Barnes & Noble in the Upper West Side.”