Honor for me to be speaking with you today. Guest thank you. Host as i read your book, what a hard it must have been for you to write. You uncovered so many deep extremely painful parts of your past and families. Can you tell me more about your writing process and when and how you decide decide to go about wg this book . Guest the writing process was starting to come together in 2017 i wrote a story for the New York Times about what happened to my exhusband and was called the lawyer of the addict. It was about a years worth of research and writing about it and exploring it with my family and children and seeing if it was okay with them to go ahead and tell the world of this story and figure out why we were doing it and what it meant to us. All of it was largely to make some kind of meaning out of something that felt almost arbitrary and shameful and kelsey, and also to try to understand what was going on with peter and also in the Legal Profession in terms of Substance Use and depression and anxiety. After that came out, it surprisingly had a viral wife and millions of shares and i got a lot of feedback from readers especially voyeurs who said im worried im going to end up like your exhusband facing a vote of the same issues, depression, anxiety and using different substances. So then i also at that point in time started thinking about a memoir and decided i would write one. I feel like my process started years before and i spent another eight or nine months talking to high end Addiction Treatment centers and people i met through online discussion boards and the way that a reporter will find people to speak to her. Then i guess i wrote it over the course of a year and a course of another half a year or so it took about two years from conception to final draft. Host you intersperse the discussions of your discovery about your exhusband and his drug addiction and discoveries about your self. Early on in the book you wrote lots of things inspired someone to cut down their own worth and for decades afterwards i wasnt comfortable following my own intuition. Tell me about what you meant by that. Guest i think in retrospect i was battling so many of the choices i made. The choice to marry peter and stay in the marriage although i was unhappy. The curvier choices i made, which were largely to follow peter around for his career and been kind of fits my name to it. And why i never really i never did much advocating for myself and i didnt do enough advocating i think for my kids especially when he was sick with his addiction and i didnt know it but he was absent or not acting in ways that were responsible. I didnt have a lot of self confidence or selfesteem and when i looked at the course of my own life i found some of the things my mother had done in her marriage. When we split up he was having an affair. I was 46 an 46 entire member thg im the same age my mother was when my father left for the same reasons. I think i didnt receive a lot of positive affirmation. My father was concerned he had three daughters i think that he loved us but that was sort of the way that it was and he said the same thing to me its a good thing you are smart because you are not pretty. I always felt like i was lucky to have kind of got hi gotten p, who have married him. My father who was the other major male figure in my life acted like i was working to get him into growing up i think i write and do what i grew up in a town that was very irish and Italian Catholic and we were jewish. My family kept kosher. I didnt look the same as other girls, i was underweight, i had ethnic hair. And i looked jewish and felt like an outsider. Someone painted jew on my locker. So there were all these things that made me feel like an outsider, not as popular or pretty or whatever. I was funny so thats kind of how i got accepted. You grew up kind of feeling you are constantly trying to get into the group that in and you are always on and i wound up marrying somebody i thought i was lucky to get and i didnt want to screw it up, so i didnt advocate for my Software Demand anything and followed him around. I guess thats how i wound up in a passage ithat passage in the. Host there was another anotr person that you were talking about how you would tell your father about your engagement. He said something to you that really surprised you. You told him you were getting married and peter got up to go to the bathroom at a restaurant, my dad looked at me and said dont blow it. I hadnt thought about it much until after peter died and started to write a memoir with kind of reporting but my editor said it needs to be a memoir. And i is the emotional heart of the story. I realized what a crummy thing it was to say to your daughter and i looked back and said why didnt i stand up and say why arent you saying that to peter, why are you saying that to me but in the mindset to say i wont come to understand that i didnt want to blow it, its very indicative of my self worth the time. Host the most striking books seeking the signs on time. I didnt think someone would be earning a salary he was earning or have advanced degrees. Also struggling with convictio s baby they were homeless or have a Mental Illness that was untreated. Someone living under a bridge, panhandling on the subway and i was wrong although in the communities there were also plenty of people at the top of the socioeconomic ladder struggling as well. And what they did and then as i havent really educated myself i didnt know how it would affect me or my family. So when peter suffered from those, i attributed it to Everything Else. Maybe he was psychotic. Maybe he had an eating disorder. Maybe he had an illness he didnt know about my cancer. I had people ask me if he had aids. Do you think that he has a drug addiction . I never considered it, but he