It was a pleasure and an honor for me to be speaking with you today. Thanank you. What kept going through my mind as i read your new book is with a hard look at last have been for you to write. You uncovered so many deep and extremely painful parts of your past and your family. Can you tell me more about your writing process and how you decided to go about writing this book . Guest it was starting to come together in 2017 i wrote a story for the New York Times about what happened to my exhusband and it was called the lawyer the addict so i did a lot of research for that piece and research and thinking about it and exploring it with my family and my children and seeing if it was okay with them to go ahead and tell the story and figure out why we were doing it and what it meant to us. All of it was largely t to makig meaning out of something that felt almost arbitrary and shameful and guiltynd also to try to understand what was going on for peter and in the Legal Profession in terms of Substance Use and depression and anxiety. After that came out, its surprisingly have a firewall life and millions of shares and i got a lot of feedback from the readers especially Young Lawyers who said im worried im going to wind up like your exhusband facing the same issues. I started thinking about a memoir a decided i would write one and i sold it to random house. I feel like the process started years before and then i spent about another eight or nine months researching it, traveling and talking to the Treatment Centers and people tt i met discussion boards then i guess i wrote it over the course of about a year so it took about two years to the final draft. You intersperse the discussions of the discovery about the addiction with your discoverieabout yourself. Early on in the book you wrote they conspired to cut down. Tell me more about what you meant by that. I think in retrospect i was questioning so many of the choices i made, the choice to stay in the marriage even though i was unhappy. But caree curvier choices i made largely to folunor his career and benefits mine into it. Ii didnt do muchh advocating fr myself and i didnt give him of advocating for my kids especially when he was s sick wh his addiction but i certaly knew his parenting was suffering and he was absent were not acting in ways that were responsible. I didnt have a lot of self confidence or selfesteem. When i looked bac look back ovee of my young life, i solved a delay had done a lot of the same thinthings my mother had done ir marriage. When we split up comes as having an affair. I remember thinking im the same age when my father went for the same reason. I think i just did and received a lot of positive affirmation growing up. My father was concerned he had three daughters and is getting us married off. That is sort of the way it was and heould say things to me growing up like its a good thing you are smart because you are not that pretty. He said what he was thinking. I felt like i wasucky to have gotten to mary peter in my other male figure in my life my father so all of those things, growing up i write in the book i grew up in a town that was very irish and Italian Catholic and weve are jewish. My family kept kosher, i didnt look the same as other girls, i was underweight and have ethnic hair. I looked jewish and felt like an outsider into a sort of antisemitic. In seventh grade someone painted jew on my walker so there were all these things that made me feel like an outsider, not as popular or pretty. I was funny so that is how i got accepted and i think you grow up feeling like you are constantly trying tget into the group thats a. Ultimately i wound up maring somebody i felelt like i was luy to get and i didnt want to screw it up so i didnt advocate for myself or do anything and i followed him around and i guess that is how i got the passage in the book. There was another part of the book where you were talking about how you would tell your father about your engagement and he said something that really surprised you. Guest we told him we were getting married. Peter gogot up to go to the bathroom at the restaurant and my dad looked at me and said dont blow it. I hadnt thought about that much until after peter died and i started to write a memoir because at first i thought it was going to be a book about reporting and what happened but my editor said it needs to be a memoir. You need to get to the emotional heart of the story so i had to dig into my past and looking back on that moment, i realized that was a funny thing to say to your daughter and i look back and think why didnt i stand up and be indignant and sort of say why arent you saying that to peter, w why are you saying it o me at that point my mind was to just s i wont. I didnt want to blow it. It was very indicative of my selfworth a at the time. Host some of the most striking parts of your book are the way yoorthe way you talk abr exhusbands behaviors and usage in hindsight easy to see the signs of addiction. Guest what i learned is not only is this true but with my own implicit biases i did not think that someone struggling with a drug addiction would look like peter and earng a salary he was earning, have two advanced degrees, a successful partner in a very prestigious silicon valleybased law firm. To me, someone struggling with an addiction was also struggling with bleak conditions in their life meaning they were homeless or struggling with a Mental Illness that was untreated. Someone on the side of the roadd living under a bridge, panhandling on the subway. I was very wrong. Even though it is hard in those communities there are people at the top of the socioeconomic ladder struggling as well. But i didnt know if i hadnt really educated