In 2017 i wrote a story for the new york city about what happened to my exhusband peter and it was called the lawyer, the addict, and so i did a lot of research for that piece. I did a years worth of research in thinking about it and exploring it with my family and my children and if it was okay with them to go ahead and tell the world the story and figure out why we were doing it and what it meant to us and all of it was largely to make some kind of meaning out of something that felt almost arbitrary and shameful and felt guilty about and also to try to understand what was going on for peter and understand what was going on in the Legal Profession in terms Substance Abuse and depression and anxiety. After that came out, it surprisingly had a viral life and had millions of shares and i got a lot of feedback from readers like Young Lawyers who say i am worried who will wind up like your exhusband, depression, anxiety, also using lots of substances. I also at that point started thinking about a memoir and decided that i would write one and i sold it to random house. I feel like my process started years before and i spent 8 or 9 months talking to highend Addiction Treatment centers and talking to people, the way a reporter will go about finding people that will speak to her and then i i guess i wrote it over the course about a year, revised over course another half years. It took about 2 years from conception to final draft. Well, discoveries about yourself. Early on in the book you wrote, lots of things conspire to create or cut down someones sense of their own worth and for decades after words i wasnt confident to follow my own intuition. Tell me what you meant by that . You know, i think in retrospect i was questioning the choices that i made, the choice the marry peter and the choice to stay in the marriage and i was unhappy and the career choices that i made were large through follow peter around for his career and kind of fit mine into it and and why i never really i dont do much advocating for myself and i didnt even do enough advocating for my kids especially if he was sick with his addiction and i didnt know it but i knew that his parenting was suffering and that he was absent or not acting in ways that were responsible, but i didnt i think because i didnt have a lot of confidence, i didnt have a great deal of selfesteem and when i looked back over the course of my own life i did many things that my mother had done in her marriage. When peter and i split up, he was having an affair. He was 46. Im the same age my mother was when my father left for the same reasons. So i think i just didnt think receive a lot of positive affirmation growing up. It was a different generation. My father was mostly concerned with 3 daughters kind of getting us married off to be honest. I think he loved us but that was the way it was and he would say things to me growing up. Its a good thing youre smart because youre not that pretty. He said what he was thinking and i always felt like i was lucky to have gotten peter to, to have gotten marry today him and i felt that way and my father who was the other major figure in my life felt lucky to get him. My family kept kosir. I had ethnic hair. I looked jewish and i felt like an outsider and it was somewhat antisemitic there. I wrote that in seventh grade someone painted jew on any locker. Not as popular or pretty, i was funny, thats kind of how i got accepted and i think you grow up feeling like youre constantly trying to get in to the group thats in and and wind up marrying somebody that i felt i was lucky to get and i didnt want to screw it up and i didnt and vocate for advocate for myself and thats how i got around. Theres another part in the book and you were telling him about your engagement and he said something to you that surprised you. Yes. He hugged peter and peter got up to go to the restroom and we were at a restaurant having pizza and my dad looked at me and said, dont blow it. At first i thought it was a book about what happened to peter. I realize what a crony thing to say to your daughter. Why i didnt stand up to say, why arent you saying that to peter, why are you saying that to me but at that point any mind set that i wont and i didnt want to blow it and indicative of my selfworth at the time. Some of the most striking parts of your book are when you talk about your exhusbands behaviors. In hindsight its easy to see signs of addiction in realtime, its not. Tell me more about that. Not only is that true but the idea that i came to my idea with my own implicit biases. I didnt think that people struggling with addiction would look like peter, earning the salary that he was earning, would have 2 advanced degrees. , highly successful partner and prestigious law firm. They were someone who i would see someone on the side of the road, panhandling on the subway and i was very wrong although addiction hit hard in those communities there are also plenty of people at the top of socioeconomic ladder struggling as well. What i didnt know then was i hadnt really educated myself in symptoms of drug addiction. I hasnt thought it would affect me or my family. When peter was clearly suffering from those, i turned to everything else. Maybe he was psychotic, maybe he had an eating disorder. Maybe he had an illness that he didnt know about like cancer. I had people ask me if he had aids. Nobody said do you think he has a drug addiction, none of us. I never considered it but he did have all of the symptoms of it and i just thought its the flu, hes working too hard, hes not getting enough sleep, all of those things. Party, there were a lot of moments