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 th