myself in the symptoms of drug addiction and i didnt think it would aect me and my family so when he was suffering i attributed it to everything else. Maybe he was psychotic or have an eating disorder. Maybe they have an elements. The elements. I never considered that he did have all the symptoms and i just thought its just the flu, hes working too hard, hes not getting enougugh sleep, all thoe things. Host there were a lotot of moments that were dedicated to this rationalization which of course in retrospect and any of us that know any individuals with addiction we understand how you were talking about peter would say he was diagnosed with hashimotos disease or stressed out i work in everything he gave an explanation i wonder what was going through your mind as you heard these explanations . Guest part of me just thoughght he was going. There would be wis a lie is like time and i think this is in the book it wasnt one time but several times he was two hours or more late to pick up our son from high school before he had cense so he h to wait for his dad. It was one night a week. Peter would sometimes dont gett there until 7 30 or eightnd it was humiliati to be at school in the dark and he would walk up the street and just have dinner and wait for peter and i would say why are you two hours late to get our son and he would say there was traffic but i was checking traffic in realtime. In my mind i was thinking i dont know what his work day is like. Hes under a lot of pressure, there are clients that are very demanding. Maybe its possible he doesnt want to tell me something happened at work. A meeting ran over because he would always say i have two workers a client emergency. I left my cell phone in my office and had to run to a meeting offsite. When he said there was traffic, i actually dont have my own accuracy in my investigation. I thought well i saw there w was no traffic when i checked but maybe there was an accident that didnt show up. I always defer to what he said and thought why would he be two hours late to pick up your son. Turned it to the fact that he was concealing something else. Host you talked earlier about this kind of profound stigma that surroundsddiction and the societal understanding of what it means or what type of person gets this disease and i thought it was such an interesting description i mean for example you said he lives in a house that cosoststs 2 milli. Can you go into a bit more detail about what they were thinking was around your preconception of people that have addiction and what you ended up finding out . I thought that they were homess, mentally ill. I thought it wouldnt be a rich white professional with schooling and someone to have any scientist with a masters in chemistry and certainly knew the chemicals he wound up using and what they were due to his brain and his body and certainly understood the addiction. There was a lot of arrogance at that level and i can imagine him thinking i will try this it might be fun but im not going to get addicted because i can control that. When i was told we think he died of an overde it turned out he died from an infection related to intravenous drug use. It happens fairly commonly. I just thought they must have gotten that wrong. Thats impossible. He was well educated and i thought he would know better. Certainly even someone that has a High School Education can understand addiction is a powerful thing. Im actually in a graduate program for social work and my first fieldwork was a working petruggling with addiction and most of the people were homeless or they had some, many have hiv or were struggling with other Mental Health issues but they all the ones that were active users even though they were on methadone, i never met a client that didnt understand addiction is the risk. How quickly people become addicted and how education, income and privileged is not inoculated against it. Host that there is no face of addiction you cannot tell by looking at somebody that they are at risk are in recovery. One of thessues i have dealt with as the Previous Health commissioner in baltimore , there been a number of people who had said why do we now say its a Public Health issue . People in our city have been dying from the heroin and crack epidemic for decades. There is a resistance to thinking now the face of addiction is changg not just black and brown people in the innercity dying. Now we care. I find that hard to wrestle with because we do want to address the disease of addiction and im glad there is attention but its also true in part beuse that face of addiction is changing to white e and wealthier to those they may not expect. That is so true i el a lot of guilt and shame in the fact all of a sudden now is an emergency because its happening in my life which seems not fair because black and brown people and minorities in many cities across america and those at the lower end of the spectrum this has been an emergency for decades. I feel so wrong that now its a white problem now we talk about it. It is so wrong on so many level levels. But it does get attention so hopefully the people getting help are not just white wealthy people that every person struggling at all levels that is what i hope will continue to hpen and more attention onn the problems of addiction and for those that are affected i think it was rattling to me and the people that knew peter because it was so unexpected like watching someone fall from a great height. Maybe is the height of the erican dream you seem to have everything but then he was putting needles in his arm i dont understand why and i cannot ask so i asked a lot of other officials in recovery what made them go down that road . My guess now is what underlies addiction for