did have all the symptoms. I thought hes just working too hard, hes not getting enough sleep, all those things. Host thats right. And there were a lot of moments that were dedicated to this which of course in retrospect and for any of us that go individuals that have the disease we understand it and you were talking about how she would say that he was diagnosed with passiohashimoto disease. I wonder what was going through your mind as you had these explanations. Guest i thought they would be blazoned it wasnt one time, it was several times to pick up our son from high school and this was before my son had a drivers license and it was one day a week my son had Cross Country practice. It was hard for a teenager to be at school in the dark the only one his parents arent there. He would walk up the street and say why argue two hours late to get our son and he would say there is traffic. But i was checking traffic in realtime and hreal time and hee been there in half an hour. In my mind i was thinking i dont know what his birthday is like. Maybe its possible he doesnt want to tell me something happened at work. A meeting ran over because he would always say i have to work, there is an emergency. I left my cell phone in an office and had to run off site. When he said there was traffic, i doubted my own accuracy. I thought that there was no traffic when i checked the app for that, but maybe there was an accident that didnt show up. Maybe he was right. Why would he be two hours late to pick up our son to come it must have been a workrelated thing. I didnt look at the fact he was concealing something else. Host you talked earlier about this profound misconception and stigma that surrounds addiction and one of them is about the societal understandings of what it means or what type of person gets this disease. I thought that it was such an interesting description when you arwere writing about your initil disbelieves citing poor example that he is rich and lives in a house that costs 6 million. Can you go into what youre thinking was that the preconceptions how people have addiction and what you ended up finding out. Guest that ties back to my answer but without the implicit biases. I thought that they were mentally ill and that it wasnt going to be a rich white professional with 13 years of schooling and sometimes as a scientist from the paymasters in chemistry and certainly knew what the chemicals would do to his brain and body and certainly understood addiction. But i had not counted on his arrogance at that level and i can imagine peter thinking i will try this and see what its like. It will be fun but im not going to become addicted because i can control that. So it turned out he died from and infection and it happens very commonly to the iv drug abusers. I thought that must be wrong. That is impossible. The biggest problems i had as he was welleducated. He would know better. Its Everything Else you can think of because even someone that has a high school indication it is a powerful thing. My first work was when they were struggling with addiction and most were homeless but they were active users even though they were on methadone. I never met a client that didnt understand it was a risk or they understood they suffered from this disease. I dont know why i thought somehow that his education would be protected with his income would be protected. I think i also thought he can have anything he wants, like why would he choose to. It felt like someone had all of these Resources Available as well as a good education wouldnt make that choice so i think i didnt really understand how hard it is to fight addiction and how people become addicted and how education, income, privilege is not against it which is something i now understand very well. Host there is no face to addiction. You cant tell by looking at somebody if they are at risk or if they have addiction or are in recovery. One of the issues i dealt with in baltimore and the industry here is there have been a number of people that have said why do we now say its the publichealth issue. There are people in the city that have been dying from the heroin epidemic and crack epidemic for decades and there is a resistance to thinking up at the face of addiction is changing and we are recognizing it isnt just poor black and brown people, now we care. And i find it difficult to wrestle with because im the one hand, we do want to address it and im glad there is attention to it, but it also is true that there is no attention to it in part because of the fact it is changing that is who it is affecting. Guest that is so true and i felt a lot of guilt and saying the fact that i didnt even recognize all of a sudden now it is an emergency because it is happening in my life which is completely unfair because for black and brown communities and people of color in new york city and many cities across america and for people that are in the lower end of the socioeconomic spectrum, this has been an emergency for decades and it feels so wrong that its now more of a white problem we are talking about it. It feels wrong on so many levels. I guess as you say it is getting attention and hopefully the people that are getting killed are not just white wealthy people but its every person struggling with the disease at all levels and i hope that is what well continu will continu. I think more attention to addiction and what underlines this important spectrum of those that are affected it is i think kind of rattling to me and the people that knew peter because it was so unexpected it was like watching someone called from a great height and maybe that is just the height of the american dream. We seem to have everything and yet he was putting needles in his arm. Theres other professionals in recovery. What made them go down that ro