Blood Orange Night

January 1, 2022

Sleep deprived as she cares for a special-needs baby, increasingly distant from her husband, and suddenly out of her journalist job, a stressed Bond was prescribed benzodiazepines (e.g., Xanax, Valium) in increasing dosages and finally collapsed while holding her daughter. That's when she learned that many doctor overprescribe these drugs and that withdrawing cold turkey could led to psychosis or death. Both cautionary tale and a nightmarish journey of recovery; with a 125,000-copy first printing.

Copyright 2022 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from March 28, 2022
In this raw and captivating debut, journalist Bond chronicles her volatile descent into a benzodiazepine addiction. During her pregnancy with her second child, Chloe, Bond developed extreme insomnia, sometimes sleeping as little as an hour a night. Struggling, simultaneously, to care for an infant with Down syndrome, she relied on Ambien to help her sleep, until she met “Dr. Amazing,” who, after Chloe’s birth in 2010, prescribed Ativan, a benzodiazepine. “ ‘Take these,’ my doctor told me,” Bond recalls. “Frantic for sleep, I took them month after month, my mouth wide-open like a hungry carp.” After her doctor began ratcheting up her doses, Bond realized she was in the grip of a full-blown addiction: “I was simply following my doctor’s orders. I was in a free fall.” In lucid flashbacks—one particularly haunting scene sees her blacking out while driving with her children in the car—she details the hellish recovery process (“a year and a half clawing in the underworld”) that counted her marriage among its casualties. Pairing her unsparing candor with the same deep compassion she finds in the physician who helped her level out, Bond’s narrative casts a burning light onto the hazards of overprescribing and the threat it poses to vulnerable people. This cautionary tale stuns.

May 1, 2022
A harrowing memoir about a class of drugs as dangerous as opioids. Making her book debut, journalist and poet Bond, a blogger for Mad in America, recounts her unintended overuse of popularly prescribed benzodiazepine drugs, which led to addiction and a long, painful process of withdrawal. In 2009, pregnant with her second child and caring for an infant son with Down syndrome, Bond experienced weeks of insomnia that left her physically and emotionally exhausted. "After nine weeks," she writes, "my hands begin to shake. There's the feeling of being broken, of the head and body not being connected. Some puppeteer jangles my legs, my head." After the first trimester, her doctor finally prescribed Ambien, assuring her that it would be safe for her nursing infant and growing fetus. At first, Bond was relieved: Ambien worked. Soon, however, the effects sharply diminished. The author learned only later that the medical literature advised taking benzos only occasionally, for a few weeks; she kept swallowing Ambien for months. After her daughter's birth, her doctor substituted Ativan, another benzodiazepine. Each time its effects stopped, the doctor increased the dose and then added Xanax. Still suffering from insomnia, Bond experienced other symptoms as well: memory loss, olfactory hallucinations, fainting, nausea, digestive problems, and depression, which became exacerbated when she tried to taper the dose. A frantic internet search revealed information that startled her: She was undergoing active drug withdrawal, much more severe with benzos than with opioids. "While the physical withdrawal of opioids is safely done in seven to ten days," she writes, "benzo withdrawal can be ten times that long." Furthermore, sudden withdrawal can be fatal. Bond's anguish affected her relationships with friends and family (her mother had been an addict) and especially with her husband. Marital stress added to her despair, as did her frustration in finding medical help. Bond's sharp critique of big pharma and the broken American health care system sounds an urgent alarm. A vivid chronicle of suffering.

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May 1, 2022
Because benzodiazepines like Ativan and Valium are addictive, it's a bad idea to take them for long periods of time. In 2010, Bond, a journalist and mom with two very young kids, including one with Down syndrome, starts taking Ativan for insomnia. She gets hooked. She blogs about it and gets interviewed by ABC World News Tonight for a piece that never airs. Over time, she grows skinnier and weaker, and she and her husband drift apart. She switches doctors and takes Valium because it stays in the body longer and causes a less severe "freak-out" when she tries to withdraw. At the close of her memoir, with her kids ages 11 and 12, Bond admits that she still takes 5 milligrams of Valium nightly. At least she's alive, unlike Soundgarden lead singer Chris Cornell, whose death was ruled a suicide but whose wife sued the doctor who gave him so very many Ativan prescriptions. Bond's story, with lines like "the blood orange night turns red and screams through my eyes," is an eloquent cautionary tale.

COPYRIGHT(2022) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

May 1, 2022

"I feel like a house that has somehow remained standing in the wake of a massive fire" writes journalist and poet Bond in her memoir recounting her dependency on prescription benzodiazepines. Bond experienced chronic insomnia during her pregnancy for her second child. Under doctor's orders, she began taking a drug in the benzodiazepine family. As her dosages continually increased, her body deteriorated with rapid weight loss, fatigue, mental fog, and lack of muscle control. She discovered that she had become physically dependent on her medication and was experiencing withdrawal tolerance. Under the guidance of an addictionologist, Bond decided to undergo the harrowing process of gradually tapering. With the support of friends and with her children as inspiration, Bond was able to taper down to a small dosage and began a new phase of her life. Bond hopes that if she "can ache with honesty, people will hear." This is an engaging testament to the powers of self-advocacy and resilience written with lyrical clarity and heart. VERDICT This cautionary tale will help many understand how prescription drug dependency can happen and the strength and courage required to overcome it. Highly recommended.--Anitra Gates

Copyright 2022 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.