All Fall Down

by Jennifer Weiner

Genres: Family Life; Literary Fiction; Women's Fiction

Synopsis

From #1 New York Times bestselling author Jennifer Weiner

Allison Weiss got her happy ending-a handsome husband, adorable daughter, a job she loves, and the big house in the suburbs. But while waiting in the pediatrician's office, she opens a magazine to a quiz about addiction and starts to wonder…Is a Percocet at the end of the day really different from a glass of wine? Is it such a bad thing to pop a Vicodin after a brutal Jump & Pump class…or if your husband ignores you?

The pills help her manage the realities of her good-looking life: that her husband is distant, that her daughter is acting out, that her father's Alzheimer's is worsening and her mother is barely managing to cope. She tells herself that they let her make it through her days…but what if her increasing drug use, a habit that's becoming expensive and hard to hide, is turning into her biggest problem of all?

With a sparkling comedic touch and a cast of unforgettable characters, this remarkable story of a woman's slide into addiction and struggle to find her way back up again is Jennifer Weiner's most masterful work yet.

Release date: June 17, 2014

Publisher: Atria Books

Print pages: 400

Sample

All Fall Down

ONE

Do you generally use alcohol or drugs more than once a week?

I hesitated with my hand over the page. I’d picked up the magazine to read the “How to Dress Right for Your Shape” story advertised on the cover, but it had opened to a quiz that asked “Has Your Drinking or Drug Use Become a Problem?” and something had made me stop. Maybe it was the black-and-white photograph of a woman in profile, bending sadly over her wineglass, or maybe the statistic beside it that said that prescription painkiller overdose was now the leading cause of accidental death of women in America, surpassing even car crashes. I had a pen in my hand—I’d been using it to fill out the stack of forms for Eloise’s five-year-old well-child checkup—and, almost without thinking, I made an X in the box for “Yes.”

I crossed my legs and looked around Dr. McCarthy’s waiting area, suddenly worried that someone had seen what I’d written. Of course, no one was paying any attention to my little corner of the couch. Sleet ticked at the panes of the oversized windows; a radiator clunked in the corner. The lamplit room, on the third floor of an office building at the corner of Ninth and Chestnut, with a volunteer in a striped pinny at a knee-high table reading Amelia Bedelia to kids sitting in miniature chairs, felt cozy, a respite from the miserable winter weather. Three years ago my husband, Dave, my daughter, and I had moved out of Center City and into a house in Haverford that I refused to call a McMansion, even though that’s exactly what it was, but I loved Ellie’s pediatrician so much that I’d never even tried to find a suburban replacement. So here we were, more than half a year late for Ellie’s checkup, in the office where I’d been taking her since she was just a week old. We’d parked in the lot on Ninth Street and trekked through the February slush to get here, Ellie stepping delicately over the piles of crusted, dirty snow and the ankle-deep, icy puddles at the corners, complaining that her feet were getting wet and her socks were getting splashy. I’d lured her on with the promise of a treat at Federal Donuts when her checkup was over.

Ellie tugged at my sleeve. “How much longer?”

“Honey, I really can’t say. The doctors need to take care of the sick kids first, and you, Miss Lucky, are not sick.”

She stuck out her lower lip in a cartoonish pout. “It isn’t FAIR. We made an APPOINTMENT.”

“True. But remember when you had that bad sore throat? Dr. McCarthy saw you right away. Even before the kids who had appointments.”

She narrowed her eyes and nibbled at her lip before dropping her voice to a stage whisper that was slightly more hushed than your average yell. “I am having an idea. Maybe we could tell the nurse lady that I have a sore throat now!”

I shook my head. “Nah, we don’t lie. Bad karma.”

Ellie considered this. “I hate karmel.” She smoothed her skirt and wandered off toward the toy basket. I recrossed my legs and checked out the crowd.

