I went out to dinner recently with two friends, one of whom is a nurse in a center for addiction recovery. As she was telling us about her delight in her patients, our other friend added, “And really, we’re all addicted to something.”

The characters in Michelle Brafman’s latest novel, Draw Near to Me, would certainly agree with that observation. The main character, Kristy, is recovering from love addiction, which caused her to have an ill-advised fling with her best friend’s (and half-sister’s) husband. The result is an adorable “whoops, I thought I was in menopause” baby whom Kristy adores, even while she doesn’t know if the little girl’s father is the other man or her own beloved husband, David, a successful OB-GYN.

Unfortunately, David didn’t know about the addiction, the fling, or the uncertainty over his daughter’s parentage. Not until, that is, he was short on clean socks, went digging through Kristy’s sock drawer, and found her (partial) confession hidden there. Furious, he leaves their suburban DC home to take refuge at the family’s Rehoboth Beach vacation house.

Kristy, distraught, rushes to follow him, determined to plead her case and finally come clean about her addiction. But once there, she slips, hits her head on the signed rock that serves as the family’s landmark to the house, and both chokes on a chicken bone and suffers a brain injury. She then slips into a coma from which it seems unlikely she’ll emerge.

Soon, members of this strained family come from far and wide to help with the kids — David and Kristy have two teenagers in addition to the baby — and to sit in vigil. Nearly everyone suffers from some sort of addiction, whether it’s Kristy’s half-brother’s struggle with alcohol or David’s reliance on the thrill he gets from scrubbing in on high-risk cases. Kristy’s half-sister — she of the cheating husband — is also addicted, in a way, to portraying herself as perfect and in control. And even David and Kristy’s elder daughter, Mia, is addicted to sniffing out the truth, earning her the nickname “Scoop.”

Obviously, some of these addictions are more crippling than others, but they all form a thematic tableau for Brafman to work upon as everyone grapples with their own demons and learns, as the book’s title suggests, to come together. Many of the characters are given their own short, point-of-view chapters, which keeps the novel’s pace brisk. The drama embedded in this traumatized family verges at times on the soap-operatic, but the stakes feel high, and this reader was eager to keep turning the pages.

Mia rushes home from college when she learns about her mother’s plight. She’s had her share of frustrations with Kristy — especially the summer Kristy’s love addiction flared (though Mia didn’t know at the time why her mother was acting like “some kind of alien”) — but she also harbors a profound love for her. Driving to the beach house in a panic, Mia worries that she’ll be too late. “Your whole life really could change in a day,” she thinks.

That families willingly live on such a knife’s edge, vulnerable to the deep pain of losing a loved one yet still committed to each other, is one of the mysteries of human relationships. Brafman does excellent work in excavating those ties, examining not only the individual toll of addiction but the shared wages of loss and love. None of her characters are perfect, and some are even unpleasant. But they represent the real, messy complexity of family, and she has crafted a gift to readers willing to delve into the fractured human heart.

The first section of the novel, in fact, is called “Rupture,” following the epigraph by Baratunde Thurston, “You can’t repair without rupture.” Draw Near to Me suggests that such repair can, like a broken bowl mended with gold, yield something even more beautiful than the original.

Carrie Callaghan is the author of the historical novels A Light of Her Own and Salt the Snow. She admits to being addicted to tea, reading, and smushing her face in the fur of her purring cat.