dedicate today dedicated to rationalization which those who know those individuals with addiction know typically. That he was stressed out at work and every time he gave an explanation, i wonder what was going through your mind as you heard the explanations. You know, a part of me just thought hes lying because he was i thought this cant be. Blatant lies, one time and i think this is in the book, he was it want one time, it was actually several times, 2 hours or more late to pick up our son from high school and this is before my son had his drivers license and had to wait for his dad and one day a week, one night a week and my son had Cross Country practice and he was at school at 5 30 which was the end of most people workday and peter would not get there till 7 30 or 8 00 and my son, first of all, human humiliating and he would walk up the street to mexican place and had dinner and eventually wait for peter and i would say to peter, why are you 2 hours late to get our son and he would say theres traffic and i was checking traffic in realtime and i saw that there was not 2 hours of traffic and he should have been there in half an hour and yet in my mind i was thinking, well, i dont know what his workday is like, he is under a lot of pressure, he is a partner, there are clients that are very demanding, maybe its possible he doesnt want to tell me that something happened at work, a meeting ran over because he would always say i have to work, theres a client emergency. If we couldnt reach him. I left my cell phone in hi office and had to run to a meeting off site and when he said there was traffic i actually doubted my own accuracy of my own investigations. I thought, well, i saw that there was no traffic when i checked the app for that but, you know, maybe there was an accident that didnt show up. Maybe hes right. I always differed to what he said and thought, well, why would he be 2 hours late to pick up our son, it must have been workrelated thing. I didnt attribute it to the fact that he was concealing something else. You talked earlier about this profound misconception and stigma that sounds addiction and one of them is about the societal understanding of what it means what type of person gets this disease and i actually thought it was such an interesting description when you were writing about your initial disbelief, hes a lawyer, hes a rich, he lives in a house that cost 2 million. Can you go into more detail about what your thinking preconception was. I thought they were, you know, homeless, mentallyill people, i thought that it wasnt going to be a rich, white professional with 13 years of schooling and someone who had been a scientist. He had a masters in chemistry and who certainly knew what the chemicals that he wound up using would do to his brain and body and certainly understood addiction. And what i hadnt counted on that theres arrogance at that level and i can imagine peter thinking, i will try this and see what its like and maybe itll be fun but im im not gog to become addicted because i can control that and so when i was told actually, we think that he died of an overdoes, it turned out to be infection of intravenous. I thought, they might have gotten it wrong. Its impossible. The biggest bias that i had was that he was well educated and he would know better and even someone with high school education, you know, can understand that addiction is a powerful thing and, i mean, i dont think im actually in a graduate program for essential work now and my first years field work were people struggling with addiction and most of the people were homeless or many had hiv or were struggling with other Mental Health issues but they all were the ones that were active users even though they were on methadone. I never met a client that didnt understand addiction was a risk, understood that they were suffering from this disease and so i dont know why i thought somehow peters education would be protective or that his income would be protective. I think i also thought he can have anything he wants like why would he choose that, you know. It just felt like someone with all Resources Available to them as well as good education wouldnt make that choice and i think i didnt understand how quickly balm become addicted and its something that i understand very well. Theres no face of addiction. You cant tell by looking at somebody if they are at risk or if they if they have an addiction or are in recovery. One of the issues that ive dealt with in baltimore as Previous Health commissioner here is there have been a number of people who have said, why do we now say that addiction is a Public Health issue, there have been people in our city who have been dieing from the heroin epidemic, crack epidemic for decades and theres the resistance to thinking, well, now that the face of addiction is changing and we are recognizing that its not just poor, black and brown people in inner cities who are dying, now we care. Right. I find this difficult to wrestle with because we want to address the disease of addiction and im glad theres attention to it but it also is true that theres now attention to it in part of the fact that the face of addiction is changing to white, wealthier, the people who we normally might not expect, but thats who is affected now. That is so true and i feel a lot of guilt and shame in the fact that i didnt i mean, all of the sudden its now an emergency because its happening in my life which seems completely unfair because for black and brown communities and people of color in the city and lower in your city and in many cities across america and for people who are in