The room was predictably full. There were first-time mothers from Queen Village and Society Hill, who wore their babies wrapped in yards of organic cotton hand-dyed and woven by indigenous Peruvian craftswomen who were paid a living wage. The moms from the Section 8 housing pushed secondhand strollers and fed their infants from plastic bottles, as opposed to ostentatiously breast-feeding or slipping the baby a few ounces of organic formula in a BPA-free bottle with a silicone-free nipple hidden under a prettily patterned, adorably named nursing cover-up (I’d worn one called the Hooter Hider).

On the days when you use drugs or alcohol, do you usually have three drinks/doses or more?

Define “dose.” One Percocet, from the bottle I got after I had my wisdom teeth pulled? Two Vicodin, prescribed for a herniated disc I suffered in a step class at the gym? I’d never taken more than two of anything, except the day after my father had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and my mother had set up a temporary fortress in our guest room. Could three pills count as a single dose? I decided not to answer.

Do you use drugs or alcohol to “unwind” or “relax”?

Hello. That’s what they’re there for. And was that so bad, really? How many times had I heard my husband say “I need to go for a run,” or my best friend, Janet, say “I need a glass of wine”? What I did was no different. It was, actually, better. A run was time-consuming and sweaty and hard on the joints, and wine could stain.

“Mommy?”

“Hang on, sweetie,” I said, as my iPhone rang in my purse. “Just one minute.”

“You ALWAYS say that. You ALWAYS say just one minute and it ALWAYS takes you for HOURS.”

“Shh,” I whispered, before hurrying toward the door, where I could keep an eye on her while I talked. “Hi, Sarah.”

“Allison,” said Sarah, in the gruff, all-business tone that surprised people, given her petite frame, sleek black bob, and freckled button nose. “Did the fact-checker call?”

“Not today.” The Wall Street Journal was in the midst of its every-six-months rediscovery that women were online. They were doing a piece on women who blog, and Ladiesroom.com, the website that I wrote for and Sarah ran, was to be featured. I was alternately giddy at the thought of how the publicity would raise Ladiesroom’s profile and nauseous at the notion of my picture in print.

“She just read my quotes back to me,” said Sarah. “They sounded great. I’ve really got a good feeling about this!”

“Me too,” I lied. I was optimistic about the piece . . . at least some of the time.

“Mom-MEE.”

My daughter was standing about six inches from my face, brown eyes brimming, lower lip quivering. “Gotta go,” I told Sarah. “We’re at the doctor’s.”

“Oh, God. Is everything okay?”

“As okay as it ever is!” I said, striving to inject good cheer into my tone before I slipped the phone back into my purse. Sarah, technically my boss, was twenty-seven and childless. She knew I was a mother—that was, after all, why she’d hired me, to give readers live, from-the-trenches reports on married-with-children life. But I tried to be a model employee, always available to talk through edits or help brainstorm a headline, even if Ellie was with me. I also tried to be a model mother, making Ellie feel like she was the center of my universe, that I was entirely present for her, even when I was on the phone, debating, say, the use of “strident” versus “emphatic,” or arguing about which picture of Hillary Clinton to use to illustrate another will-she-or-won’t-she-run story. It was a lot of juggling and quick switching and keeping my smile in place. “Sorry, honey. What do you need?”

“I’m FIRSTY,” she said, in the same tone of voice an old-school Broadway actress might use to announce her imminent demise.

I pointed at the water fountain on the other side of the room. “Look, there’s a water fountain!”

“But that is where the SICK kids are.” A tear rolled down my daughter’s pillowy cheek.

“Ellie. Don’t be such a drama queen. Just go get a drink. You’ll be fine.”

“Can I check what is in your purse?” she wheedled. Before I could answer, she’d plunged both hands into my bag and deftly removed my bottle of Vitaminwater.

“Ellie, that’s—” Before I got the word “Mommy’s” out of my mouth, she’d twisted off the cap and started gulping.

Our eyes met. Mine were undoubtedly beseeching, hers sparkled with mischief and satisfaction. I considered my options. I could punish her, tell her no screens and no SpongeBob tonight, then endure—and force everyone else in the room to endure—the inevitable screaming meltdown. I could ignore what she’d done, reinforcing the notion that bad behavior got her exactly what she wanted. I could take her outside and talk to her there, but then the receptionist would, of course, call us when we were in the hall, which meant I’d get the pleasure of a tantrum on top of another half-hour wait.

