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A House on Stilts tells the story of one woman's struggle to reclaim wholeness while mothering a son addicted to opioids. Paula Becker's son Hunter was raised in a safe, nurturing home by his writer/historian mom and his physician father. He was a bright, curious child. And yet, addiction found him. More than 2.5 million Americans are addicted to opioids, some half-million of these to heroin. For many of them, their drug addiction leads to lives of demoralization, homelessness, and constant peril. For parents, a child's addiction upends family life, catapulting them onto a path no longer prescribed by Dr. Spock, but by Dante's Inferno. Within this ten-year crucible, Paula is transformed by an excruciating, inescapable truth: the difference between what she can do and what she cannot do.



About the Author

Paula Becker

Paula Becker is the award-winning author of Looking For Betty MacDonald: The Egg, The Plague, Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle and I, and co-author of The Future Remembered: The 1962 Seattle World's Fair and Its Legacy and Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition: Washington's First World's Fair. An expert on the history of world's fairs, she is featured in the documentary films When Seattle Invented The Future: The 1962 World's Fair, which aired on PBS stations nationwide; and Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition: Washington's Forgotten World's Fair, which aired on Seattle's KCTS-9; and Structural Engineers of the 1962 Seattle World's Fair, which she narrated.Paula Becker has written for HistoryLink.org since 2001, and is a staff historian. Her 300 essays on the site document all aspects of Washington state history.



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