Host some of the most striking parts are if your book, your talk about behaviors, in hindsight it is easy to see the signs of addiction. In realtime it is not. Tell me about that. What i learned is not only is that true but i came to the idea of addiction with my own implicit biases. I did not think someone struggling with the drug addiction would look like peter, earning the salary he was earning, have two advanced degrees, have a successful partner and at prestigious Silicon Valley law firm. Someone struggling with an addiction was also struggling with conditions like a homeless or Mental Illness that was untreated. They were someone i would see on the side of the road living under a bridge panhandling on the subway and i was very wrong although addiction hits hard in those communities there are plenty of people at the top of the socioeconomic ladder struggling as well. What i didnt know is i hadnt educated myself on the symptoms of drug addiction. I hadnt thought it would affect me or my family so when peter was clearly suffering from those i attributed to everything else. Maybe he was psychotic, maybe he had an eating disorder. Maybe he had an illness like cancer, i had people ask if he had aids. Nobody said do you think he has a drug addiction . I never considered it but he did have all the symptoms and i just thought it is the flu, hes working too hard, he is not getting enough sleep. Host there were a lot of moments dedicated to this rationalization which in retrospect for any of us who know individuals who have the disease of addiction we understand talking about how peter says he was diagnosed with hashimotos disease, stressedout, out of work, every time he gave an explanation i wonder what was going through your mind. A part of me just thought he is lying. This cant be there would be blatant lies. One time, it wasnt one time, several times, two hours or more late to pick up my son and this was before he had a drivers license and Cross Country practice at 5 30, the end of most peoples work day. Peter would not get there, it was humiliating for a teenager to be at school and in the dark and his parents not there and he would go to this mexican place and have dinner and wait for peter and i would say why are you two hours late to get our son . He said there is traffic but i was checking traffic in realtime and i saw there was not two hours of traffic, he should have been there in half an hour and in my mind i was thinking i dont know what his workday is like. He is under a pressure, he is a partner. There are clients that are very demanding. Maybe he doesnt want to tell me something happened at work, a meeting ran over. He would always say i have to work. I left my cell phone in my office and had to run to a meeting off site so when he said there was traffic i doubted my own accuracy of my own investigation. I thought i saw there was no traffic when i checked the apps but maybe there was an accident that didnt show up. It third what he is said and thought why would he be two hours late to pick up our son. Mustve been a workrelated thing. You talked earlier about a profound misconception and stigma that surrounds addiction and one of them is about societal understanding of what type of person gets disease and i thought it was such an interesting description when you were writing about your initial disbelief, he is a lawyer, rich, lives in a house the costs 2 million. Go into detail what youre thinking was, your preconceptions of people who have addiction and what you ended up finding out. That goes to my implicit biases. I thought they were homeless mentally ill people, i thought it wasnt going to be a rich white professional with 13 years of schooling and someone who had been a scientist, certainly knew the chemicals he was using wood due to his brain and body and certainly understood addiction. What i hadnt counted on was there was a lot of arrogance at that level and i can imagine peter thinking i will try this and see what it is like and maybe it will be fine but i will not become addicted because i can control that. When i was told we think he died of an overdose, he died from an infection related to intravenous drug use. It happens fairly commonly to iv drug abusers. I thought they must of gotten that wrong. It is impossible. He was welleducated and i thought he would know better. That is so classist, even someone with a High School Education can understand addiction is a powerful thing. I dont think, i am in a graduate program for social work and my first year fieldwork was at a clinic where people were struggling with addiction and most of those people were homeless, many had hiv or struggling with other Mental Health issues. The ones that were active users even though they were on methadone i never met a client the didnt understand addiction was a risk, or understood they were suffering from this disease so i dont know why i thought peters education would be protected for that his income would be protective. I also thought he can have anything he wants. Why would he choose that. It felt like someone with all these Resources Available to them as well as a good education wouldnt make that choice so i think i didnt understand how hard it is to fight addiction or quickly people become addicted or how education, income, privileged is not in ocular you against that which is something i now understand very well. There is no face of addiction can you cant tell by looking at somebody if they are at risk or if they have an addiction or are in recovery. What of the issues i dealt with 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 cities who have been dying from the heroin epidemic, crack epidemic for decades and there is this resistance to thinking now that the face of addiction is changing and we are recognizing it is not just poor, black and brown people in the industry who are dying, now we care. I find this difficult to wrestle with because on the one hand we want to address the disease of addiction and im glad there is no attention to it but it is also true that now that theres attention to it in part because of the fact that the face of addiction is changing to white, wealthier, people we might not normally suspect that is who is affected. That is so true and