Transcripts For CSPAN2 After Words Eilene Zimmerman Smacked

CSPAN2 After Words Eilene Zimmerman Smacked July 13, 2024

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, wh

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