“We will discuss this in the car. Do you understand me?” I maintained the steady eye contact that the latest parenting book I’d read had recommended, my body language and tone letting her know that I was in charge, and hoped the other mothers weren’t taking in this scene and laughing. Ellie took another defiant swig, then let a mouthful of zero-calorie lemon-flavored drink dribble back into the bottle, which she handed back to me.

“Ellie! Backwash!”

She giggled. “Here, Mommy, you can have the rest,” she said, and skipped across the waiting room with my iPhone flashing in her hand. Lately she’d become addicted to a game called Style Queen, the object of which was to earn points to purchase accessories and makeup for a cartoon avatar who was all long hair and high heels. The more accessories you won for your avatar—shoes, hats, scarves, a makeup kit—the more levels of the game you could access. With each level, Ellie had explained to me, with many heaved sighs and eye rolls, you could get a new boyfriend.

“What about jobs?” I had asked. “Does Style Queen work? To get money for all that makeup, and her skirts and everything?”

Ellie frowned, then raised her chubby thumb and two fingers. “She can be an actress or a model or a singer.” Before I could ask follow-up questions, or try to use this as a teachable moment in which I would emphasize the importance of education and hard work and remind her that the way you looked was never ever the most important thing about you, my daughter had dashed off, leaving me to contemplate how we’d gone from The Feminine Mystique and Free to Be . . . You and Me to this in just one generation.

The magazine was still open to the quiz on the couch beside me. I grabbed it, bending my head to avoid the scrutiny of the übermommy two seats down whose adorable newborn was cradled against her body in a pristine Moby Wrap; the one who was not wearing linty black leggings from Target and whose eyebrows had enjoyed the recent attention of tweezers.

Do you sometimes take more than the amount prescribed? Yes. Not always, but sometimes. I’d take one pill and then, ten or fifteen or twenty minutes later, if I wasn’t feeling the lift, the slow unwinding of the tight girdle of muscles around my neck and shoulders I’d expected, I’d take another.

Have you gotten intoxicated on alcohol or drugs more than two times in the past year? (You’re intoxicated if you use so much that you can’t function safely or normally or if other people think that you can’t function safely or normally.)

This was a tricky one. With painkillers, you did not slur or get sloppy. Your child would not come home from school and find Mommy passed out in a puddle of her own vomit (or anyone else’s). A couple of Vicodin and I could function just fine. The worst things that had happened were the few times Dave had accused me of being out of it. “Are you okay?” he’d ask, squinting at my face like we’d just met, or apologizing for being so boring that I couldn’t muster five minutes of attention to hear about his day as a City Hall reporter at the Philadelphia Examiner. Never mind that his anecdotes tended to be long and specific and depend on the listener’s deep interest in the inner workings of Philadelphia’s government. Some days, I had that interest. Other days, all I wanted was peace, quiet, and an episode of Love It or List It. But I’d been occasionally bored and disinterested even before my use of Vicodin and Percocet had ramped up, over the past two years, from a once-in-a-while thing to a few-days-a-week thing to a more-days-than-not thing. It wasn’t as if one single catastrophe had turned me into a daily pill popper as much as the accumulated stress of a mostly successful, extremely busy life. Ellie had been born, then I’d quit my job, then we’d moved to the suburbs, leaving my neighborhood and friends behind, and then my dad had been diagnosed. Not one thing, but dozens of them, piling up against one another until the pills became less a luxury than a necessity for getting myself through the day and falling asleep at night.

I checked “No” as Ellie skipped back over. “Mommy, is it almost our turn? This is taking for HOURS.”

I reached into my purse. “You can watch Les Miz,” I said. She handed me the phone and had the iPad out of my hands before I could blink.

“That’s so cute,” said the mother who’d just joined me on the couch. “She watches musicals? God, my two, if it’s not animated, forget it.”

