Elise Schiller

In January of 2014, Elise Schiller's daughter, Giana Natali, died of a heroin overdose. Even if Your Heart Would Listen is a memoir about Giana's illness and death and its impact on her family--especially her mother--as well as a close examination and critique of the treatment she received from health care practitioners while she was struggling to get well.

Losing My Daughter to Heroin

Even If Your Heart Would Listen

When Angel Ferente--a teen with a dysfunctional home life who has been struggling to care for her sisters even as she pursues her goal of attending college on a swimming scholarship--doesn't come home after a party on New Year's Eve, her teammates, her coach's church, and her family search the city for her. The result changes their lives forever.

Watermark

Raised by a drug-addicted mother and criminal stepfather, she became her younger sisters' only hope-and the rock that held her family together. Now, high school senior Angel Ferente is nowhere to be found. Last seen on public transit in the middle of the night, the talented competitive swimmer with an independent streak could have ended up just about anywhere. But on the rough streets of Philadelphia, in a community plagued by drugs and violent crime, her family and friends are finding plenty of cause for concern. Narrated by Angel's troubled younger sister Jeannine and her swim teammate Alex, Watermark explores the challenges of growing up in the inner city in the midst of the crack epidemic and how one girl found refuge in the act of swimming and the steadfast support of her team. Alex and Jeannine form a bond as they find ways to cope with Angel's absence. The swim team and members of a struggling community come together in search of the missing teen-will they manage to figure out where she has gone and track Angel down alive?

In January 2014, Elise Schiller’s youngest child, thirty-three-year-old Giana Natali, died of a heroin overdose while a resident in a treatment program in Boulder County, Colorado. Even if Your Heart Would Listen is about Giana’s life, which was full of accomplishments, and her mental illness, addiction, and death. Using excerpts from the journals, planners, and letters Giana left behind, as well as evidence from her medical records, Schiller dissects her daughter’s treatment for opioid use disorder (OUD) at the five residential and several outpatient programs in eastern Pennsylvania where she tried to recover, taking a close look at the lack of continuity and solid medical foundations in the American substance-use treatment system even as she explores the deeply personal experience of her own loss. Poignant and timely, Even if Your Heart Would Listen is a meditation on a family’s grief, an intimate portrayal of a mother-daughter bond that endures, and an examination of how our nation is failing in its struggle with the opioid epidemic.

Elise Schiller

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