Codependence: A Novel in Essays

The thirteen essays in this collection center on the narrator's shifting relationship to opioid painkillers and other drugs. The narrator and protagonist, Amy, begins using opioids recreationally with her boyfriend Ryan, an opiate addict who initiates Amy's drug use. Years after the couple breaks up, Amy's childhood headaches return as migraines and transform into chronic daily headaches, which she relieves with oxycodone (and sometimes other drugs). The narrative chronicles Amy's relationship with Ryan and her iatrogenic dependence on narcotic painkillers, detoxification, return to opioids following a year spent "clean," and the ways in which her headache treatment regimen shapes her relationship to her family, friends, various medical personnel, and her own embodied subjectivity.