I let myself bask in the all-too-rare praise: Ellie’s passion for Broadway musicals was one of the things I loved best about her, because I loved musicals, too. When she was little, and tormented by colic and eczema, and she hardly ever slept, I would drive around in my little blue Honda, with Ellie strapped into her car seat and cast recordings from Guys and Dolls and Rent and West Side Story and Urinetown playing. “Ocher!” she’d yelled from the backseat when she was about two years old. “I WANT THE OCHER!” It had taken me ten minutes to figure out that she was trying to say “overture,” and I’d told the story for years. Isn’t she funny. Isn’t she precocious. Isn’t she sweet, people would say . . . until Ellie turned four, then five, and she was funny and precocious and sweet but also increasingly temperamental, as moody as a diva with killer PMS. Sensitive was what Dr. McCarthy told us.

Extremely sensitive, said Dr. Singh, the therapist we’d taken her to visit after her preschool teacher reported that Ellie spent recess sitting in a corner of the playground with her fingers plugged into her ears, clearly pained by the shouts and clatter of her classmates. “Too loud!” she’d protest, wincing as we got close to a playground. “Too messy!” she’d whine when I’d try to lure her outdoors, into a game of catch or hide-and-seek, or ply her with finger paints and fresh pads of paper. Movies “made too much noise,” sunshine was “too bright,” foods that were not apples, string cheese, or plain white bread, toasted and buttered and minus its crust, were rejected for “tasting angry,” and glue and glitter gave her “itchy fingers.” For Eloise Larson Weiss, the world was a painful, scary, sticky place where the volume was always turned up to eleven. Dave and I had read all the books, from The Highly Sensitive Child to Raising Your Spirited Child. We’d learned about how to avoid overstimulation, how to help Ellie through transitions, how to talk to her teachers about making accommodations for her. We’d done our best to reframe our thinking, to recognize that Ellie was suffering and not just making trouble, but it was hard. Instead of remembering that Ellie was wired differently than other kids, that she cried and threw tantrums because she was uncomfortable or anxious or stressed, I sometimes found myself thinking of her as just bratty, or going out of her way to be difficult.

The woman beside me nodded at her son, who seemed to be about eight. He had a Band-Aid on his forehead, and he was making loud rumbling noises as he hunched over a handheld video game. “A little girl would have been so nice. I’ve got to bribe Braden to get him in the tub.”

“Oh, that’s not just a boy thing. Ellie won’t go near a tub unless it’s got one of those bath bombs. Which are eight bucks a pop.”

The woman pursed her lips. I felt my face heat up. Eight-dollar bath bombs were an indulgence for a grown-up. For a five-year-old, they were ridiculous, especially given that our mortgage payments in Haverford were so much higher than they’d been in Philadelphia, and that instead of a raise last year, Dave and everyone else at the Examiner had gotten a two-week unpaid furlough. When we’d filed our taxes the year before, we’d both been surprised—and, in Dave’s case, mortified—to learn that I was earning more with my blog than he was as a reporter. This, of course, had not been part of our plan. Dave was supposed to be the successful one . . . and, up until recently, he had been.

Three years ago, Dave had written a series about inner-city poverty, about kids who got their only balanced meals at school and parents who found it less expensive to stay at home, on welfare, than to look for work; about social services stretched too thin and heroic teachers and volunteers trying to turn kids’ lives around. The series had won prizes and the attention of a few literary agents, one of whom had gotten him a book deal and a hefty advance. Dave had taken the chunk of money he’d received when he’d signed the contract and driven off to Haverford, a town he’d fallen in love with when the newspaper’s food critic had taken him there one night for dinner. Haverford was lovely, with leafy trees and manicured lawns. The schools were excellent, the commute was reasonable, and it all fit into my husband’s vision of what our lives would one day be.

Unfortunately, Dave didn’t discuss this vision with me until one giddy afternoon when he’d hired a Realtor, found a house, and made an offer. Then, and only then, did he usher me to the car and drive me out past the airport, off the highway, and into the center of town. The sun had been setting, gilding the trees and rooftops, and the crisp autumnal air was full of the sounds of children playing a rowdy game of tag. When he pulled up in front of a Colonial-style house with a FOR SALE sign on the lawn, I could hear the voices of children playing in the cul-de-sac, and smell barbecuing steaks. “You’ll love it,” he’d said, racing me through the kitchen (gleaming, all stainless steel appliances, granite countertops, and tile floors), past the mudroom and the powder room, up the stairs to the master bedroom. There we had kissed and kissed until the Realtor cleared his throat twice, then knocked on the door and told us we needed to respond to the seller’s offer within the hour.