road. My guess now is a lot of what underlies addiction and people that are welleducated and we have everything we want in society and its what we think of when we think of success, issues of depression and anxiety, untreated, those lie in all populations. So, from what i can tell as a journalist that researched this. Host i thought you presented a really interesting analysis why it is people turn to addictive substances and behaviors. I heard the phrase and i believe that you said some version of this happens when tomorrow is no better than today and you wrote something about how they run out of reasons not to try drugs. Guest he was at the National Institute of drug abuse and i interviewed him for the buck and talked about what happened to peter and that is exactly what he said when you are struggling you are unhappy and feel in love anxiety or depression or whatever it is that is causing you to look around at the options available to you and nothing seems better than where you are at. You often run out of reasons not to try drugs and alcohol is included in that as well. So i think that is true. I think that in some ways people are at the top feeling really trapped. I think it is easier for me and other people to realize the feeling of being trapped when you have limited resources, you dont have the Financial Resources or the education to make other choices, when you come from families that cannot support you are generations ahead of you that have also struggled with Substance Abuse disorders, but in that sense i could almost understand the feeling of being trapped but at the top where you have a lot of options and the ability to go to a Treatment Facility or you have the ability to get psychological testing to pay for it and you live in a beautiful place. Its how to understand how they arare attracted like they dont have a lot of options but clearly that is also happening. Host i grew up in a household very much affected by addiction. I think maybe that is one of the reasons cspan asked me to come and interview you. Your book resonated so deeply with me on a lot of problems as a professional that works in this field as well as someone who has lived through i think many of the experiences you have just go at a different point iny life. Now that i im a mother and expecting my second child any day now, i think a lot about what i experienced in ho how id help my children understand the world if i were in the type of position you were in. I know that it was a dilemma for you to tell your children about the cause of their fathers death and what he had been through and what you were uncovering. How did you come to this decision . Guest a lot of the feedback ive gotten from the bug is also from parents but i felt like a part of the book, how i handled this and letting them know what happened to their father and their reaction afterwards it spoke to them and raise the question. I will say peter was so absent in the marriage and when he became sick with a drug addiction we didnt understand or know about hi, he was kind of absent for me as a parenting partner that when i was at the house and was told by the medical examiner that his death was not as i thought a heart attack from working too hard was a Drug Overdose related to a drug habit i felt like i dont know what to do. There is no way to prepare your self as a mother or parent or father how you are going to tell your children one of their parents died. So for that alone i felt like i dont know how to handle this, like what do you do. I didnt have a partner to return to that i had been making a lot of decisions withou withos help anyway. So, i turned to the people around me and one of them was a medical examiner and there were two women that volunteered at the Police Department who had been emergency room nurses who were retired and work as counselors in situations like this and i asked them basically what would you do. I asked do you have children and when she said yes i said what should i do and she said i would tell them the truth and the counselors also who have seen plenthad seenplenty of death ann thought it was a good idea. And the truth i think as a journalist i really believe in the truth and it can be very liberating. We have been lied to for so long by this man in our lives i felt like it was enough. To say this is what happened. And then when i did it was the right thing to do because up until that point, if you read the book you will know they had seen their ad two days before he died and he was very sick and they couldnt get him to go to the hospital. They were hurt and angry and they felt enormously guilty and responsible for his death. Explaining to them know, you couldnt save him was a relief to understand tha understand ths something well beyond their control and it turned out to be the right decision. Host there is a lot of guilt anytime someone passes away but i would imagine if i were in the shoes of your children how they might have felt with all these thoughts going through their headphones connected differently. Should i have forced him to go to the hospital, like you very well said, its their father. Hes an Authority Figure and even if he were ill, he was stubborn, he wouldnt have reacted well to that anyway. How did you reconcile with your own go through this process . Guest that is a great question. I didnt realize i had survivors guilt until i went to counseling afterwards because immediately after his death, almost everything i did that mighmake the remote doesnt come into there were not that many things like advice all a beautiful sunset or i did something with one of your kids id sai would say i cant beliee is and seeing this, i cant believe that he isnt here. During my sons senior year i find myself checking over my shoulder because he would always make it. He