Cere Demuth to read from her new book at Darvill’s

San Juan Island therapist and writer Cere Demuth will read from “The Way We Stay,” a memoir about her son’s twelve-year addiction to opiates, at Darvill’s Bookstore.

Join her on Thursday, Nov. 15 from 6-7 p.m. The book chronicles her life as a small-town psychotherapist coping with the pain, fear and humiliation of her only son’s opiate addiction.

Demuth revisits her tumultuous childhood beginning in the Bay area with her birth during the summer of love to leftist radical hippies. She retraces her parents’ intense, but brief, political involvement in the leftist militant group The Weather Underground. Eventually, her family moves to Whidbey Island, where her parents raise her and her brother in a rural, alternative community.

In the midst of a painful, high-risk, adolescence, Demuth invites the reader into her internal world as a teenage mother in 1985, an adoptive mom in 2000 and a psychotherapist of 25 years. Written in a sparse, poetic language, it is a story of heartbreaking love, vulnerability, faith and healing.