the lower end of the socioeconomic spectrum it has been an emergency for decades and feels so wrong because its more white problem, we are now all talking about it. It feels so wrong on so many levels and i guess as you say, you know, it is getting attention and so hopefully the people that are getting help are not just white people or white wealthy people, its every every person thats struggling be the disease at all levels. Thats what i hope and what i hope continue to happen and i think more attention on the problems of addiction and what underlies them is important, you know, across the spectrum as those who are affected. It is it is kind of i think it was rattling to me and the people who knew peter because it was so unexpected. It was like watching someone fall from the great height. Dot, dot, he was putting needles in his arms. I dont understand why and i cant ask him n. The book i ask a lot of professionals in recovery what made them go down that road and i my guess now is that a lot of what underlies addiction for people that are wealthy or well educated or seem to have everything you want in society, those issues, depression, anxiety maybe untreated, those underlie addiction in all populations, so from what i can tell you journal u. S. Journalist who researches this and social work. I thought you presented a really interested analysis of why it is that people turn to addictive substances and behaviors and i heard the phrase and i believe you said some version of this that addiction happens when tomorrow is no better than today. You wrote something about how the people were addicted. They run out of reasons not to try drugs. Yes, i think that might have been david epstein. He was at nda, National Institute of drug agency and i interviewed him for the book and thats exactly what he said. Sort of like when you are someone who is struggling, youre unhappier, youre depressed or feel stagnant or just, you know, feeling a lot of an anxiety and you look at the options available to you and nothing seems better than where youre at. You often run out of excuses not to try drugs and alcohol is included that well. Thats a drug as well. I think that is true and i think in some ways people are at the top are feeling really trapped too. I think its easier for me and other people to understand that feeling of being trapped when you had so limited resources, when you dont have financial resources, when you dont have the education to make other choices maybe, perhaps when you come from families who cant support you or generations ahead of you who have also struggled with Substance Abuse disorders, but in that sense, i could almost understand the feeling of being trapped and when things look so bleak but i think at the top of economic ladder where you have lots of options and where you have the ability to go into a Treatment Facility at a really nice place or you have the ability to get psychological counseling, you can pay for it, you live in a beautiful place where theres, you know, its safe and, you know, you have all the comforts that you can afford in life, its harder to understand how someone there would also feel trapped and feel like they dont have a lot of options but clearly that is also happening. Household, that was much affected by addiction. Im sorry. I think maybe thats one of the reasons why i cspan asked me to come and interview you, your book resinated to me on a lot of levels, as a professional or someone who has lived through, i think, many of the experiences that you have lived with just at a different point in my life. Now that youre a mother myself and expecting my child any day now. [laughter] i think a lot about what i experienced and how i would help my children understand world if i was in the type of position that you were in and i know that it was a dilemma for you tell your children about the cause of their fathers death and what he had been through, what you were uncovering, how did you come to this decision . Thats such an interesting question. Do i think its something funny that a lot of the feedback that ive gotten from the book is parents who felt like that part of the book, how i handled my children, letting them know what had happened to their father and their reaction and how i handled their reaction, i spoke to them and raised a lot of questions for them. I will say that peter was so absent in the marriage and certainly when he became sick with drug addiction that we didnt understand or know about, he was so kind of absent for me as a parenting partner that when i was at the house and i was told by the medical examiner that peters death was not a heart attack from working hard but was drug overdoes or related to drug use or drug habit, i i mean, i felt like i dont know what to do. Theres no way to prepare yourself as a murder or parents or father, how are you going to tell your children that one of their parents have died and for that alone i dont know how to handle it. I didnt have a partner to told to because i had been making a lot of decisions without help anyway, so i turn to the people around me at the house and one of them was a medical examiner and two women that volunteered with the San Diego Police department that had been emergency room nurses who were retired and acted as grief counselors in situations like this and i asked them basically what would you do. I even asked a medical examiner, do you have children, i said, yes, what should i do, she said i would tell them the truth and the grief counselors who had seen plenty of death, destruction in their careers told me they thought it was a good idea and the truth, as a journalist i