The Fix ─ A Father's Secrets, a Daughter's Search

Who is Josef Katz? The fun-loving, harmonica-playing dad Sara loves so much? Or the monster who abuses Sara's mother and locks himself in the bathroom, unable to beat his addiction?

Eight-year-old Sara Katz huddles under the covers, listening to her parents' muffled arguments and fighting the sleep that inevitably brings her bad dreams—dreams of her terrifying Shadow Father, a heroin addict.

Is my daddy not a good father? Is it my job to fix him?

As Josef's sickness worsens, young Sara is torn apart by her family's need to keep its "shame" a secret from its Jewish community in Brooklyn. Sara finds herself drawn to the liberation movements of the 1960s while feeling trapped in the darkness of her father's addiction and, ultimately, his untimely death.

Will Sara ever learn the truth about how her father became addicted and why he couldn't get well? How will she find her own identity if her family can't embrace its truth? And if Sara reveals her father's secret, will she find freedom—or destroy her family?

Sharon Leder taught English, women’s studies, and Jewish studies on several campuses of the State University of New York and is Associate Professor Emerita at S.U.N.Y.-Nassau Community College. As a teacher, she wrote books and articles on women writers, on the literature of the Holocaust, and on women in academia before beginning the second half of her life as a fiction writer and poet. An earlier draft of her novel The Fix was a finalist in Merrimack Media’s Outstanding Writer Award (2015). Several of Leder’s short works of fiction have been anthologized or published online. In her fiction, Leder uses her life story as the oldest daughter of a heroin addict to help her imagine ways for her characters to survive conflict, tragedy, and trauma without losing sight of the supports they need to prevail. As an adult in the ongoing process of recovery, she has been helped by twelve-step programs, nonprofit groups that stress self-help in the context of loving community. Leder resides on Cape Cod with her husband, artist and author Milton Teichman. Together they run The Teichman Art Gallery. Visit Leder at SharonLeder.com