would be late but i would save him a seat and then we would text each other and say third row down, and i kept looking and then it would strike me like hes not coming. I couldnt believe he wasnt going to see this. I still cant believe he isnt going to see them grow into the people they are becoming because he wanted so badly, and i know that. So i ended up feeling so guilty that i couldnt really enjoy anything as time went on with my children or even in my life because i felt bad he couldnt and then i understood that was survivors guilt because it was all it. It wasnt like we went in a car accident and i survived. We had a different trajectories we seem to have lived through just under different sides of it. He came out the other end and didnt make it and i did. So, i felt so much guilt and i think part of my processing of that is writing about it for the New York Times and definitely in the book because i was just so angry for ditching us like how could you make this choice. He was a partner in a law firm you can understand the disparity in incomes. I really needed is support and income to live in our city and i missed his advice from before he was struggling when he had a different way of looking at a problem. He was scientific and logical and if i had a reaction to something i could call him up and say what do you think of this, what do you think we should do, and he usually had a really good advice, and i missed all of that. So i was angry, but then writing the memoir he was able to remember things about the relationship early on the about me and amount of pleasure and made me feel restful and enormously compassionate and helped me kind of forgive myself for not saving him for seeing it. Ive been able to do a lot of the work and the writing. So i developed compassion and i was able to develop compassion for myself which i didnt have over the years and back then i was really hard on myself thinking i cant believe i missed this, i cant believe. That is a long answer. Host you have many lines in the book and one of them i had to stop and read several times out loud. I will have to be the widow even if i am no longer the life. Guest the feeling of responsibility we didnt really have that get each others back kind of narrative which is why it ultimately ended. It was more like in the trenches raising our kids but battling it out. I did take care of a lot of stuff for him and even in divorce when we were married i would make is doctors appointment because he was working all the time, i did the dry cleaning, all the domestic c stuff and then we divorced like a family calendar. I would remind him dont forget theres a crosscountry meeting and meeting with the guidance counselor. I did it because he did have a highpressure job and i had more flexibility. I dont know if that is the way other couples work it out but until our kids work around i didnt mind giving it because it was important that he make it to all of these events and be a part of that. After he died, there was no one really to do that, to kind of cleanup. He had a bi big mess he did andd final his taxes for years, struggling with a disease, the house hadnt been maintained so i was executor and part of it also meant picking up his ashes. My kids spread his ashes in the ocean. I mentioned this in another interview you pick up someones ashes from the crematorium and i felt like a wife again. I felt like there was this former partner and it wa was suh an old position to be. I also think i dated him i felt like because in some ways i let him down because i didnt recognize he was struggling and i felt like i didnt know him as well as i should have. But as someone that works in the field of addiction addison, you also understand people are profoundly changed by a addiction and he wasnt the man i thought i knew, so theres all of that. But i did, i felt like i hadnt made it right while he was alive and there was a part of me i thought im going to the space now and make sure the kids are okay and im going to do it exactly right in a way to kind of make up to you what i didnt get right before so there was some of that. Host you mentioned you became both the archaeologist and the anthropologist. Guest you get to know somebody all over again and see the way theyve changed. Just the amount of stuff accumulated after we split up this kind of astonishing. We can certainly be addicted to many things. As the drug addiction but also to shopping, school, you know exercise, all kind of things. He definitely was over consumptive and media was part and parcel of the same thing, there was this emptiness. One of the ways he tried to tell it was by buying a lot of stuff, having expensive furniture and kitchen where the interesting bits opairs of Running Shoes ine closet. He had so much stuff, but he also saved things over the years but i think i felt like i wrote in the book they were too painful for him to throw out. They still have a lot of meaning but he didnt need to have them with him all the time so they were in a box at the bottom of the garage pile. They were letters from the end mementos from our earlier relationship and things from his childhood like eagle scouts and things like that. His books from graduate school and law school. He saved all of his letters come acceptances and rejections, transcripts. It was like putting together a puzzle and figuring out what happened to you, what changed, who were you then and who are you now and my children were 16 and 18 when he died and he had been sick for about a year and a half, so especially for my son he would need some of these artifacts to remember his son and didnt get to know him so i felt a huge responsibility to create a meaningfucreating meanf his life for his kids. Host you also kept his phone. I wonder if you can share with everyone what you saw