“Yes?” Dave asked. His eyes were shining; his whole face was lit up. I’d never seen him so boyish, or so happy, and it would have been heartless to tell him anything except what he wanted to hear.

“Yes.”

I hadn’t thought it through. There wasn’t time. I didn’t realize that I was signing up not just for a new house and a new town but, really, for an entirely new life, one where, with Dave’s encouragement, I’d be home with a baby instead of joining him on the train every morning, heading into the city to work. Dave wanted me to be more like his own mother, who’d gladly given up her career as a lawyer when the first of her three boys was born, swapping briefs and depositions for carpools and class-mom duties. He wanted a traditional stay-at-home mother, a wife who’d do the shopping and the cooking, who’d be available to sign for packages and pick up the dry cleaning and, generally, make his life not only possible but easy. The problem was, he’d never told me what he wanted, which meant I never got to think about whether it was what I wanted, too.

Maybe it would have worked if the world hadn’t decided it had no great use for newspapers . . . or if the blog I wrote as a hobby hadn’t become a job, turning our financial arrangement on its head, so that I became the primary breadwinner and Dave’s salary ended up going for extras like private school and vacations and summer camp. Maybe our lives would have gone more smoothly if I hadn’t found the house so big, so daunting, if it didn’t carry, at least to my nose, the whiff of bad luck. “The sellers are very motivated,” our agent told me, and Dave and I quickly figured out why: the husband, a political consultant, had been arrested for embezzling campaign contributions, which he used to fund his gambling habit . . . and, Examiner readers eventually learned, his mistress.

Dave and I had both grown up in decent-sized places in the suburbs, but the Haverford house had rooms upon rooms, some of which seemed to have no discernible function. There was a kitchen, and then beside it a smaller, second kitchen, with a sink and a granite island, that the Realtor ID’d as a butler’s pantry. “We don’t have a butler,” I told Dave. “And if we did, I wouldn’t give him his own pantry!” The main kitchen was big enough to eat in, with a dining room adjoining it, plus a living room, a den, and a home office with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. Upstairs there were no fewer than five bedrooms and five full bathrooms. There was the master suite, and something called a “princess suite” that came with its own dressing room. The basement was partially finished, with space for a home gym, and out back a screened-in porch overlooked the gentle slope of the lawn.

“Can we afford this?” I’d asked. It turned out, between Dave’s advance and the embezzler’s desperation, that we could. We could buy it, but we couldn’t fill it. Every piece of furniture we owned, including the folding card table I’d used as a desk and the futon from Dave’s college dorm, barely filled a quarter of the space, and it all looked wrong. The table that had fit perfectly in our Philadelphia row house was dwarfed by the soaring ceilings and spaciousness of the Haverford dining room. The love seat where we’d snuggled in Center City became dollhouse-sized in the burbs. Our queen-sized bed looked like a crouton floating in a giant bowl of soup in the master bedroom, and our combined wardrobes barely filled a third of the shelves and hanging space in the spacious walk-in closet.

Overwhelmed, out of a job, and with a baby to care for, I’d wander the rooms, making lists of what we needed. I’d buy stacks of magazines, clip pictures, or browse Pinterest, making boards of sofas I loved, dining-room tables I thought could work, pretty wallpaper, and gorgeous rugs. I would go to the paint store and come home with strips of colors; I’d download computer programs that let me move furniture around imaginary rooms. But when it came time to actually buy something—the dining-room table we obviously needed, beds for the empty guest rooms, towels to stock the shelves in the guest bathrooms—I would go into vapor lock. I’d never considered myself indecisive or suffered from fear of commitment, but somehow the thought That bed you are buying will be your bed for the rest of your life would make me hang up the phone or close the laptop before I could even get the first digits of my card number out.