people that are wealthy or welleducated that seem to have everything what we think of as success issues with depression and anxiety unaddressed issues that is all populations. So from what i can tell as a journalist who research this and now studying social work. I thought you presented and interesting analysis why peopleurn to addictive substances and behaviors. He said some version that addiction happens when tomorrow is no better than today and you wrote how the people who are addicted run out of reasons not to try drugs. At the National Institute of drug abuse i interview him for the book and talked about what happened to peter and thats exactly what he said for someone who is struggling if you are uappy and depressed and feel stagnant or a lot of anxiety and depression whatever causeyou discomfort if you look at the auction one options available and nothing seems better, then you run out of excuses not to try drugs and alcohol is included as well as a drug. In some ways people at the top are feeling trapped. Its understandable to feel that feeling was so little resources or dont have the education for those that cannot support you that also struggle to Substance Abuse disorders. In that sense i could understand but at the top of the professional and economic ladder and then to go into a treatment fility or psychological counseling and you live in a beautiful place it is safe and you have all the comforts you can afford in life its harder to understand then how you feel trapped and they dont have a lot of opoptions but clearly that is alalso happening. I grew up in a household very much affected by addiction. Im so sorry. Maybe thats one of the reasons why cspan asked me to come and interview you. Your book just resonated with me so many levels as a professional and someone who has lived through many of these experiences that you lived but just at a different point in my life. Now i am a mother myselff expecting my second child any day now. [laughter] i think about what i experienced and how i would help my children uerstand the worlif i were in t type of position you are in i know was a dilemma for you to tell your children of the cause of your one their fathers death and what you are uncovering so how did you cocome to that decision . A lot of the feedback i got from the book are from parents that felt how i handled my children letting them know what happened to their father and how i hanandled their reaction that spoke to them and raised a lot of questions i will say he was so absent in the marriage and when he became sick with a drug addiction he was absent for me as a parenting partner so when i was at the house and was told by the medical examiner it was not a heart attack from working too hard but as a Drug Overdose are related to one i felt like i know what to do. Theres no way to prepare yourself as a mother how do you tell your children that one of the parents has died . That alone i dont know how to handle this. I felt like i didnt have a partner to turn to but and that making decisions without his help anyway. I turned to the people at the house one was a medical examiner one who volunteered with the San Diego Police department and now acting as grief counselors. I asked them what would you do . Even asked the medical examiner do you have children . I said what can i do she said tell them the tru. The grief counselors that seem plenty of death and destruction thought it was a good idea. As a journalist i believe in the truth they can be freeing and liberating we been lied to for so long by this man in our lives i felt like enough that felt like to say this happened and when i did it was so clearly the right thing to do they were relieved because up till that point they had seen their dad two days before he died he was very sick and they cannot get him to go to the hospital they were hurt and angry when they found out he died they found one that spell enormously guilty and responsible so to explain we could not have saved him was a huge relief to understand something well beyond their control was at play for that decision. There is a lot of guilt as a survivor anytime a loved one passes away i cant imagine iff i were in the shoes of your children how they might have felt all these thoughts go to their head. Should i force him to go to the hospital but like you said he is an authority figure. He was stubborn. So how did you reconcile with your own guilt throughout the entire process . Thats a great question i didnt realize i had survivors guilt until i went to counseling afterwards because immediately after peters death almost everything i did that could be remotely pleasant there werent that many for a long time but if i saw a group one a beautiful sunset or did something with one of the kids i would say i cant believe hes not here and hes not seeing this. Dung my son senior year i would find myself checking over my shoulder because he would often make it but always be late i would save him a seat for meetings we would text each other im third row down and i kept looking suddenly would strike me hes not coming. I couldnt believe he wasnt going to see this i still cant believe he will see them grow into the people they are becoming because he wanted that so badly. I know that. And i felt so guilty i could not enjoy anything but as time went on because i felt so bad beuse he couldnt have that too then i understood that was survivors guilt which is odd is not likely went like a car accident and i survived two different trajectories but we both went through his drug addiction buon but different sides we came out the other end and he didnt make it but i did. Part of the pressing was writing about it its definitely in the book because i was so angry for