believe in the truth and it can be freed and liberating and lied to by the man in our lives that i felt like enough. It felt right to say this is actually what happened and when i did it was so clearly the right thing to do because my kids were visibly relieved. I think up until that point, you know that they had seen their dad 2 days before he died and they could not get him to go to the hospital and they were hurt and angry and i think when they found out that he had died he felt enormously guilty and responsible for that death, so explaining to them, no, you couldnt have saved him i think was a huge relief, something well beyond their control was at play turns out to be the right decision. Theres a lot of guilt as the survivor, any time a loved one passes away but i could imagine if i were in the shoes of your children how they might have felt, all the thoughts going through the head of well, what could happen differently and should i have should i had forced him to go to the hospital, even if he were ill, he was stubborn, he wouldnt have do that well anyway. How did you reconcile with your own guilt throughout this entire process . You know, thats a great question. I didnt realize what i was figuring out through survives guilt. Immediately after peters death, almost everything i did that was remotely pleasant and there were that many things that felt pleasant at the time, like if i saw a beautiful sunset, like i cant believe hes not here and even like at School Events, my sons senior year i would find myself checking over my shoulder because peter would often make it but he was late. I would save him a seat at School Events and we would text each other, third row down, two in, i kept looking, suddenly striking oh, hes not coming. I just i couldnt believe he wasnt going to see this. I still cant believe he wont see them grow into the people they are becoming because he wanted that so badly and i know that, so i wound 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 so bad that he couldnt have that too and then i understood that that was survivors guilt because its odd because i wasnt like the two of us went through discreet event or we went through car accident and i survived. We had two different trajectories but both seemed to have lived through drug addiction on different sides of it and we came out the other end and he didnt make it and i did, and so i did, i felt so much guilt. Part of my processing was writing about it to the New York Times but definitely in the book because i was so angry at peter for like ditching us. I felt like how could you make this choice, we all need you, depending on you, i was a writer, he was a partner in a law firm, you can imagine the disparity in our incomes, like i really needed him and his support and his income to live in san diego which is not a cheap city and i needed, you know, i missed his advice before he was addicted, before he was struggling with that, when he had a very different way of looking at a problem our kids might face, he was scientific, logical and a lawyer where i might have an emotional 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 had reasoned and good advice. I miss all of that. I was angry but writing the memoir i was able to remember things about the relationship early on that, you know, brought me a loft pleasure and made me feel compassionate toward him and help me kind of forgive myself for not saving him or not seeing it. I was able to do a lot of work in the writing and so i developed compassion for peter and i was able to develop compassion for myself which i think i didnt have over the years and i didnt have right then. I was hard on myself thinking i cant believe i missed this. I cant believe i didnt call him on this or push him more, why did i accept his excuses. Thats a one answer to the question but the process of writing the memoir help node process all of that and and feel less survivors guilt and also a lot less anger towards peter. You have many striking lines in the book and one of them that i had to stop and read several times out loud is this one. I will have to be the widow even if im no longer the wife. Right. Well, i dont know if youre a wife but if you are married and wife, you know the feeling of responsibility you have toward your whole family, kids and your spouse, you have each others back. Peter and i didnt have each others back which is why it ultimately ended. We were in the trenches. Battling it out on who got less sleep. I did take care of stuff for him as his wife. When he was working i would bring dry cleaning, meals and we divorced but i kept the family calendar. I would remind him dont forget theres a Cross Country meet today and meeting with guidance counselor meeting and i did it because he did have a highpressure job. I had more flexibility and maybe i dont know if thats the way other couples work it out but that seemed like that would work until our kids were grown and i didnt mind doing it because it was important that he made it to the events and be part of that and after he died there was no one really to do that. He left a big mess. He hadnt filed taxes in years and struggling with disease, the house hadnt been maintained and had to be fixed up to be sold. I was executor and that meant picking up ashes after cremated. My kids spread ashes in the ocean. I mentioned this in another interview. You go pick up someones ashes, your exhusbands ashes from cramatorium and i feel like i was wife again and such odd position to be in and i also think i did it i felt like that because in some ways i let him down because i didnt recognize that he was struggling