Sunrise Over Half-Built Houses: Love, Longing and Addiction in Suburbia - Paperback

by Erin Steele (Author)

Enter into the life and mind of a shy teenager coming of age in the early 2000s in a pretty, suburban neighbourhood where nothing is quite as it seems--including her. At a glance, she's a student with a boyfriend and a job at the coffee shop. Yet she's skipping class, grappling with intense feelings for girls and growing dangerously dependent on illicit pills with cute names. Wanting nothing more than to be who she is on the inside, Erin Steele's spiral into addiction and parallel quest for meaning takes readers into big houses with spare room for secrets; past quiet cul-de-sacs where kids party in wooded outskirts zoned for development; where West Coast rains can pummel for days. Written with searing honesty that stares at you until you turn away, then stares at you some more, Sunrise over Half-Built Houses digs down past pleasantries and manicured lawns, through the sucking hole of addiction, then further still to reveal a place where we can all see ourselves and each other more clearly.

Author Biography

Erin Steele is a writer, low-key philosopher and insatiably curious explorer of life. She writes On Being Human on Substack, is a 2022 Writing by Writers fellow and has been published in Human Parts by Medium. She currently lives in Kelowna, BC, Canada where she practises all limbs of yoga, runs long distances on trails and nerds out on nature-- particularly when the arrowleaf balsamroot explodes the hills yellow.