Speaker 1: Family Secrets is a production of I Heart Radio. I
Speaker 1: turned down the hallway where the bedrooms are located. Peter,
Speaker 1: I call again, Peter. I'm coming down the hall to
Speaker 1: your bedroom. Okay. His bedroom is at the end of
Speaker 1: the hallway. Its door faces me and it's open, but
Speaker 1: I can't see anything except a corner of the bed
Speaker 1: and a cluttered night table. I walked past my son's
Speaker 1: bedroom with its one orange wall and ikea bed, past
Speaker 1: Anna's old bedroom, one wall painted deep pink. I am
Speaker 1: nearly at his door and start calling his name again
Speaker 1: in earnest Peter, Peter. I can see into the room.
Speaker 1: The covers on the bed are drawn back, and I
Speaker 1: can see the crumpled white sheets. There are a few
Speaker 1: tissues in the bed with spots of blood on them.
Speaker 1: I'm starting to shake badly as I walk into the bedroom.
Speaker 1: Peter isn't in the bed, so I turned towards the
Speaker 1: master bath. Then I see him lying face up on
Speaker 1: the floor between the bathroom and the bedroom. That's Eileen
Speaker 1: Zimmerman reading from her book Smacked, a memoir of white
Speaker 1: collar ambition, addiction, and tragedy. Eileen is now pursuing a
Speaker 1: social work degree She's the mother of two young adults
Speaker 1: and lives in New York City. But when this story unfolds,
Speaker 1: Eileen as a journalist wife and an ex wife of
Speaker 1: a high powered attorney, raising her teenage kids in San Diego.
Speaker 1: They live a lovely life, a privileged life, a life
Speaker 1: that doesn't end sordidly on a bathroom floor, because money
Speaker 1: and worldly success inoculates us from such things, don't they.
Speaker 1: I'm Danny Shapiro, and this is family secrets, the secrets
Speaker 1: that are kept from us, the secrets we keep from others,
Speaker 1: and the secrets we keep from our selves. I met
Speaker 1: Peter when I was looking for a job. I was
Speaker 1: twenty three years old. I had a job at CBS
Speaker 1: News as an administrative assistant. I had worked my way
Speaker 1: up from receptionist, and I got laid off in the
Speaker 1: late eighties, and so I couldn't afford my apartment near
Speaker 1: Rutger's where I just graduated, and so I moved home
Speaker 1: to be with my mother and my sisters, which was
Speaker 1: like living in an insane asylum. It was crazy. But
Speaker 1: I had to find a job. So I was looking
Speaker 1: in the Sunday New York Times and saw an ad
Speaker 1: for a recruiter in New York named Peter at Adam Personnel,
Speaker 1: So I made an appointment to see him, and that's
Speaker 1: how I met him. I walked in and he was
Speaker 1: the counselor I was supposed to meet, and he was
Speaker 1: really young and very very sweet, and we wound up
Speaker 1: talking for a really long time during the interview quote unquote,
Speaker 1: mostly about stuff we like to do. He had just
Speaker 1: graduated from Cornell and so we had a lot to
Speaker 1: chat about. And then he said, I'll you know, I'll
Speaker 1: call you with some interviews and things. And I wanted
Speaker 1: to do writing, but I got sent out only for
Speaker 1: secretarial jobs because typing fast seemed to be my most
Speaker 1: marketable skill at that point. And um, from there we
Speaker 1: became friends. He wound up quitting Adam Personnel and he
Speaker 1: went back to school to be a chemist. I wound
Speaker 1: up with a job at a law firm as a
Speaker 1: legal assistant, which I got through a friend of Peter's,
Speaker 1: and we just stayed friends for a few years. I
Speaker 1: moved to Philly to work at a really small arts magazine,
Speaker 1: and then one time I went up to Ithaco, where
Speaker 1: he was living in New York State, to see his
Speaker 1: band play and everything changed. I suddenly I was like, well,
Speaker 1: maybe he could be a boyfriend. And it started was
Speaker 1: that because you were seeing him like a different side
Speaker 1: of him by seeing him as a musician. He was
Speaker 1: always kind of dorky and I always felt like, oh,
Speaker 1: we don't have any chemistry, and um, he was super
Speaker 1: science e but nice. He was very interested in philosophy
Speaker 1: of science then and Carl Sagan was his you know,
Speaker 1: euro and Darwin and so he was a really interesting
Speaker 1: guy to talk to. But I just didn't think of
Speaker 1: him as that attractive. But then you know, he's in
Speaker 1: this on this like homemade stage and it's of State,
Speaker 1: New York, and there's all these people, you know, on
Speaker 1: a hillside listening to the band, and he had long hair,
Speaker 1: and I noticed everybody else was staying in him, and
Speaker 1: I thought, oh, you know, maybe he's kind of cute.
