What do you do when the person who destroyed your family is also, undeniably, a human being?
That's the question at the center of Nadia Bowers's Dear Dealer, and it's the question we sit with for this entire conversation. Nadia's sister Sasha died in 2015 after taking drugs laced with fentanyl, and rather than write a simple story of a villain and a victim, Nadia spent nearly a decade writing directly to the man who sold them to her. We talk about the letter that became a This American Life episode in 2018, the moment a producer emailed her that JJ Abrams wanted to option it as a film, and the year she spent unweaving a seven hundred page draft written entirely as letters before finding the structure that let the book breathe. Nadia talks about reading Truth & Beauty, Ann Patchett's memoir about her friendship with Lucy Grealy, years before Sasha died, and tucking away the idea that grief could be written about honestly and lovingly at once. We get into the specific stigma that surrounds women and addiction, the friend whose book on losing loved ones to the opioid crisis helped Nadia think about radical acceptance, and the moment her husband suggested her sister might have been closer to the dealer's side of the story than either of them wanted to admit.
This is a conversation about what we owe the dead, what we owe ourselves, and how you write your way into forgiveness without forcing it. Share this conversation with anyone who has ever loved someone impossible to hold onto.
\"I think maybe grief doesn't grow up, doesn't wither. It stays stubborn and young, rooted in the moment it was born.\" - Nadia Bowers, Dear Dealer
Books referenced:
Truth & Beauty by Ann Patchett
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