and i felt like i knew him so well that i should have but as someone who works in the field of addiction medicine, you also understand that people are profoundly changed by addiction and he wasnt behaving as the man i thought i knew and theres all of that but i did, i felt like i was going to since i hadnt made it right when he was alive, im going to fix this now, clean everything up and im going to make sure the kid are okay and im going to do it exactly right to make up to you what i didnt get right before. I think there was some of that you mentioned too that while going through many executing the things you become the archaeologist and the anthropologist. Right. You know, you really you kind of get to know somebody all over again but you also see the ways in which theyve changed since youve not been with them and the amount of stuff he accumulated i think is astonishing. You can certainly be addicted to many things, theres drug addiction but also addictions to shopping, to food, to you you know, exercise, i think he was overly consumptive and maybe part and parcel of the same thing, maybe there was this discomfort, emptiness that he was trying to fill and one of the ways he was trying to fill by buying a lot of stuff, very very expensive house, very expennive furniture and kitchen ware and 15 pairs of shows in the closet but he had saved things over the years that i think i felt like i wrote in the book, there were they were too painful to throw out and didnt need to have with them and they were in a box at the bottom of the garage piles and that was letters from me, momentos from our earlier relationship and things from his childhood, like his eagle scout patch and things like that. He saved all of the letters from law school, gpa, his transcripts. It was a lot. It was like putting together a puzzle and trying to figure out, well, what happened to you, what changed, who were you then, who are you now and also creating a record for my children, they were 16 and 18 when he died and he had been sick for a year and a half and especially for my son, he kind of he was going to need some of the artifacts to kind of remember his father and he would get to know him, so i felt a huge responsibility to create a meaningful record of peters life for his kids. You also kept his phone and im wonder if you can share with everyone about what you saw on it. I think you know what im referring to. It was certainly very striking to me what came across his phone. Right, i had his phone initially because it was in his house and we had taken valuable things out of there. The phone belonged to his law firm and i had to return to him and they were eager to get it and i can understand why because on it were series of Text Messages going months and months with his drug dealers, you know, arranging to get money, basically meet people and pick up his drugs and then there were also texts with different friends that he had that i didnt know. Some vaguely familiar with making plans to go get high together or where they were going to go party and i could see the text, the dates and times of the texts and i could match them to testimony from my son when he would show up at dads house and he was pretty sure that peter had forgotten he was supposed to be there because he would be there on their night together and peter would be gone and not show up till 2 00 or 3 00 in the morning long after my son had gone to bed, nothing for dinner, no plan for him and i could see on peters phone waiting around for people to show up for whatever he needed to get that night and i could also see how much money he was. Drawing from atms, from his own the amount he was need today pay for things, the word was paper. He was getting texts from dealers after he died, give him what he needed and he had photos on there of him and various people high, getting high, and pictures of syringes, he had a mouse. I dont know what was happening to him. He also had an infection at the time that he wasnt aware of that he traveled to his brain and he was being affect bid that. The phone was a very telling piece of evidence which i did take photos of everything on it so i had a record of it. I figured at some point either for my own ability to process what had happened in aralias, so the phone was quite a thing. You even at some point thought about doing something with the drug dealers. I dont know if it was reporting them or i know, i was so angry that one guy was texting. Hey, bro, are you dead, i havent heard from him and i wanted to say, hey, bro, i am dead, thanks to you. I didnt. I had whole spreadsheet with the numbers and where they were coming from and their names and their handles. A good friend of mine that was an attorney. I think the police are going to want this. He said i would not identify them. You dont know if the police are going be doing with this and i had to let that go. I tried to puzzled out what had happened. At some point i had to let it go. One of the parts of your processing is specifically around lawyers. I wasnt aware, i hadnt thought about how prone people in different professions, i dont know if i ever thought about the Legal Profession prone to drug addiction. Why, why is that . Well, i think most of us didnt think there was drug addiction in the Legal Profession. I think most of us have picture of lawyer with drink in his her or her hand. The stereotype of alcoholic lawyer is one thats been around for a long time and theres ton of alcohol abuse in the Legal Profession. About 6 months after peter died, the American Bar Association and Treatment Center came out with the landmark study, survey of 13,000 lawyers