i feel a lot of guilt and shame from the fact that i didnt even all of a sudden now it is an emergency begin to visit happening in my life which seems completely unfair because for black and brown communities, in your city and in many cities across america and for people in the lower end of the socioeconomic spectrum this has been an emergency for decades and it feels so wrong that now it is a white problem now we are all talking about it. It feels so wrong on so many levels. As you say it is getting attention and hopefully the people getting help, white wealthy people. That is what i hope will happen. And more attention on what underlies them is important across the spectrum of those that are affected it was rattling to me and the people that knew peter because it was so unexpected, like watching someone fall from a great height and maybe that is just the height of the american dream, you seem to have everything, and yet he was putting the losing in his arms. I cant ask i ask a lot of other professionals in recovery what made them go down the road and my guess is a lot of what underlies addiction for people that are wealthy or welleducated or seem to have everything in society, makes us think what we think of when we think of success those issues, depression, anxiety may be untreated, other Mental Health issues those underlies addiction in all populations. As a journalist who researched this and is studying social work. Host you presented a really interesting analysis why it is people are turned to addictive substances and behaviors. You send some version of this, addiction happens when tomorrow is no better than today and how people who are addicted run out of reasons not to try drugs. Guest David Epstein was at the national institute, a Government Agency and i interviewed him for the book and talked about what happened to peter and someone who is struggling, you arent happy or depressed and feel stagnant or just feeling a lot of anxiety or depression or whatever it is causing you discomfort and you look around at the options available to you and nothing seems better than where you are. You run out of excuses not to try drugs, alcohol is included in that as well, that is the drug as well. That is true. In some ways people at the top are feeling really trapped too. It is easier for me and other people to understand that feeling of being trapped when you have so limited resources, you dont have financial reasons, dont have education to make other choices come from families that cant support you or generations ahead of you that have also struggled with Substance Abuse disorders so in that sense i could almost understand that feeling of being trapped and things look so bleak but at the top of the professional and economic ladder where you have lots of options and the ability to go into a Treatment Facility at a nice place or the ability to get psychological, you can pay for it, you live in a beautiful place where it is safe and you have all the comforts you can afford in life it is harder to understand how someone there could feel trapped and feel they dont have a lot of options but clearly that is also happening. In a household that was very much affected by addiction, now that i think maybe that is one of the reasons cspan asked me to interview you. Your book resonated deeply with me on a lot of levels as a professional who works in this field, as someone who has lived it through many of the experiences you lived in a different point in my life and now that i am a mother myself and expecting my second child any day now i think a lot about what i experienced and how i would help my children understand the world if i were in the type of position you were in and i know for you to tell your children about the cause of their fathers death and what hed been through and what you were uncovering, how do you come to this decision . Interesting question. A lot of the feedback ive gotten from the book is from parents who felt that part of the book, how i handled my children, letting them know what happened in their reaction after words and how i handled their reaction, spoke to them and raised a lot of questions for them. I will say that peter was so absent in the marriage and when he became sick with drug addiction, we didnt understand or know about, he was still kind of absent for me as a parenting partner. When i was at the house and told by the medical examiner that peters death was not a heart attack from working too hard, Drug Overdose or related to drug use or drug habit i felt like i dont know what to do. There is no way to prepare yourself as a mother or parent or father how you are going to tell your children one of their parents is died. For that alone i felt i dont know how to handle this. What do you do . I felt i didnt have a partner to turn to, i had been making a lot of decisions without his help so i turned to people around me and one was a medical examiner, two women volunteered with the Police Department who had been emergency room nurses who were retired and acted as counselors in situations like this and i asked what would you do . I asked the medical examiner do you have children . Yes. What should i do . She said i would tell them the truth and the grief counselors also who had seen plenty of death and disruption in their careers thought it was a good idea and as a journalist i believe in the truth and it can be very liberating. We had been so lied to for so long by this man in our lives and i felt like enough. It felt right to say this is what happens and when i did it was clearly the right thing to do because my parents were visibly relieved. Up until that point if you read the book you will know they had seen their dad two days before he died and he was very sick and they could not get him to the hospital and they were hurt and angry and when they found out he had died they felt enormously guilty and responsible for that death. Explaining to them now, you couldnt have saved him was a huge relief for them to understand something beyond their control was at play, turned out to be the right decision. There is a lot of guilt anytime a loved one passes away. I could imagine if i were in the shoes of your children how they might have felt, what could have happened