him ditching us how could he make this choice . We are depending on you u i was a writer he was a partner in w from you can imagine the disparity of our incomes but then to live in san diego is not a cheap city and i missed is advice before he was addicted and struging with that he had a very different way of looking at our problem our kids might face very scientific rhyme i have a emotional reaction i would say what do you think we should do . He wouldave very recent and good advice. I missed all of that i was angry but then writing a memoir i can remember things about us early on the property pleasure that made me feel blissful about him and compassionate and helped me forgive myself for not saving him or seeing it so i developed a passion for peter and myself which i didnt have over the years i was haron myself thinking a cant believe i missed this or did not call him or push him or why did i except his excuses . But thats a long answer but the process of the memoir helped me to process that and feel less survivors guilt and a lot less anger toward peter. You have many striking lines in the book one of them i had to stop and read several times out loud i have to be the widow even if i am no longer the wife. I dont know if you are a wife or married but the responsibility you have toward your whole family we didnt have the god each others backs kind of marriage why thats ultimately probably why it ended more like in the trenches battling it out for felt worse but i did take care of a lot of uff for him as his wife when married i would make his doctors appointments and the make the meals and then we divorced but i still kept the family calendadar dont forget there is a Cross Country meet or a meeting with the guidance counselor provided that because he did have a highpressure job and i have more flexibility. Thats the way other couples work it out but it seemed thats the way it would work and tell my kids were grown. It was important he make it to these events why didnt mind doing it. After he died there was no one to clear up he hadnt filed his taxes, he was struggling and let everything go, the house had not been maintained and had to be fixed to be sold i was executor that alalso meant picking up his ashes after he was cremated and my kids spread his ashes in the ocean he love the beach but i mentioned this at a another interview when you go pick up someones ashes your exhusband from the crematorium, i felt like a wife again and i was grieving the loss of this former partner and exhusband it was such an odd position i felt like that because i felt i letet him down because didnt recognize he was struggling and i should have. But someone who works in the field of addiction medicine you also understand people are proundly changed and he was not behaving as a man i thought i knew but i felt like i didnt make it right while he was alive then i will fix this now settle the estate to make sure the kids are okay and do it right to make up to you what i didnt get right before. I do think there was some of that that i was the wife again. Wow. You mentioned while going through his effects that you became both the archaeologist and the ahropologist. You get to know somebody all over again and the ways in which the changed since youve not been n with them the amount of stuff he accumulated after we split up was astonishing but i think certainly you can be addicted to many things the drug addiction to shopping or food exercise, all kinds of things he was overly consumptive and may be part and parcel of the same thing a discomfortr emptiness was tryin to fill so he tried to fill it by buying a lot of stuff with a very expensive house, furnitur house, furniture, kitchenware, 5 pairs of running shoes. He had so much stuff he also saved things they were too painful to throw out 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 letters for me and mementos from the early relalationship and his childhood and eagle scout patch. His books from grad school. He saved all the letters from law school that he was accepted. It was like putting together a puzzle what changed, and creating a record for my children they were 16 and 18 when they died and was sick for a year and a half so for my son he mayay need these artifacts to remember his father so i felt a huge responsibility to create a meaningful record. You also kept can you share with everyone what you saw on it. It is very striking to me. I had his phone initially it was in the house ultimately it belelonged to the law firm and i had to return it they were eager to get it and i can understand why because on it a series of Text Messages going back months and months with his drug dealer to get many and meet people alsoso text with different friends he had that i did not know making plans to go get high together or were they would party. I could see the text and i could match them when my son would show up at his dads house and he was forgotten he was supposed to be there because he was on their night together that he would be gone and not show up until three in the morning long after my son had gone to bed. Nothing for dinner, no plans. I can see on peters phone waiting for people to show up. I can also see how much money he got from the atm or wits to pay for things the word for that is paper he was still getttting text fro dealers after he died. And if you have and various people getting high. Pictures of syringes. We dont know whats happening but also he had an infection he was not aware of site y think he was affected by that but it is a very telling piece of evidence i did take photos of everything on it so i have a record of it but at some point i would need ifor either my own ability for what happened to her to write about