across the country and asked them about Substance Abuse and abuse and Mental Health and the striking thing about that survey was that there was high levels of drinking and there were high levels of anxiety and depression, but about 3 quarters of attorneys get questions of drug abuse. They didnt even answer. They acted like the questions werent there and when i was researching the stories i called the lead investigators on the study patrick and hes now has his own consulting that works with law firms to help with Mental Health and Substance Abuse. Do you think that peter was a oneoff and there isnt drug abuse in the Legal Profession. No, i think 75 of lawyers skipped it because they were afraid to answer and theres a group of professionals that they are used to looking for problems, they are very suspicious, they are not particularly trusting and thats part of their legal training, so, you know, they werent going to answer the questions even on an anonymous survey. They did not believe it was truly anonymous so they didnt answer and so when i started investigating further i found that there was quite a bit of Substance Use at least among the research i did and some of it was prescribed, some of it was not prescribed, some of it was combined with alcohol abuse and some was to make alcohol abuse less apparent, using cocaine if youre suffering from alcohol withdrawal and can make you much more alert and with it at the office. I found out with a lot of Substance Abuse and underlying it and lawyer unhappiness and anxiety and American Lawyer magazine just released this years 2020 survey of lawyer, Mental Health and wellbeing and they found that i think the question asked lawyers do you think that the profession contributes to, you know, whatever is ailing them and 75 said, yes, levels of an anxiety and its a pervasive problem. Absolutely. The multiple drugs that you mentioned, the multiple levels of addiction that you mentioned we see to be so common too when we look at the autopsy data and we find that cases of overdoes typically dont just involve one drug, they also use stimulants in addition to heroin and other opioids, sometimes they are drugs that are mixed in with each other and i think what you said about the lawyers and that kind of anxiety and drive for achieving more or staying awake, i could see how one feeds into the other. That its all covering for something thats underlying. Yes. I mean, i did talk to a lot of lawyers and i was very surprised at the levels of an yetia anxiety and a lot of it is overwhelming amount of work and they are partners that are somewhat abusing. I dont know how prevalent that continues to be. But the lawyers that i talked to many in 30s and early 40s and they were coming up toward partnership hoping to become partners and enormously stressed and they also cited technology and i think that is something that changed over the course of peters career trajectory. When he started. These lawyers that i talked to felt very much that pressure. They felt that they are never off. Theres never a time where they could turn it off. They had to be responsive because their billable hour rate was to high and the billable hours is enormous pressure, operationally in firms. You to bill every 6 minutes. Youre keeping track of your time constantly and bill the hours. I think theres been enormous amount of pressure in the profession and that creates a lot of anxiety and lack of autonomy because your schedule is not really your own. Youre at the beck and call of clients, of the partners that you work for, the Senior Associates that you work for and so a lot of the lawyers just felt like they could not control their own schedules and wait if the other shoe to drop and, you know, if you take that with alcohol thats not a safe combination and they were taking stimulants, to try to make it able to pack more into a 10 or 12hour day which sounds mindbogglingly, thats how they felt or how they feel. You mention technology also and specifically you wrote about young people and addiction. Right. The role of overmedication of our children. You also gave frightening statistics i thought about whats happening with our youth. Tell me more about that and what would you advise to parents to do . Well, im not a psychologist and im not a professional in that area but i will say when i talk to addiction psychologists and therapists, what they said especially parents i think my generation of parents as well as your generation of parents are boomers, gen x and older millennials who are becoming parents themselves. Theres a tendency for a child thats struggling in school or might feel like your child is down or overly anxious and maybe that child would benefit from some medication to help them along with therapy but a lot of the psychiatrists and the psychologists i talk to said the parents first responses, theres medication they can give their child because its quicker and especially kids from affluent families where theres a lot of pressure and high schools and middle schools to compete, taking time to do psych therapy and those types of interventions, those take time. Its not an overnight fix and parents believe that if you give your child antidepressing or antianxiety medication they will see results quicker. One gentleman that head highend center in utah says there may be valid reasons to describing antidepressant to an adolescent but theres avenues to try first. That could be addressed in a different way. Theres the kind of quickfix mentality thats very american. I interviewed this guy that was young and successful and had become Senior Executive at hedge fund at a very young