Jessica Danger
No Heroic Measures; A Memoir
One day, Jessica Danger’s life is shattered when she receives a phone call informing her that her long estranged father - the man who once tried to kill her - is now dying of liver failure. Danger faces an impossible choice: abandon her father, or care for the man who caused her so much pain and fear.
This unflinching and profound memoir delves into the dark heart of addiction, the tangled web of family myths, and the agonizing journey to forgiveness. As she spends a year caring for her dying father, Danger unearths the truth about his past and confronts the unsettling ways she sees herself reflected in the man she thought she hated.
This is a powerful story of reckoning, redemption, and the enduring complexities of family and love.
What People Are Saying
“ Jessica Danger excavates the most painful question a daughter can face: What do you owe the parent who devastated your childhood? No Heroic Measures is memoir-writing at its most fearless—a book that transforms family trauma into something luminous and essential."
From Chelsea Bieker, author of Madwoman and Godshot
"Jessica Danger’s No Heroic Measures is a testament to why we write books and why we read books like hers. Her prose is clear-eyed, authorial, and filled with unconditional love and mercy. Mercy for herself and for the complicated father who could have consumed her. Danger's work is a love letter to anyone wrestling with demons, grief, and addiction, while healing by spinning emotional hay into golden sentences."
From Megan Culhane Galbraith, author of The Guild of the Infant Saviour: An Adopted Child’s Memory Book
"Danger’s powers of recollection are sensitive and resolute, and hers is a page-turner of a story that seeks only to clarify and comfort, to illuminate the shadowy absurdities and successive ambushes of deep grief. No Heroic Measures is heroic in its own way, not unflinching as much as leaning all the way into the flinch; it is page after full-hearted page of bare-bones honesty and dogged, undying love."
From Shawna Kay Rodenberg, Author of Kin
“ I couldn’t stop reading No Heroic Measures once I started; it unfurled like a poem, a profound diary, and an answer to confounding questions—all at once. Topped off with pickled eggs, cigarette packs, a .44, a flannel shirt, the story insists on the truth, and delivers something even greater.”
From Jardine Libaire, author of White Fur, Here Kitty Kitty, and The Sober Lush
“ With stunning clarity, No Heroic Measures stretches a daughter's capacity to love her father until it snaps with such force it wakes her up to her own recovery. Danger has written a fiercely intimate memoir that reads like a snapshot of the boundlessness of hope.” – Sabrina Orah Mark, author of Happily, Wild Milk, The Babies, Tsim Tsum
“Jessica Danger’s No Heroic Measures is an unflinching look at what it costs to love—and lose—a parent to addiction. With brutal honesty, she writes into the murky space between love and obligation. No Heroic Measures reveals what so many keep buried: Sometimes we cannot help but love the people who hurt us most."
– Shelby Hinte, author of Howling Women
“ In No Heroic Measures, Jessica Danger confronts the legacy of addiction and estrangement with unflinching honesty. What begins as the story of a daughter caring for the father who once caused her deep harm expands into a searching meditation on family myth, survival, and the complicated nature of forgiveness. This is a memoir written with courage and clarity, a testament to the endurance of love even in its most difficult forms." — Garrard Conley, author of Boy Erased and All the World Beside Me
“Truth be told, there is not one day that goes by when I don't fall in love with someone, with something.”
– Carole Masso