it. It was quite a thing. Host at some point you thought about doing something with these drug dealers that of them it was recording them were texting them back. I was so ary it came in while i was holding the thought it said hey broro are you dad i havent heard from you i wanted to say yes i am. I did get close to figuring out who they were with the phone numbers in the spreadsheet where they were coming from their handles and the names a good friend of mine as an attorney the plea so want this he said i would not identify them you can be putting yourself at risk. I had to let that go. It was cathartic in so ways to figure out what was going on but at some point i had to let it g go. One of the partss specifically around the lawyers i was not aware i hadnt thought about how prone people in different professions why is that . I think most of us didnt think it was drug diction in the Legal Profession most of us see a lawyer with a drink in their hand but one that has been around r a long time but six months after peter died the American Bar Association came out with a landmark study of 13000 laers across the country and asked about Substance Abuse and Mental Health the striking thing about the survey is very high levels of drinking and anxiety d depression the attorneys skipped the questions about drug abuse acting like they were there i call the lead investigator who now has his own Consulting Firm to help them address Mental Health and Substance Abuse issues peter was a oneoff and there is no drug abuse he said no i think 75 percent of players gifted because they were afraid to answer is a group of professionals they are very suspicious they are not trusting thats part of their Legal Training they were going to answer that even on the Anonymous Survey they didnt believe it was anonymous or they can be found out so they did not answer investigating further there was quite a bit of Substance Abuse in the research that i did. Some of that was prescribed some was not some make it less apparent if you are suffering from symoms of alcohol withdrawal to make you much more alert. So what was underlying that was unhappiness and anxiety in fact American Lawyer magazine just release the 2020 survey and they found the question do you think the profession contributes to whatever is ailing them . 75 percent said yes that contributed to their levels of anxiety and success is a pervasive problem. Absolutely the multiple drugs that you mentioned those we see to be so common looking at the autopsy data w we find cases of overdose typically dont just involve one drug somebody only uses heroin but also stimulants sometimes drugs that are mixed in with each other and what you said about the lawyers with that anxiety and the drive for achieving more. I could see how one feeds into the other something thats underlying. I did talk to a lot of lawyers im ry surprised at the levels of anxiety there is an overwhelming amount of work that are somewhat abusive its like a weird hazing. But many were in their thirties or forties. And enormously stressed out. And also siding technology that changed over the career trajectory. Starting at the turnofthecentury but certainly by the time he died charging 600 an hour and then to be available 24 7 very much felt that pressure when they can just turn it off. To be responsive to tir phones with enormous pressure operationally and then you have to bill a lot of hours there is an enormous amount of pressure in the profession so you are at the beck and call of clients and the partners that youork for so a lot of these lawyers feel they cannot control their own schedules and wait for the other shoe to drop so a lot of them hav problem with addictions of anti anxiety medication if you take that with alcohol is not safe they were taking stimulants like adderall making it able to pack more into a ten or 12 hour day. But thats how they felt. Host you mentioned Technology Writing young people and addiction with the goal of overmedication of our children you gave frightening statistics tell me about that and what do you think im not a psychologist or professional in that area but i will say when i talk to addiction psychiatrist and therapist they said especially pararents my generation in your generation with older millennials becoming parents there is a tendency to see a child struggling then feel like the c child is down maybe they would benefit fm some medication but a lot of the psychiatrist and psychologist said the First Response if there is a medication to give their child because it is quicker especially upwardly mobile affluent families with a lot of pressure and high schools thats not an overnight fix. If you give your child antianxiety medication and en they can go back and do therapy and one gentleman with a high and Treatment Center there are very valid reasons to prescribed antidepressants to an adolescent maybe with social anxiety or they feel pressure from parents and that can be addressed in a different way. But there is that mentality thats very american one that i interviewed was senior successful at a very young age he was promoted he was depressed because he she achieved his goal and felt discontent the doctors suggested cognitive behavior therapy and he said can i take a pill . In fact he asked him about his ability to focus he clearly wasnt having a problem but he said adderall its great for focus i will give you some of that now hes taking hundreds of milligrams of adderall per day because he developed the tolerant is hyper productive and get a lot done. But in other ways he doesnt have a s significant other or a lot of relationships with friends and spend time to follow other projects and technology and to develop and those that are