Four months after Dave had signed his advance, another book came out, this one based on a series that had run in one of the New York City papers, about a homeless little girl and the constellation of grown-ups—parents, teachers, caseworkers, politicians—who touched her life. The series had gotten over a million clicks, but the book failed to attract more than a thousand readers its first month on sale. Dave’s publisher had gotten nervous—if a book about the poor in New York City didn’t sell, what were the prospects for a book about the poor in Philadelphia? They’d exercised their option to kill the contract. Dave didn’t have to give back the money they’d paid him on signing, but there would be no more cash forthcoming. His agent had tried but had been unable to get another publisher to pick up the project. Poverty just wasn’t sexy. Not with so many readers struggling to manage their own finances and hang on to their own jobs.

Dave’s agent had encouraged him to capitalize on the momentum and come up with another idea—“They all love your voice!” she’d said—but, so far, Dave was holding on to the notion that he could find a way to get paid for the writing he’d already done, instead of having to start all over again. So he’d stayed at the paper, and when Sarah had approached me about publishing my blog on her website, saying yes was the obvious choice. Once I started working, I had no more time to fuss with furniture. Just finding clean clothes in the morning and something for us all to eat at night was challenge enough. So the house stayed empty, unfinished, with wires sticking out from walls because I hadn’t picked lighting fixtures, and three empty bedrooms with their walls painted an unassuming beige. In the absence of dressers and armoires, we kept our clothes in laundry baskets and Tupperware bins, and, in addition to the couch and the love seat, there were folding canvas camp chairs in the living room, a temporary measure that had now lasted more than two years—about as long as Dave’s bad mood.

I remembered the sulk that had followed the Examiner’s edict that every story run online with a button next to the byline so that readers could “Like” the reporter on Facebook.

“It’s not even asking them to like the stories,” he’d complained. “It’s asking them to like me.” He hadn’t even smiled when I’d said, “Well, I like you,” and embraced him, sliding my hands from his shoulder blades down to the small of his back, then cupping his bottom and kissing his cheek. Ellie was engrossed in an episode of Yo Gabba Gabba!; the chicken had another thirty minutes in the oven. “Want to take a shower?” I’d whispered. Two years ago, he’d have had my clothes off and the water on in under a minute. That night, he’d just sighed and asked, “Do you have any idea how degrading it is to be treated like a product?”

It wasn’t as though I couldn’t sympathize. I’d worked at the Examiner myself, as a web designer, before Ellie was born. I believed in newspapers’ mission, the importance of their role as a watchdog, holding the powerful accountable, comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable. But it wasn’t my fault that newspapers in general and the Examiner in particular were failing. I hadn’t changed the world so that everything was available online immediately if not sooner, and not even our grandparents waited for the morning paper to tell them what was what. I hadn’t rearranged things so that “if it bleeds, it leads” had become almost quaint. These days, the Examiner’s home page featured photographs of the Hot Singles Mingle party that desperate editors had thrown, or of the Critical Mass Naked Nine, where participants had biked, nude, down ten miles of Broad Street (coverage of that event, with the pictures artfully blurred, had become the most-read story of the year, easily topping coverage both of the election and of the corrupt city councilman who’d been arrested for tax fraud after a six-hour standoff that ended after he’d climbed to the top of City Hall and threatened to jump unless he was provided with a plane, a million dollars in unmarked bills, and two dozen cannoli from Potito’s). “A ‘Like’ button is not the end of the world,” I’d said, after it became clear that a sexy shower was not in my future. Then I’d gone back to my iPad, and he’d gone back to watching the game . . . except when I looked up I found him scowling at me as if I’d just tossed my device at his head.

“What?” I asked, startled.

“Nothing,” he said. Then he jumped up from the sofa, rolled his shoulders, shook out his arms, and cracked a few knuckles, loudly, like he was getting ready to enter a boxing ring. “It’s nothing.”

I’d tried to talk to him about what was wrong, hoping he’d realize that, as the one who’d gotten us into this mess—or at least this big house, this big life, with the snooty private-school paren