age and he went to a doctor and said he felt depressed because he achieved his gels and felt discontent and the doctors suggested Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and he said, can i just take a pill. The doctor, yeah, sure you can, he asked him about ability to focus and this guy really wasnt having a problem, the doctor said, have you ever use aderol and he said i used in college. This guy is taking hundreds of milligrams a day because hes developed tolerance for it. In other ways his life is not, you know, its not completely filled out. He doesnt have a significant other. He doesnt have a lot of relationships with friends. He spends a lot of his time, you know, doing stuff for work or, you know, creating apps or following other projects and technology but not necessarily maybe developing meaningful relationships, things that are slower i guess in life, having coffee for somebody in a few hours or reading a book or things like that. Hes really hyped up, you know, hell really wired and doing lots of projects at the same time. And thats the pill for every ill mentality that we are seeing. Theres a culture around that here, right . Whats been the response to your book. You know, its been for the most part very positive and very gratifying. I would say a lot of people are sharing stories of their own experiences with addiction and alcoholism in their families with spouses and fathers and wives and mothers that were professionals that struggled with addictions and were, you know, theres a lot of stigma in the families and they tried to do it privately and theres a lot of families that were really broken apart by it and the stories are very heartbreaking but its really nice to have people reach out and connect because i felt isolated when this happened to our family and just to know that theres other people that went through similar things or are now struggling or going through stuff like that, you can reach out and be a support to each other. Like one person said, you know, she felt like she was seen for the first time, like, oh, i recognize myself and this woman and i felt the same way. I feel like people are saying, i see you, i understand what you went through. You know, i feel you and something so power nfl that, its really great and i think, you know, probably the best thing is that we started a conversation in the workplace about Mental Health and wellbeing and so Substance Abuse and hopefully that will extend to graduate schools, law schools, any places where theres a lot of competition and theres a lot of pressure to success and perform and there also seems to be willingness to try to hack oneself, if you will, for creativity and that sort of thing. I think not as high as policy level. Ive had people that insurance covered more. Thats a huge problem. They fall through the crack insurance wise which affects a lot of people. Its expensive. More so than that, they wish that the stigma that surrounds this for professionals would be lessened because the loved one might have asked for help sooner and ive had families going bankrupt trying to deal with fallout from the drug use because people spend a lot of money on drugs and then that rewarded system hijacks every other need and suddenly they are not saving for college fund or Retirement Fund and they are spending money of substance not feeling sick anymore. So many difficult consequences from it and what i hear overwhelmingly is the desire to talk about it. Reduce the stigma. Someone asked me recently i did a reading, presentation somewhere and a mother in the audience had said i wish there was a version for High Schoolers so they could see what you just talked about. Theres a lot of research of cannabis, for instance, being stronger and substance that seems to be precipitating more psychotic episodes in young people that are using it. People that might be predisposed to things to schizophrenia and i had one therapist that says if youre predisposed to it, it fast tracks and cannabis becoming legalized recreationally which will make it more available to younger people the way alcohol is and a lot of unknowns and a lot of concerns, what does it mean to be on ssri like antidepressing or antianxiety medication for a long period of time which is now how it was originally conceived and perceived to be used with Cognitive Behavioral Therapy to change behaviors and help people confront whatever issues were causing a problem but you have people who have been on the medications for over a decade and we dont really know what that means. It could be perfectly safe, you know, but we dont know, we dont know what that means for society generally, so i think it raises a lot of questions and i think people are, you know, talking about those questions but not necessarily making policy recommendations. I think the first step has to be changing the culture and changing the conversation and youve certainly done that with your article and then with the book also. I hope so. [laughter] and i wonder looking back, what would you tell young eilene, what would your tell her 20 years ago, 10 years ago based on what you know now . Oh, gosh, what wouldnt i tell her . Have more confidence in herself and i wish i could tell my 25yearold self to advocate for herself more, advocate for eilene in her marriage, other relationships. I wished i could have been more forthright with people as we were growing up together. We met so young, we were 23. I feel like in the early stages of our relationship if i had pushed back more or demanded things like we are going to go to counseling an learn how to communicate, i want you to see somebody, you