The Opioid Epidemic

Bewilderness is a contemporary refiguring of a standard coming of age story of friendship and loss in North Carolina's Appalachian foothills made relevant by its setting amid the worsening drug crisis in the declining rural South. Perhaps the most important relationship at the heart of the novel is not Irene's and Luce's as the narrative is mainly devoted to, but Irene's, Luce's and Wilky's addictions, which are tantamount to their relationship with the drugs they alternately pursues and eschew.

Tucker wrote and published her novel during the period when the country's largest pharmaceutical corporations have been held legally and financially liable for their complicity in deceiving congress, the medical establishment, and the public about the addictive potential of their next-generation painkillers. Massive class-action lawsuits continue to force companies like Purdue, mentioned in the novel as the inventor and original patent-holder of Oxycontin, and Johnson...