Author Billie Jo Kidder shares an intensely personal journey through addiction, mental illness, trauma, devastating consequences, and hard-won recovery in her memoir, Can You Relate? Essential Tremors, Alcoholism, Depression, Bulimia, Suicide Attempts, Death.
Beginning with her childhood on a farm in Turner, Oregon, Kidder looks back on a life that once seemed filled with family, freedom, horses, and the ordinary adventures of growing up. But as those early years gave way to instability and trauma, her life began moving in a far darker direction.
Kidder recounts her first experience with alcohol at just eleven years old and the years that followed as depression, bulimia, sexual trauma, suicide attempts, destructive relationships, and addiction increasingly took control. Her story does not soften the consequences. Alcoholism eventually affected her health, relationships, career, freedom, and the lives of other people.
The memoir follows Kidder through legal consequences, jail and prison, repeated attempts at sobriety, relapse, and serious medical crises. Her health struggles included a heart attack, stroke, seizures, essential tremors, physical disability, and melanoma. She also underwent deep brain stimulation surgery, another major turning point in a life repeatedly pushed to its limits.
Yet Can You Relate? is not simply a record of everything that went wrong.
The later chapters turn toward faith, accountability, recovery, and the difficult process of rebuilding. Through medical care, recovery support, personal commitment, and what Kidder describes as surrendering her life to God, she found sobriety and a sense of peace she once believed was beyond her reach.
Kidder is equally clear that redemption does not erase responsibility. Her recovery requires acknowledging the people harmed by her past decisions and refusing to minimize the consequences of addiction. That accountability has also become part of her purpose. Through recovery communities and Victim Impact Panels, she has begun using her experiences to warn others about impaired driving, addiction, denial, and the damage one decision can cause.
At its heart, Can You Relate? asks readers to recognize that even a life marked by relapse, shame, illness, and painful mistakes does not have to end there. Kidder writes for those who may see part of themselves in her journey, and especially for anyone who believes they have fallen too far to begin again.
Her message is rooted not in perfection, but persistence: recovery is lived one day at a time, and the past does not have to have the final word.
About the author
Billie Jo Kidder shares her deeply personal journey through addiction, depression, trauma, eating disorders, incarceration, and serious health challenges. After years of struggle, she found sobriety through faith, medical care, recovery support, and personal determination. By telling her story with honesty and accountability, Billie hopes to offer encouragement to those facing addiction, mental illness, and despair, while showing that recovery, peace, and a new beginning are possible.