seem depressed. I wish i had the confidence and felt safe enough that i could do that without risking my relationship but i didnt. I didnt feel like i had the right to speak up for myself, for us as a couple and as a family, so i would definitely give myself that advice to speak up. You had talked in your book about the reasons of why you may not have felt this way in dealing with your childhood and you also mentioned the income disparity. How would you overcome that in retrospect . I think i bought into this notion that because i didnt make the most money i didnt have any power in my relationship and i think that comes from what i saw in my parents marriage, typical 1950s marriage. My mom was a stay at home mom which i think enjoyed much working than raising kids. I think she was depressed as a mom and isolated and interesting job before she got married. He was like a Corporate Travel agent for American Express and got to travel for free all over the world and she was really beautiful and loved clothes and worked in manhattan. I think her life felt really exciting and then she was in the suburbs raising 3 girls and my dad worked all of the time. Worked 3 jobs because we were financially insecure and gave him convenient to have affairs in the marriage. I think income disparity made my here so powerless and i started to feel that the power in my marriage was economic because every time i wanted more support from peter, why are you in your office in the garage, he had a Garage Office all weekend, why arent you in here with us or helping make a meal or playing with them he would say, well, somebody has to pay the mortgage, you know, and even if it wasnt fair or accurate because i was actually working, its just that i was contributing on such a small field that he was providing that he wound up, the person that had the flexibility and ability to say im going to go here. Im going to take a trip. Ly buy a new car. I never got asked. I was told what was going to happen and i should have said no, i shouldnt have accepted that but i think i think i was primed for that. I believed in the truth so that that the economic power was the power in the relationship and even though i was doing 90 of the parenting and the household stuff and i was working, i didnt feel like i had the right or the power. I didnt have the leverage to say something. And whats your life like now . You mentioned going to graduate school in social work. How did you decide on that and whats whats your life like . So after my son left for college i sold my house in san diego and i moved back to new york city where im from to be closer to my mom who is old e and help my sister help 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 at peters house when we learned that he had died and i think actually seeing this person that i knew so well dead and i had never seen a dead body. I havent had any experience really with death up close like that. Even in the midst of my shock and everything else, in the back of my mind i was thinking, you know, this is going happen to me like this, not like this, not at this age and i think you better think how you want your life to go and at that point i had been volunteering for a school in homeless for children in san diego. So social work was something that i was always interesting in as a human being and i felt like it was a natural thing to study so that i could, you know, be of service in some way, little different than as a journalist and write about different things. I had written a lot about business and technology and startups and entrepreneurships. I felt like i needed and wanted to write about other issues, issues that felt more important to me and more focused on what it means to be a human being at this point in time and the society and this world and i say what we all i think grapple with and for social work is both a way into that to examine the issues and also will allow to hope to work with populations that are in need and feel, you know, that im doing good in the world too in contributing in other ways not just as a journalist. Well, its been a real honor to have this conversation. I so enjoyed your beautifully written book and i brought it today so i can show it here. Thank you. I just so appreciate your sharing your wisdom and your humanity with us on such an important topic to you personally but to so many people around the country, in the world, so really appreciate again and thank you, eilene. Thank you so much. Thank you. This program is available as podcast, all after words programs can be viewed on our website at booktv. Org. Recently counterinsurgency expert traced threats and explain it is title of the book, the dragons and the snakes. The title comes from jim woolsey. Yes, thank you for pointing that out, and incredible by proficient guy. If you read his testimony when he was going through confirmation in 1993 he was asked the cold war just ended, what do you think will be the threat environment that America Needs to face in the post cold war period and he said, we slanged a dragon and now we find in a jungle and in many ways the dragon was easy to keep track of and he goes onto lay out the incredible by detailed vision of weak states, failing states and nonstate actors which im calling the snakes and suggest that peter and adversaries are going to be in the near future which im calling as dragons. Adversaries have adapt and evolved and im trying to sort of trace the history of how that happened and where they are now. To watch the rest of this event visit website booktv. Org and search for bill collin, the dragons and the snakes at the top of the page