Kristen McGuiness: Searching for My Dad in the Haze of Crime, Addiction & Lost Time.

At the Podium with Patrick Huey

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Kristen McGuiness is a successful author of books such as her memoir 51/50: The Magical Adventures of the Single Life and her debut novel, Live Through This. She has also founded her own publishing company called Rise Books where her mission is to publish what she describes as “radical works of inspiration.” Kristen is also the daughter of Dan McGuiness – one of the largest and most consequential marijuana smugglers of the 1970s and 1980s. She describes him as “one of the architects of the modern drug trade.”
His story and their relationship she detailed in an article for Rolling Stone Magazine called, Learjets, Mistresses, and Bales of Weed: My Dad’s Life as Drug Kingpin. While TV and films often glamourize this existence, Kristen’s life was one of missing a father who existed for her solely in weekend phone calls from the prisons that tried to keep him under lock and key for decades – Dan escaped three times – and the letters he would send home. Her relationship to his story and to his business and how it impacted her life is complex. There are no heroic apologies from Dan to Kristen. He expresses no real remorse for the lives that might have been negatively impacted by his drug smuggling. Kristen herself at times speaks poignantly about how much her dad had her deep love and devotion, and the other times, she labels him a sociopath.
There exists a hard truth that comes through in our conversation and in her writings of what it was like to love her dad so much, even as he loved equally, if not more, the rush he got from being addicted to crime - "the juice" as she describes it. Her views of her life and who Dan McGuniess was are both heartbreaking and provocative; there is not the neat and easy good guy/bad guy trope that we usually expect from this type of story.
Mostly, we find ourselves at the tip of the needle, dancing on a point that pricks our feet while we stay as upright as we can, clinging to dear life.
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