Speaker 1: And he was really nice. And so it's one of
Speaker 1: those things where suddenly something changed and I started to
Speaker 1: see him in a totally different lay. And then once
Speaker 1: that happened, I really felt for him. So it took
Speaker 1: two years. Do you think he had been biding his time?
Speaker 1: Like he liked you? He did he made it very
Speaker 1: clear that he wanted to go out with me, and
Speaker 1: I just kept saying, like, I don't feel that way
Speaker 1: about you. So I was dating some other people, you know,
Speaker 1: nobody great, he was dating a few people. I kept thinking,
Speaker 1: he's always just going to be my friend. He's just
Speaker 1: a friend. I think they call it friend zoning now.
Speaker 1: And then that changed, and I think so he was
Speaker 1: sort of waiting. I think he was a very tenacious
Speaker 1: person and believed he would get what he wanted. So
Speaker 1: he did. He just sort of hung in there. What
Speaker 1: was his instrument, by the way in the band, bass guitar.
Speaker 1: And he couldn't read music. He taught himself by ear
Speaker 1: to listen and just copy, and he learned tabs, how
Speaker 1: to read tabs. Yeah, so he's pretty good. Eileen and
Speaker 1: Peter date for a couple of years. They move in together,
Speaker 1: get married. Peter gets his master's degree in chemistry and
Speaker 1: begins working at a pharmaceutical company in New Jersey. Eileen
Speaker 1: is features editor at the Baltimore City Paper. They live
Speaker 1: in Philly, which is in the middle sort of. After
Speaker 1: a few more years, they followed Peter's work to San Diego,
Speaker 1: where he gets a job at a very promising startup.
Speaker 1: Peter's job was as a bench chemist, which means that
Speaker 1: he sits with a group of other bench chemists at
Speaker 1: a lab table creating compounds that will be used in
Speaker 1: experiments designed by pH d s. Peter's ambitious, restless. He
Speaker 1: doesn't want to spend the rest of his life inhaling
Speaker 1: chemicals and not even designing the experiments. At this point,
Speaker 1: as he sees it, he has two choices go back
Speaker 1: to school to get his pH d, which would take
Speaker 1: upwards of six years, or go to law school. So
Speaker 1: they moved back east to New Hampshire this time, and
Speaker 1: it's during the law school years that things slowly, inexorably
Speaker 1: begin to change. I didn't realize it at the time,
Speaker 1: but Peter also was tired of not having enough money.
Speaker 1: We always struggled. His family was really poor. My family
Speaker 1: had a ton of financial insecurity when we are growing up.
Speaker 1: My dad worked two jobs and we all worked. I
Speaker 1: cleaned houses at twelve. We were, you know, not destitute,
Speaker 1: but we were kind of poor in a genteel way.
Speaker 1: So um, he was sick of it, and he said,
Speaker 1: let me go to law school and I'll make some
Speaker 1: money for all this education, and I was nervous, but
Speaker 1: I was excited for something new. We thought about starting
Speaker 1: a family only then I was about twenty nine and
Speaker 1: decided to put it off. Things did start to change,
Speaker 1: although I think partially it was due to law school,
Speaker 1: and I think partially it was Peter and I just
Speaker 1: either being in love, didn't see it or didn't want
Speaker 1: to see it. And then it became more clear. So
Speaker 1: he always, for instance, liked to trip. He loved acid
Speaker 1: and everything. And I'm not a big drug person. I
Speaker 1: just I think I'm too anxious. I don't want to
Speaker 1: be inside my head that long. Yeah, you know, but
Speaker 1: he he did. He liked to get high, and he
Speaker 1: hung out in Ithaca. Um. I don't know if any
Speaker 1: of your listeners know what Cornell is liking up there.
Speaker 1: It's kind of a very crunchy hippie. And now he
Speaker 1: was back in school, and so it was like grades
Speaker 1: and partying, and you know, people took no dose, which
Speaker 1: was a stimulant to stay up all night, or coffee
Speaker 1: or um, some coke, some smoking, cannabis, and a lot
Speaker 1: of drinking, a lot of hard drinking. It seems that
Speaker 1: odds in a way. All that ambition combined with the
Speaker 1: hard partying. But this is the way Peter blows off steam.