on it. I think you know what im referring to. It was very striking to me what came across the phone. Guest i had initially because it was in his house and we had taken valuable things. It belonged to the law firm and i had to return it to them. They were eager to get it and i can understand why because on it were a series of Text Messages going back months and month is with his drug dealers like arranging to get money and then there were texts with different friends i didnt know making plans to go get high together or were they were going to party. At the time i could see the texts and match them to the testimony from my son when he would show up at his dads house and he was pretty sure peter had forgotten he was supposed to be there because he would either on their night together and he would be gone and not show up until two or three in the morning after my son had gone to bed and there was no food in the house, nothing for dinner, nothing planned and i can see on his phone those nights he was waiting around for people to show up with whatever he needed to get and i can also see how much money he was withdrawing from the atm, he would talk about the amount that was needed to pay for things. So i was able to kind of discover all of this stuff about what was going on with him and he was still getting texts from the dealers after he died. Trying to arrange times to sell and give him what he needed and he had some photographs with c. And various people getting high in the throes of their using and pictures of syringe is, he had a pet mouse, i dont know what i was about and what was happening to him cognitively by then but he also had an infection he wasnt aware of traveled to his brain, so i think that his blood was being affected. The phone is a very telling piece of evidence which i did take photographs of everything so i had a record. I figured at some point i was going to need it either for my own ability to process what had happened in our lives for if i had to write about it in some way to the phone was quite a thing. Guest you talked about doing something with these drug dealers i dont know if it was reporting them or texting them back. Guest i know i was so angry one guy was texting it came in while i was holding the phone hey are you dead i havent heard from you and i wanted to text back im dead thanks to you and your friends, but i didnt. I got close to figuring out who they were. I hav had a whole spreadsheet wh phone tour or send where they we coming from and their names and handles. I said i think the police are going to want this and he said i wouldnt identify them. You dont know if the police are going to do anything with it and you could put yourself and your family at risk so i had to let that go, the i think that it was cathartic in some ways as i figure out what is happening but at some point i had to let it go. Host one of the parts of your processing is about lawyers. I havent thought about how prone people in different professions, i dont know that i thought about the Legal Profession as one that is prone to drug addiction. Why is that . Guest i think most of us didnt think that it was drug addiction and the Legal Profession. We have a picture of a lawyer with a drink in his or her hand, and i think that there are the kind of alcoholic that have been around for a long time and theres a lot of alcohol use in the Legal Profession but about six months after peter died, the American Bar Association and the Treatment Center came out with a landmark study a survey in 15,000 lawyers across the country and asked about Substance Use and abuse and Mental Health and the striking thing about the survey is there were high levels of anxiety and depression but about three quarters skipped over the questions on drug abuse. They didnt even answer. They acted like the questions were not there so when i was researching i called an investigator on the study and he now has his own Consulting Firm to help them address these issues and i said there really wasnt any drug use or abuse and he said i think 75 were afraid to answer. This is a group of professionals that are used to looking for problems and they are suspicious and not particularly trusting and that is part of their legal training. They were not going to answer the questions even on a survey and they didnt believe it was either truly anonymous or they could be found out, so they didnt answer. When i started investigating further i found out there was quite a bit of Substance Abuse in the research i did. Some of it was prescribed and combined with alcohol use to make it less apparent if you are suffering from symptoms of withdrawal it could take them better and more alert. So, what i found hi is there waa lot of use and anxiety. They released the survey and found i think the question asked to do you think that the confession divvied co profession contributes for what is ailing them and 75 said they thought that contributed to their level of stress and all that. It is a pervasive problem. Host the multiple drugs we seem to be so common to when we look at the autopsy data we find cases of overdose typically dont just involve one drug they also used stimulants in addition to heroin and opium and sometimes they are mixed in with each other. In the drive i can see how one feeds into the other that its all covering for something thats underlining. Guest i was very surprised at the levels of anxiety and they have partners that had to go through it with a kind of weird hazing. I dont know how prevalent that continues to be, but many of them were in their 30s or 40s and they were still kind of coming up hoping to become partners and they were stressed out and almost always cited technology. That is something that changed over the course of the trajectory. It started at the turnofthecentury 