BookLife Review: Blood Orange Night, by Melissa Bond
Young mother, insomnia, benzodiazepine dependency, withdrawal, addiction, Down's syndrome child, marriage stress, memoir
Blood Orange Night by Melissa Bond is one of the best books I have read this year. This beautifully written, evocative and gripping memoir recounts the author’s extended battle with insomnia following the birth of her first child, her unwitting dependency on Ativan and other benzodiazepines prescribed to her to treat the insomnia and the harrowing experience of attempting to detox from and rid herself of them.
Much has been said in literature, news, Congressional testimony and on television about the country’s opioid crisis and the explosion of tragedies and treatment centers that have arisen around this crisis. Barbara Kingsolver’s recent, prize-winning book, Demon Copperhead, dives deep into that universe in the entrenched poverty of Appalachia. Benzodiazepines (Ativan, Xanax, Valium, Ambien) are not opioids. They are considereed more addictive than heroin and exponentially more difficult to detox from than any opioid. Benzo detox and withdrawal can take months or even years. It is not a 7-10 day detox or a 29-day inpatient program. This is a public health crisis lurking in the shadows that struggles to see the light of day. It is rampant and misunderstood. Blood Orange Night peels back the misperceptions around this class of drugs in a deeply personal, vivid and intensely human true story.
Melissa Bond, a newly married journalist, becomes pregnant with her first child mere weeks after marrying her beloved, Sean. They give birth to their first son who is diagnosed with Down’s syndrome and fall quickly and deeply in love with him. Shortly thereafter, the 2008 recession hits, Melissa’s employer, a magazine, folds and she finds herself unemployed and once again pregnant. Her husband, a landscape company owner, is thrust into the role of sole provider. Melissa develops insomnia and multiple care providers attribute it to new motherhood, parenting a Down’s syndrome child, and her stressful unemployment. The causes are almost irrelevant. She is prescribed benzodiazapenes without warning of their addictive power. She is, in fact, prescribed them, in escalating doses, over months and years. She begins to experience symptoms later understood as side effects of extended use. She begins to investigate and learns the horror of her situation. She begins detoxing and fails. She grows sicker. Stress multiplies. Her marriage falters and wobbles. Ultimately she learns that detoxing from benzodiazepine dependency is an extraordinarily difficult, painful and months or years-long process.
Bond’s writing is what makes this book so compelling. She describes the experiences of insomnia, clinical fatigue and exhaustions (while parenting), muscle, visual and digestive dysfunction, mental fog, balance issues and more in graphic detail. She simultaneously recounts the range of misunderstanding of those closest to her-husbands, friends, and even care-givers. The reader witnesses the spiral of this particular addiction like watching a train wreck in slow-motion, feeling her devline, mounting frustration, fear and pain with the turn of each page, and the onset of each chapter.
At the end of the day, Blood Orange Night is a phenomenal read. It is also and eye-opening education about this unvoiced, too-infrequently covered, rampant public health emergency, seeping into our country’s bloodstream one little pill at a time. I could not put it down and read it in a day. Read this book, and then share it with everyone you know who depends on little happy pills for anxiety or sleep. Sound the alarm.