slowewer in life talking to somebody for a few hours and to be really hyped of one up in different projects all the same time. That is the pill for every mentality there is a culture for that. What is the response to your book. To be very positive and gratifying people are sharing stories of alcoholism and addiction and their families and those that were professional struggling with addiction as they try to treat it privately and a lot of families were broken apart they are very heartbreaking so to reach out and connect it felt very isolated. So those that are now struggling to reach out a and be a support to each other like she says i recognize myself in that moment and i felt the same way to say i see when i understand what you went through. Its really great. But we started a conveversation in the workplace hopefully that will extend to graduate school, law school, anyplace there is a lot of competition and pressure to succeed in that willingness for better performance and creativity and that sort of thing. When other people responded to your book today provide policy or legislative ideas they think word be helpful to addiction . Obviously thats a huge problem for people that dont have the resources with inpatient treatment which think affects a lot of people. But more so than that they wish that stigma would be lessened because they may have saved their life people contact from the fallout from the drug use that word system hijacks that isnt to obtain that substance there are so many difficult consequences so what i feel overwhelmingly is a desire to talk about it to do those presentations somewhere mother said i wish ththere was an abridged version of this for what you just talked about white cannabis much stronger than it was in the nineties and the powerful psychoactive substance with those psychotic Episodes People that may be predisposed i had one addiction therapist say if you use cannabis regularly it will fasttrack and how how it is becoming legalize recreationally to make it more available to younger people away alcohol is. With that prescribed medication what does that mean but that anti anxiety medication throughgh a long period of time to be used in contention with that behavioral therapy and that background anxiety and depression whatever issues were causing a problem for over a decade and we dont know what that means. It could be safe we are not that means for a society that people talk about these questions but not necessarily making big policy recommendations spent the first step has to be changing the culture. So i wonder looking back what do you tell young eileen ten or 20 years ago based on what you know now . What wouldnt i tell her. [laughter] have more confidence i wish i could tell my 25 yearold self to advocate for eileen more often there are other relationships at work i wish i couldve been more forthright growing up together we met so young and 23 the early stages our relationship i ft if i push back more that we will go to counseling or the how to communicate i wish i had the confidence that i could do that without risking my relationship but i didnt press as a couple and the family so i would deftly give myself that advice. You talalked about the reasons of why you may not have felt thi way also the incomeisparity hadovt in retros. I had no money or power i in my relationship in the typical 19 fifties marriage she enjoyed working more than she did raising kids she had an interesting job before she got married she was a Corporate Travel agent with American Express and traveled all over the world and was beautiful and loved close and then just raising three girls and my dad walked worked all the time also a very convenient cover story for affairs during the marriage and i think that income disparity made my mother feel powerless and thats what i saw. So all that power was economic and then to have a Garage Office all weekend why arent you helping after a play date maybe that wasnt fair or accurate because i really was working but contributing on a such a a small scale compared to what he provided to say i will here i will take a trip or buy a new car just told what would happen and i should have said no and not accepted that. But i think i was primed for that and believed in the truth of that the economic power was the pow in the relationship even though 90 percent of the parenting and household staff iidnt have the leverage to say something. Whahat is your life like now . You mention going to graduate school and social work. I sold my housuse in san diego move back to new york city to be with my mother whoho is older and help my sister take care of her also to start a graduate program in social work because in the midst of everything that happened at peters house when he died to actually see this person that i i knew so well ive never seen a dead body ive never had experience with death up close in the back of my mind i was thinking this will happen to you also not like this but you better think how you want the rest of your life to go i was already volunteering for a school at Homeless Children and was very involved with issues of homelessness and poverty social work was something i was always interested in ass a human being and i felt it was a natural thing to study and with those entrepreneurships. And then to write about other issues. And what it means to be a human being but then that social work to allow those populations that are in need doing good in the world not just as a journalalist. It has been an honor to have this conversation i enjoy your beautifully written book. I appreciate you sharing your wisdom and your humanity with us such an important topic to you personally
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