1998, 99, and it wasnt part of the landscape but by the time he died, you know, if you are going to charge a client 600 an hour for your advice and guidance, that client is going to expect you to be available 24 7. Lawyers i felt had the pressure that was never a time they could just turn it off. It was an enormous pressure youre keeping track of time, you had to do a lot of hours. So theres an enormous amount of pressure on the profession and also a lack of autonomy. You are at the beck and call. He felt like they couldnt control their own schedules and they have been anxious. A lot of them had problems just typically antianxiety medication and if you take that with alcohol that isnt a very safe combination and they were taking stimulants like adderall, concert a to try to make it able for them to pack more into a ten or 12 hour day which sounds kind of mindboggling but its how they felt or how they feel. Host you mentioned technology also and the role of technology and you get some pretty frightening statistics about what is happening with our youth. Tell me about that and what would you advise . Guest when i talk to addiction psychiatrists and therapists i think my generation of parents as well as yours now older millennial star parents themselves and there is this tendency to see a child struggling in school or you might feel if your child is down or overly anxious. Maybe the child would benefit but it would be psychiatrists and psychologists said the First Response is to ask if there is some medicatio medication that e their child because it is quicker and if you have kids from affluent families where there is a lot of pressure to compete, taking time to do psychotherapy or those kind of interventions take time. Its not an overnight fix where i think parents might believe if you get your choice of any antidepressant or antianxiety medication if they want to they can go back into therapy. There may be very valid reasons are prescribing antidepressant to an adolescent. There might be different avenues to try before that. That can be addressed but there is a quick fix by introducing the book this guy thats very young and successful and has become a Senior Executive in a hedge fund at a very young age and he went to his doctor and said he felt depressed and he felt kind of antsy and this content. The doctor suggested some kind of behavioral therapy and he said can i just take a pill and the doctor said of course you can. He asked about his ability to focus and he really wasnt having a problem but the doctor said have you ever used adderall in college and he said yes. I can give you some of that, t too. Now hes taking hundreds of milligrams of adderall each day because he developed a tolerance to that and he is hyper productive and gets a lot done, but i think that in other ways his life is not completely filled out. He doesnt have a significant other or a relationship with friends. He spends a lot of his time doing stuff for work or for another kind of projects and technologies, but not necessarily developing meaningful relationships are doing more of the things that are stored like having coffee with someone for a few hours or reading a book or things like that. Hes really hyped up doing lots of projects at the same time. Host and that is the pill for every mentality we are seeing. It has been the response to your . Guest very positive and i would say a lot of people are sharing stories of addiction and alcoholism with spouses and fathers and mothers that were professional and also struggled with addiction and theres a lot of stigma and shame in the family if they did things like try to treat it very privately and theres a lot of families that were broken apart by it and the stories are very heartbreaking. But its also nice to have people reach out and connect because i felt isolated that happened in our family and to know there are people that went through similar things or they are now struggling and going through stuff like that you can reach out and be a support to each other. One person wrote me and said she felt that she was seen for the first time but i recognize myself and felt the same way. If you let people are saying icu and i understand what you went through a. There is something so powerful in that it is great and the best thing we started a conversation in the workplace and hopefully that will extend to graduate school and law school, any place where theres a lot of competition and pressure to perform. There seems to be a willingness for better performance and creativity. Host when people responded, had they provided ideas as to policy ideas or legislative programs or other things that they think would be helpful in addressing addiction . Guest not as high as the policy level. I have had people write in for huge problems especially those that dont have the resources may be to afford inpatient treatment with a fallen into a crack insurance wise which affects a lot of people, but more so than that, they wish that the stigma that surrounds us especially from professionals would be less because the idea of thinking they might have asked for help sooner before it was less serious ive had people contact me trying to deal with the fallout and then that reward system hijacks their need so they tried to make them not feel sick anymore. There are so many difficult consequences from it. To reduce the stigma somebody asked me just recently i did a reading and said they wished there was an abridged version of this for high school so they can see what you just talke youve d about. Theres a lot of research about being less strong than it was in the 90s and how it is a powerful psychoactive substance that now could be precipitated with more psychotic episodes and people that are using it, people that might be predisposed to things like