By STEVEN JUPITER
LEICESTER—Though we’re now woefully familiar with the dangers of recreational fentanyl, there was a time when it was just another opioid painkiller, before it was discovered by heroin addicts looking for an even more intense high. Many times more potent than morphine, it has become a scourge in American society, responsible for the overdose deaths of thousands of people over the last decade or so.
Sam Francoeur was an early victim of the narcotic, overdosing on fentanyl patches that he found in his grandparents’ house in Ripton when he was 20 in 2013.
“We knew Sam was self-medicating,” said Kris Francoeur, Sam’s mother, in a recent conversation. “But we didn’t know the extent.”
The family had tried to keep narcotics out of his reach, but their unfamiliarity with fentanyl as a killer—Kris still believes the media downplayed the known danger even then—allowed those patches to remain where Sam could find them.
“I found the wrapper in his pocket,” Kris recalled. The medical examiner then extracted the patch from Sam’s mouth. Her special, beloved boy—the boy who befriended everyone and found such joy in human connection—was gone, taken by the addiction he fed to keep his own psychological struggles at bay.
The loss of a child is an unimaginable loss for anyone who hasn’t experienced it. And an unsurmountable one for many who have.
But Kris conquered the pain through writing about it, publishing a memoir of her experience called “Of Grief, Garlic, and Gratitude: Returning to Hope and Joy from a Shattered Life” in 2019.
“I would not be a published author if not for Sam,” she said as a matter of fact. Writing about her loss helped her process it. And she takes comfort in having brought attention to fentanyl, changing perceptions of addiction and helping others crushed by loss.
“There was a stigma attached to addiction, absolutely,” she said. Kris’ mother revealed Sam’s cause of death at his celebration of life and some attendees later chastised Kris for what they saw as an unnecessary revelation of something that should’ve remained hidden.
“We were at the lowest of the low at that point,” she recalled. But now Francoeur often hears from people who have found great comfort in her book.
“My husband, Paul, and I didn’t seek the spotlight before Sam’s death,” she said. “But we owe it to Sam to bring some good out of this.”
Francoeur credits her two editors with making sure the memoir was as powerful as it could be.
“The first draft was nowhere near as raw as it ended up being,” she said. “My editor told me I was wasting my time if I wasn’t going to really delve into the pain and emotions. I sat and cried but realized she was right. In the end, writing about Sam was cathartic. I ended up feeling very proud of how my family and I dealt with Sam’s death.”
In addition to her husband, Kris has a surviving son, Ben, and two stepchildren, Amie and Ryan.
“I was respectful of everyone in the family and only included what we were all comfortable with,” she said. “But it’s really my story. I grieve for Sam every moment. It’s really my story of how I moved forward. There was a period when I wasn’t sure I could.”
Francoeur even has a tattoo on her foot that reminds her of her family and of the need to put one foot in front of the other to keep moving forward.
The path to publication wasn’t immediate, however. Francoeur received hundreds of rejections before she finally found a publisher. And that wasn’t even for the memoir. Her first published book was a novel called “That One Small Omission,” which is being reissued this fall.
She now has 6 six published books under her own name, mostly romance novels. She’s also become a prolific ghostwriter, producing “hundreds” of books that end up published under other authors’ names. In fact, Francoeur has quite a side hustle writing Amish and Mennonite romances.
“Amish romances are a huge moneymaker in the publishing world,” Francoeur said.
Romance stories that feature billionaire men “saving” poor women are also very popular these days, she said. But Francoeur would love to flip the genre and write a romance about a billionaire woman’s adventures.
“The romances I write under my own name feature strong, independent women,” she said.
But her protagonists often have traumatic backgrounds, in keeping with her own experience as the only child of an alcoholic, bipolar father (the Rev. Wayne Holsman, who led the Brandon and Salisbury Congregational Churches) and a mother who, by Francoeur’s account, was not a traditional homemaker. As a child, Francoeur sought refuge in writing.
“I didn’t think I’d be a writer,” she said. “I just loved telling stories.”
But after Sam’s death, Francoeur resolved to try to get her work published. She’d kept writing even as an adult (“I was somewhat bored as a stay-at-home mom”) and her first novel was released on the one-year anniversary of Sam’s death in 2014.
“I think Sam somehow made that happen, to make that anniversary something positive,” she said.
Francoeur is currently working on a cinematic adaptation of her romance novel “The Stained Glass Window,” which she plans to produce as a short film in anticipation of eventually turning into a feature-length movie. “The Stained Glass” is also set to be featured at the 2025 Los Angeles Times Festival of Books.
She’s also got a new novel in progress, a romance murder-mystery set in Rutland.
Her advice to those who dream of a writing career is simple: “Don’t give up. I received hundreds of rejections before I got my first contract. Keep trying.”
Anyone interested in finding out more about Francoeur and her work can visit her website: authorkfrancoeur.com.
