"The Way We Stay" chronicles Cere's life as a small town psychotherapist coping for twelve years with the pain, fear, and humiliation of her only son’s opiate addiction.

Living in the idyllic San Juan Islands of the Pacific Northwest she struggles to balance the complexity of her own emotional needs, the needs of her clients, and the needs of her family beneath the shadow of addiction. She revisits her tumultuous childhood beginning in the Bay Area with her birth during the Summer of Love to leftist radical hippies. Cere retraces her parents’ intense, but brief, political involvement in the leftist militant group The Weather Underground. Eventually, her family moves to Whidbey Island where her parents raise her and her brother in a small, rural, alternative community.

In the midst of a painful, high-risk, adolescence she invites the reader into her internal world as a teen-age mother in 1985, an adoptive mom in 2000, and a psychotherapist of twenty-five years desperately trying to heal her family and herself from the suffering caused by addiction. Written in a sparse, poetic language, it is a story of heartbreaking love, vulnerability, faith and healing.

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