schizophrenia. I had one addiction therapist tommy if you are predisposed to this and use cannabis regularly, and fast tracks you so they are worried about how it will affect the adolescent brain and things like that and cannabis is increasingly becoming legalized recreationally which inevitably is going to make it more available to people the way alcohol is still debate coach so theres a lot of unknowns. What does it mean to be on an ssri medication for an antidepressant for antianxiety medication for a long pure code of time is and how it was originally conceived, it was used in behavioral therapy to help lower the background anxiety and hope peopl people ct whatever issues were causing the problem but now you have people that have bee found these medications for over a decade, and we dont really know what that means. It could be perfectly safe. But we dont know. We dont know what that means for society so it raises questions and i think people are kind of talking about the questions but not necessarily making the policy recommendations. Host the first step has to be changing the culture and youve certainly done that with your article and the book. I wonder looking back what would you tell young eilene ten years ago, 20 years ago based on what you know now . Guest gosh, what would i tell her . I wish i could tell her have more confidence and advocate for herself more in her marriage and other relationships. I wish i could have been more forthright as we were growing up together. We met so young. In the early stages of our relationship if i pushed back more or demanded things like we are going to go to counseling and learn how to communicate. You seem depressed. If i had the confidence to do that without risking my relationship but i didnt. I didnt feel like i had the right to speak up for myself or for us so i would give myself that advice to speak up. Host you talked about why you felt this way and you mentioned the income disparity. How would you overcome that in retrospect . Guest i think i bought into this notion because i didnt make the most money i didnt have any power in my relationship and that is what i felt in my parents marriage contrary to the cold 1950s. My mom was a stayathome mom who enjoyed working more than she did raising kids. She was depressed in a lot of ways and isolated if she had an interesting job, she worked as a travel agent for American Express and got to travel for free all over the world and was beautiful and loved clothing and i think that her life felt exciting and then she was raising three girls and my dad worked overtime and worked two jobs because they were financially insecure and also gave him a convenient cover story to having of affairs during his marriage and i think that income disparity made my mother feel powerless and that is what i saw. I starte started feeling all thr in my marriage was economic because anytime i wanted more support i could say why are you in your office in the garage, why arent you in here with us helping make a meal or playing with your kids were out for a play date and he would say things like somebodys got to pay the mortgage. It wasnt fair or accurate because i was working and contributing. Its just i was contributing on a small scale to what he was and he had all of the flexibility to say im going to go here, im going to take a trip, im going to buy a new car. Like i never got asked. I was just kind of told what was going to happen. And i should have said no. I shouldnt have accepted that, but i think i was primed for that and i believe the economic power was covered in a relationship and even though i was doing 90 of the parenting and household stuff and i was working, i didnt feel like i had the right or the power or the leverage to say something. Host you mentioned going to graduate school. How did you decide on that and what is your life like . Guest after my son left for college, i moved back to new york citnewyork city wearing foe closer to my mom and tol hope my sister take care of her and also to start a graduate program in social work and i did that because i think in the midst of everything that happened when they learned he died and he became this person i knew so well planned i had never seen a dead body and i had no experience. Even in the midst of Everything Else in the back of my mind i was thinking this is going to happen to you, too. It made me think you better think how you want the rest of your life to go and what you want it to look like. I have been volunteering for years and i have been involved in homelessness and poverty and was a political activist is a social work is something i was interested in and i felt like it was a natural thing to study so that i could be of service in some way different than as a journalist and write about different things. I worked with business on technology and startups and entrepreneurship. I was starting out o on it and i felt like i needed and wanted to write about other issues that felt more important to me and were more focused on what it means to be a human being at this point in time in society and in this world and what i think we all grapple with. The social work is both a way into the two examined and also to work with populations that are in need and doing some good in the world too and contributing in other ways and not just as a journalist. Host well, its been an honor to have the conversation. I enjoyed your book i brought it so i could show it here. I appreciate you sharing your wisdom and humanity with us on such an important topic to so many people around the world. Really appreciate it again and think you. Guest than guest thank you so much. This program is available as a podcast. All after words programs can be viewed on our website at booktv. Org. 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