From the author of My Brain Is Hanging Upside Down, a new graphic memoir brimming with black humor, that explores the ultimate irony: the author’s addiction to 12-step programs.

“Heatley recounts in squirmy, funny detail a chaotic childhood that leads to an ironic ‘addiction’ to recovery programs in this ultra-candid memoir.” –Publishers Weekly, starred review

“Rich in detail and reflection … Heatley powerfully demonstrates that when lives are messiest, art remains cathartic, even redemptive.” –Kirkus Reviews, starred review

David Heatley had an unquestionably troubled and eccentric childhood: father a sexually repressed alcoholic, mother an overworked compulsive overeater. Then David’s parents enter the world of 12-step programs and find a sense of support and community. It seems to help. David, meanwhile, grows up struggling with his own troublesome sexual urges and seeking some way to make sense of it all. Eventually he starts attending meetings too. Alcoholics Anonymous. Overeaters Anonymous. Debtors Anonymous. Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous. More and more meetings. Meetings for issues he doesn’t have.

With stark, sharply drawn art and unflinching honesty, Heatley explores the strange and touching relationships he develops, and the truths about himself and his family he is forced to confront while “working” an ever-increasing number of programs. The result is a complicated, unsettling, and hilarious journey–of far more than 12 steps.

David Heatley was born and raised in Teaneck, NJ and has lived in Oberlin, Chicago, Oakland, and Brooklyn. He is the author of My Brain is Hanging Upside Down, and his comics and drawings have since appeared on the cover of The New Yorker, in every section of The New York Times, in New York Magazine, Granta, McSweeney’s, Kramer’s Ergot, Best American Comics (cover artist) and Nickelodeon Magazine. He proudly resides in Queens with his wife and two children.