In Praise of Addiction: Or How We Can Learn to Love Dependency in a Damaged World with Elizabeth F. S. Roberts (Princeton UP, 2026)
New Books NetworkShow Notes
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: Or How We Can Learn to Love Dependency in a Damaged World (Princeton UP, 2026) shares the unexpected journey that led Dr. 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, Dr. 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.\
This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.
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