Elizabeth F.S. Roberts' In-Store Event for IN PRAISE OF ADDICTION

Join us at Mrs. Dalloway's Bookstore on Wednesday, March 4 when Elizabeth F.S. Roberts comes to discuss her new book In Praise of Addiction: Or How We Can Learn to Love Dependency in a Damaged World. She will be joined in conversation by Angela Garcia and Kelly Knight, and will sign copies of her book after the presentation.

to order a copy of In Praise of Addiction.

Elizabeth Roberts has experienced the suffering wrought by addiction: her sister’s destructive alcoholism and dependency on prescription drugs, her mother’s hoarding, and her own struggles with binge eating. As for so many of us, addiction brought about self-loathing, reflecting her individual failure to exercise self-control, to keep it together. But during her fieldwork studying chemical exposure in Mexico City, her sense of addiction got turned upside down. She witnessed her neighbors, both young and old, defiantly celebrate their compulsive dependencies on alcohol, drugs, and junk food instead of hiding them in shame. Roberts began to wonder if everything she thought she knew about addiction was wrong.
In Praise of Addiction shares the unexpected journey that led Roberts to a new understanding of addiction. Taking lessons from her years in Mexico City as well as from addiction researchers, harm reduction activists, and scholars of religion, philosophy, and anthropology, Roberts pays close attention to the external forces that so often fuel the damage of addiction. As her neighbors in Mexico City suggest, the adverse health effects brought on by their dependencies on Coca-Cola, processed foods, drugs, and alcohol have more to do with the ongoing effects of the drug war and NAFTA than any personal failings. Taking up this ecological framework, Roberts draws a line between vice that isolates and addiction that connects, a distinction she movingly integrates into her own life and family, making a case for sharing in the pleasures—and suffering—of dependency.
Provocative and deeply humane, In Praise of Addiction invites readers to cast aside the shame, self-hatred, and judgment associated with addiction and discover how dependency can serve as a binding force worthy of our most profound devotion.

ELIZABETH F.S. ROBERTS is professor of anthropology at the University of Michigan and the author of God’s Laboratory: Assisted Reproduction in the Andes. Since 2013, she has participated in collaborative environmental health research in Mexico City.

PROFESSOR ANGELA GARCIA'S work engages historical and institutional processes through which violence and suffering are produced and lived. She is the author of The Way That Leads Among the Lost: Life, Death, and Hope in Mexico City's Anexos (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024). Garcia's first book, The Pastoral Clinic: Addiction and Dispossession Along The Rio Grande (University of California Press, 2010) received awards in anthropology and writing.

KELLY RAY KNIGHT is Assistant Professor of Anthropology, History, and Social Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. She is the author of addicted.pregnant.poor.

THIS EVENT is free but registration is requested. Registration ends at 6:00 pm on March 4.

BECAUSE SEATING is limited, please register only if you plan to attend.

DUE TO SPACE limitations, we may not be able to accommodate every person at an event, so early registration is encouraged.

WALK-INS will be accommodated only if space allows.

WE ASK that attendees arrive between 6:45 and 7:00 PM for the event.

PLEASE leave your non-support companion animals at home.

OUR shared restrooms are not accessible after 6:30 PM, please plan accordingly.

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