First in the Family Quotes

“Teachers encouraged me to pursue my athletic potential”
― Jessica Hoppe, First in the Family: A Story of Survival, Recovery, and the American Dream

“My father had to break up the melee”
― Jessica Hoppe, First in the Family: A Story of Survival, Recovery, and the American Dream

“My mother never told my school we’d lost the house”
― Jessica Hoppe, First in the Family: A Story of Survival, Recovery, and the American Dream

“I needed to get on TV. It was the thing my father loved so much—the thing that got his undivided attention night after night. Once he saw me on-screen”
― Jessica Hoppe, First in the Family: A Story of Survival, Recovery, and the American Dream

“Absorbing the daily death of my father’s dignity was not a pain any of us discussed. The pain was his. The duty was ours. An entanglement no one knew how to unravel.”
― Jessica Hoppe, First in the Family: A Story of Survival, Recovery, and the American Dream

“to tell her what went down at work that day. “Wetback” painted in white letters across the back of his orange uniform. A stick found in his locker labeled “Hoppe’s Stick” that his coworkers threatened to shove up his ass. He’d been kicked out of the lunchroom—“No spics allowed,” they said”
― Jessica Hoppe, First in the Family: A Story of Survival, Recovery, and the American Dream

“If they had ever crossed paths in my father’s sailing days”
― Jessica Hoppe, First in the Family: A Story of Survival, Recovery, and the American Dream

“I hated telling him he was hurting me when he said all he meant to do was protect me.”
― Jessica Hoppe, First in the Family: A Story of Survival, Recovery, and the American Dream

“my father had a brief and violent academic education.He was naturally left-handed”
― Jessica Hoppe, First in the Family: A Story of Survival, Recovery, and the American Dream

“But I was the one who couldn’t spell my own name. I was the one with dark skin whose dark-skinned family had just moved to town”
― Jessica Hoppe, First in the Family: A Story of Survival, Recovery, and the American Dream

“I took my mother’s feelings upon myself and never felt safe to express my own. It was always my mother I looked to”
― Jessica Hoppe, First in the Family: A Story of Survival, Recovery, and the American Dream

“Every time the door of my mother’s trauma shut me out”
― Jessica Hoppe, First in the Family: A Story of Survival, Recovery, and the American Dream

“That day”
― Jessica Hoppe, First in the Family: A Story of Survival, Recovery, and the American Dream

“A closed door”
― Jessica Hoppe, First in the Family: A Story of Survival, Recovery, and the American Dream

“As a child”
― Jessica Hoppe, First in the Family: A Story of Survival, Recovery, and the American Dream

“In high school”
― Jessica Hoppe, First in the Family: A Story of Survival, Recovery, and the American Dream

“His family blamed my grandmother’s worsening health on the stress of their ongoing rift.”
― Jessica Hoppe, First in the Family: A Story of Survival, Recovery, and the American Dream

“My father always showed up early to pick her up or arrived unannounced to check on her. His surveillance embarrassed her”
― Jessica Hoppe, First in the Family: A Story of Survival, Recovery, and the American Dream

“she was convinced her chronic upset stomach was a reaction to all the Tex-Mex she had started eating.”
― Jessica Hoppe, First in the Family: A Story of Survival, Recovery, and the American Dream

“envisioned me as an opportunity to get it right and make sure things were better for us than they had been for them. A task my father was determined to fulfill by not beating us and my mother by not abandoning us. These were the primary torments of their pasts”
― Jessica Hoppe, First in the Family: A Story of Survival, Recovery, and the American Dream

“Three weeks after hearing the feminist icon preach liberation”
― Jessica Hoppe, First in the Family: A Story of Survival, Recovery, and the American Dream

“My father secured steady paychecks doing maintenance for the city hospital during the day”
― Jessica Hoppe, First in the Family: A Story of Survival, Recovery, and the American Dream

“He demanded my mother get off government assistance. He didn’t want anyone to think he needed help taking care of his family. Under the spell of the American Dream our basic needs were cast as charity.”
― Jessica Hoppe, First in the Family: A Story of Survival, Recovery, and the American Dream

“When my mother told her family she was pregnant again”
― Jessica Hoppe, First in the Family: A Story of Survival, Recovery, and the American Dream

“She thought of Karina”
― Jessica Hoppe, First in the Family: A Story of Survival, Recovery, and the American Dream

“When she gave birth to my sister Karina that year”
― Jessica Hoppe, First in the Family: A Story of Survival, Recovery, and the American Dream

“After several abusive relationships”
― Jessica Hoppe, First in the Family: A Story of Survival, Recovery, and the American Dream

“had spent much of his childhood without his mother”
― Jessica Hoppe, First in the Family: A Story of Survival, Recovery, and the American Dream

“Historically”
― Jessica Hoppe, First in the Family: A Story of Survival, Recovery, and the American Dream

“The pursuit of the American Dream requires the sacrifice of our physical and mental health. Though marketed as the road to progress”
― Jessica Hoppe, First in the Family: A Story of Survival, Recovery, and the American Dream