differently. Should i am forced to go to the hospital. Their father is an Authority Figure and even if he were ill he was stubborn, he wouldnt we have to go to bed anyway. How did you reconcile with your own guilt throughout this entire process. Guest thats a great question. I didnt realize what i was feeling with survivors guilt until i went through counseling after words because immediately after peters death almost everything i do that might be remotely pleasant and there were not many things that felt pleasant for a long time. If i saw a beautiful sunset, i did something with what our kids i would think i cant believe hes not seeing this, i cant believe hes not here and even at School Events for my second senior year i would find this checking over my shoulder, peter would often make it but would be late, always late at work and i would say premises at School Events or meetings and we would text each other and i would say third row down, two in and i kept looking and it would certainly strike me hes not coming. I couldnt believe he wasnt going to see this. I still cant believe hes not going to see them grow into the people they are becoming because he wanted that so badly and i know that. I wound up feeling so guilty that i couldnt enjoy anything as time went on with my children all in my life because i felt so bad that he couldnt have that too and then i understood that was survivors guilt which was odd because it wasnt like we went through a discrete event, we were not in a car accident and i survived between the two different trajectories but we seemed to have both lived for his drug addiction just on different sides of it and we came up the other end and he didnt make it and i did and so i felt so much guilt and part of my processing of that was writing about it for the New York Times but definitely in the book because i was so angry at peter for ditching us. How could he make this choice . We on the you, we are depending on you. I was a writer, he was a partner in a law firm, you can imagine its buried in our income, i really needed him and his support and his income, to live in san diego which is not a cheap city and i missed his advice from before he was addicted, before he was struggling with that when he had a very different way of looking at a problem, he was very scientific and logical and a lawyer so whereas i might have an emotional reaction i could call him up and say what do you think we should do and usually had very reasoned and good advice and i missed all of that. I was angry, but then writing a memoir i was able to remember things about our relationship early on that brought me a lot of pleasure and made me feel really wistful about him and enormously compassionate toward him and helped me forgive myself for not saving him or not seeing it. I was able to do a lot of that work in the writing so i developed compassion for peter and i was able to develop compassion for myself as i think i didnt have over the years and didnt have right then. I was really hard on myself thinking i cant believe i missed this, i cant believe i didnt call him on this approach in more. Why did i accept his excuses. That is a long answer to the question the process of writing this memoir helps me to process all of that and to feel less survivors guilt and less anger toward peter. You have many striking lines in the book and one of them, i had to stop and read several times out loud is this one. I will have to be a widow even if i am no longer the wife. I dont know if you are a wife but if youre married and white you know this feeling of responsibility toward your whole family or to kids and your spouse, youve got each others back, we shouldnt have that kind of marriage which is probably why it ultimately ended. It was more like the trenches raising our kids but battling it out for who felt worse. I did take care of a lot of stuff for him as his wife and even in divorce. When we were married i would make his doctors appointments because he was working all the time, bring in his drycleaning, make the meals, did the domestic stuff and then we divorced but i still kept a family calendar. I would always remind him theres a crosscountry meet today and a meeting with the guidance counselor and i did it because he did have a highpressure job. I had more flexibility and i dont know if thats the way other couples work it out but seems like that would work until our kids were grown. I didnt mind doing it because it was important to me that he make it to all these events and things and be part of that and after he died there was no one to do that. He left a big mess, hadnt filed his taxes in years, he was struggling with this disease and let everything go, the house hadnt been maintained so i was executor, it meant picking up his ashes after he was cremated and figuring out my kids spread his ashes in the ocean, i mentioned this in another interview, you go pick up someones ashes, your exhusbands ashes from the crematorium and i felt like a wife again, i was given the loss of this husband, former partner, exhusband and it was such an odd position to be in. I also think i felt like that because i felt like in some ways i let him down because i didnt recognize that he was struggling and i knew him so well i should have but as someone who has worked in the field of addiction medicine, you also understand people are profoundly changed by addiction and he wasnt behaving as the man i thought i knew so there is that. Since i made it right when he was alive there was a part of me that thought im going to fix this, clean everything up, so your estate can make sure the kids are okay, do it exactly right to make up to you what i didnt get right before so there was some of that, this feeling that i was the wife again. Host you mentioned while you were going through his many affects and executing these things, you became as you said both the archaeologist and anthropologist. You get to know somebody all over again but also see the ways in which they changed since you have not been with them. The amount of stuff you accumulated after we split up was kind of astonishing but may be i think we can be addicted to many things, this would addiction but there are also addictions to shopping, to food. Exercise. All ki