Speaker 1: He's very driven in law school. He's going to be
Speaker 1: number one editor of the Law Review, and he is
Speaker 1: all the while burning the candle at both ends. What
Speaker 1: changed was he prioritized the work of law school over
Speaker 1: everything else, over our relationship, over being present in any
Speaker 1: way with our respective families. And when we had our daughter,
Speaker 1: it was the beginning of his third year. And I
Speaker 1: even remember we had an argument in the hospital the
Speaker 1: night she was born because there were these kind of
Speaker 1: pullout chairs the size of twin beds in the hospital.
Speaker 1: It was Brigham and Women's in Boston, and he was
Speaker 1: complaining that he wasn't going to get a good enough
Speaker 1: to night's sleep because he had midterms the next day.
Speaker 1: And I was thinking, I just pushed a human being
Speaker 1: out of my body, and I'm kind of freaked out too,
Speaker 1: And he had invited friends of his from Boston to
Speaker 1: come and they brought beer and stuff to the hospital room.
Speaker 1: And I was exhausted, and I wasn't a kid, I
Speaker 1: was thirty three, and I was freaking out that I
Speaker 1: was being woken up every two hours like I had
Speaker 1: I was trying to adjust to this whole new paradigm,
Speaker 1: and he just wanted to like celebrate and hand out
Speaker 1: cigars and party. And then we went back to New
Speaker 1: Hampshire the next day and I had said, let's get
Speaker 1: your mom or someone to come and help for the
Speaker 1: first week, and he said, no, this is our thing.
Speaker 1: We're going to do it ourselves in our way. And
Speaker 1: I just remember walking into the dark apartment with my
Speaker 1: daughter and she started crying, and I was thinking, it's
Speaker 1: going to be the middle of winter here in New Hampshire.
Speaker 1: All of the friends here are his. I mean, I
Speaker 1: knew the law school widows. They called them the ones
Speaker 1: that are left behind by law school, but it was
Speaker 1: really his world. We were there for him, and I
Speaker 1: felt so lonely and scared, and I had some postpartum depression.
Speaker 1: But he didn't want us to lean on anyone else,
Speaker 1: and so we had to do it ourselves, which meant
Speaker 1: me because he went back to school. And I don't
Speaker 1: think he ever really prioritized our family again, our kids,
Speaker 1: and I think he loved them, but what always came
Speaker 1: first was him. Was you know, he was going to
Speaker 1: be the best, and he would justify it by saying,
Speaker 1: I'm doing this for the family. When you went back
Speaker 1: and read your journals, did you have any consciousness of
Speaker 1: that or any awareness of that at that time? Do
Speaker 1: you think what I noticed in the journals was the
Speaker 1: beginning of this kind of pathological relationship he had with money.
Speaker 1: Eventually it became the thing he used to have power
Speaker 1: over people and to show love. So, you know, if
Speaker 1: if I was doing what I was supposed to do,
Speaker 1: you know, he'd buy me a computer. But if not,
Speaker 1: he would remind me who paid the mortgage. So there
Speaker 1: was always this push pull between that. But I wrote
Speaker 1: in my journal that I guess we'd had some argument
Speaker 1: or some discussion about being tired. We were both really tired,
Speaker 1: and he pointed out everything in our little apartment that
Speaker 1: he had paid for because I was actually earning more
Speaker 1: money because he was working a bunch of part time
Speaker 1: jobs and going to school and I was working full time,
Speaker 1: and our benefits were through that. And I wrote in
Speaker 1: my journal, I said, I don't know why he has
Speaker 1: to do that, Why he has to stake claim to everything.
Speaker 1: I don't care. And I kept thinking, well, maybe after
Speaker 1: law school this will go away. Maybe when we have
Speaker 1: more money, he won't feel but it never and he
Speaker 1: always felt like his money was his money. And he
Speaker 1: wanted me to understand I had nothing to do with
Speaker 1: earning it, that being there at law school with him
Speaker 1: did not mean I had any hand in his degree
Speaker 1: or his success. It was the beginning of prioritizing his
Speaker 1: earnings and his career and kind of himself over everything else.
Speaker 1: And at the time I just thought it was anxiety
Speaker 1: or just our poverty being in law school. So Peter
Speaker 1: graduates law school at the top of his class. He
Speaker 1: and Eileen and their eight month old daughter moved back
Speaker 1: to San Diego, where he again has a job waiting
Speaker 1: as a first year associate and a law firm. Now
Speaker 1: Eileen thinks life is going to get easier, no more
Speaker 1: all nighters. He'll be home and it's the exact same thing,
Speaker 1: only he's more depressed. One night, my daughter was like,
Speaker 1: I don't know, fourteen months old, maybe not even and
Speaker 1: I woke up and Peter wasn't home. I could tell
Speaker 1: he'd never come home. So I was panicked, and we
Speaker 1: had those flip phones then, so I call him and
Speaker 1: he picks up and he says, no, I just slept
Speaker 1: under my desk because I have a brief to this morning.
