About This Memoir (and the guy writing it)

My name is Nick Puopolo. I’m 64 years old, retired, and I’ve been sober for 35 years.

I grew up in East Boston back when the neighborhood was still the neighborhood—when everyone knew everyone, and my family’s stores on Three Corners were local fixtures. My uncle made the best subs in the city. We had regulars. We had history. I had every advantage a working-class kid could ask for.

And I still managed to fuck it all up.

By 28, I was homeless, strung out, and out of options. My wife had kicked me out. My mother had joined Al-Anon and learned to say no. I owed money to the kind of people who don’t forget. I’d sold everything that wasn’t nailed down—including a refrigerator my wife came home to find missing.

That’s when I ended up at North Cottage, a halfway house north of Boston that took guys like me—the repeat offenders, the hard cases, the ones who’d tried everything else and failed.

This memoir is about those six months.

It’s about the unlikely collection of people who saved my life—not because they had their shit together, but because they were just as broken as I was. Drag queens and ex-cons. Repeat offenders and guys who thought missing a mortgage payment was their rock bottom. Gay men who’d been thrown out by their families and straight guys who’d burned every bridge. We lived together, ate together, called each other out, and somehow kept each other alive.

Bob wore a floral dress on my first day and told me I wasn’t that hot. Mike was built like a linebacker but moved through the world chasing grace. Bill looked like he belonged at a country club, not a halfway house. And there were dozens of others—some made it, some didn’t, but every single one of them mattered.

It’s about trying to make amends to my wife, Joanne, only to find out she couldn’t love me sober because she’d spent 13 years learning how to love me broken.

It’s about a purple velvet ottoman, a makeover before the worst date of my life, and a place where society’s rejects figured out how to save each other when nobody else gave a damn.

Why I’m writing this now:

I should’ve written this 30 years ago, but I wasn’t ready. I’ve watched too many recovery memoirs turn survival into redemption porn—stories where the addict finds God, gets their life back, and everyone forgives them. That’s not what happened to me.

I got sober. I lost my wife anyway. I stayed sober. That’s it.

But the story matters because it’s honest. Because Bob existed. Because halfway houses like North Cottage save lives every day, and nobody writes about them. Because someone reading this right now is sitting where I sat in 1989, wondering if they’re ever going to be good enough.

You probably won’t be. Not all the way.

But you can be almost good. And sometimes that’s enough.

How this works:

I post twice a week:

- Mondays: Scenes from the Cottage (recovery timeline, told chronologically)

- Thursdays: Stories from before (pre-recovery chaos—the cons, the wreckage, how I got there)

Everything’s free. I’m not selling anything. I’m just telling the story.

If you want to support the work, there’s a paid tier with bonus material, early access, and behind-the-scenes stuff. But you don’t need it to follow the main story.

Thanks for being here.

—Nick