Nadia Bowers: Dear Dad

“ When I said I was gonna move out to San Francisco, he said, "Why are you doing this to me?" Our guest today is Nadia Bowers, whose new memoir Dear Dealer is about the loss of her older sister Sasha at age 44 in 2015 due to an accidental fentanyl overdose. The book includes a series of letters to the imagined drug dealer who dealt the fentanyl that took Sasha’s life and beautifully captures the ways in which the family disease of addiction does not discriminate based on the educational backgrounds and good intentions of its members. Dear Dealer is a sister story about the specificity of the ways sisters shape each other (Nadia calls sisterhood “the batting cage of relationships”). Within this story of Sasha’s loss and Nadia’s quest to uncover who she was in life and how she died, is their father, the psychiatrist Malcolm Bowers, MD, who died of cancer aged 74 in 2008. Dr. Bowers began and ended his 45-year career at Yale. Since the 1960s, he initiated a series of groundbreaking studies on hallucinogenic drug exposure and the emergence of psychotic disorders. He published several books on the impact of mental illness on the lives of patients, including Retreat from Sanity, A Psychiatrist Recollects, Abetting Madness, and Men and Poisons, and was known to be a psychiatrist who transformed the lives of patients plagued by the most difficult mental health problems. He was a poet and avid fisherman. He was also a father who privately battled a crippling anxiety disorder that manifested in a kind of panicked watchfulness over his daughters, especially Sasha, whose Tourette’s syndrome and secret life he may have felt partly responsible for. Sasha took after him in so many ways, also attending Yale to become a social worker, and staying near her hometown to serve the community there, while Nadia left home to become an actor against all paternal advice. In this interview, Elizabeth and I talk with Nadia about uncovering the tragic contradiction that her dad - an expert on drugs and the brain - couldn’t “save” his daughter or love her into health; why the keys to uncovering the truth of how Sasha ended up dead in her purple car in the middle of a parking lot were tied to her father, and what Nadia teaches her son - who never knew them - about his grandfather and aunt. And in the end, she reads a little from the book, and a poem her father wrote. Dear Dealer is available now from Gallery Books and Simon & Schuster audio. Here’s more of our conversation with Nadia Bowers. Love, Erin TMAYF is a labor of love and we’re not too proud to accept your financial support. Get full access to Tell Me About Your Father at tellmeaboutyourfather.substack.com/subscribe