Speaker 1: And he got home and we had this big discussion,
Speaker 1: and I knew he was fried from like thirty two
Speaker 1: hours of being awake, but I just said, I don't
Speaker 1: get it. I said, I thought this ended at law school,
Speaker 1: these all nighters. You know, you're an adult man now
Speaker 1: with the family. And he was incredulous. He was just
Speaker 1: kind of like, what are you an idiot? This is
Speaker 1: the way it is. It's going to be like this,
Speaker 1: you know, until I make partner, which wasn't gonna be
Speaker 1: for ten years. And that's the way it was, you know,
Speaker 1: And he was just like, you better get used to it.
Speaker 1: This is why it's going to be. He started hanging
Speaker 1: out with a bunch of younger attorneys that smoked a
Speaker 1: lot of pot, and the pot was much stronger than
Speaker 1: we had done in high school, and he hadn't really
Speaker 1: smoked since then. And one night he called me and
Speaker 1: he said, I can't even come home and he was vomiting.
Speaker 1: He's like, I'm like hallucinating, like so he stayed, but
Speaker 1: he hung out with them a lot, and he would say, like, oh,
Speaker 1: after work, we went out for drinks and I started
Speaker 1: to think, then he's getting high with them, but I
Speaker 1: thought it's pot you know. I would say to him, like,
Speaker 1: are you smoking. He'd be like a little bit, but
Speaker 1: you know, that's the beginning of the lying. And so
Speaker 1: I think that was when he started to think this
Speaker 1: is a way of coping. This kind of feels good.
Speaker 1: And I think it escalated from there. Not that cannabis
Speaker 1: is a gateway drug necessarily, but I think then when
Speaker 1: we split up, I mean, he may have been doing
Speaker 1: coke and stimulants said he could inhale or adderall, but
Speaker 1: I wouldn't have known. I wasn't sophisticated enough. But he
Speaker 1: was always tired when he came home. So if he
Speaker 1: did them during the day, he crashed when he got home.
Speaker 1: Peter's working more and more and more hours. You have
Speaker 1: your second child. We have we decided to have a
Speaker 1: second child, and Peter's the whole thing was, you know, like,
Speaker 1: now I'm a fourth year associate, so in a couple
Speaker 1: of more years, I'm going to be up for partner.
Speaker 1: And I kept thinking, okay, all right, well we got
Speaker 1: through law school and so all of a sudden I
Speaker 1: readjusted and I thought, oh, okay, So being an associates horrible.
Speaker 1: But in six or seven years he's going to be
Speaker 1: a senior associate. He'll be having underlings to delegate workout too,
Speaker 1: and then he'll be a partner, and then we can
Speaker 1: be like all the other guys, by the way, who
Speaker 1: were all divorced two or three times by then, right.
Speaker 1: I mean, his direct boss at his first firm was
Speaker 1: in his late sixties and he was dying his hair blonde,
Speaker 1: and I was on his third wife. So he was
Speaker 1: a grandfather and the father of grammar school aged children,
Speaker 1: and this was not uncommon, you know, but I thought
Speaker 1: that wouldn't be us um, And so that's what happens
Speaker 1: is you kind of decide, okay. So we had the
Speaker 1: second child, and we moved. We bought our first home
Speaker 1: we had been renting near San Diego State University, very
Speaker 1: kind of middle class, upper middle class community with good schools,
Speaker 1: and Peter just absented himself from family life. There was
Speaker 1: a time where San Diego is famous for zoo and
Speaker 1: in the summer they have the night time zoo. So
Speaker 1: I brought the kids to the zoo at night, which
Speaker 1: is very thrilling for a child to be in the
Speaker 1: zoo after dark, and we were coming back from some
Speaker 1: show we saw there and there was a full moon
Speaker 1: and our shadows were in front of us. And my
Speaker 1: daughter was seven and she was skipping and she said, look, mommy,
Speaker 1: there we are. We're almost a whole family. And we
Speaker 1: got home and Peter's in his office in the garage,
Speaker 1: and I don't know what he was doing in the
Speaker 1: garage for six hours while we were walking around the zoo,
Speaker 1: but you know, he should have been with us. So
Speaker 1: Eileen is increasingly unhappy in her marriage. But she's grown
Speaker 1: so accustomed to a life filled with goal posts. You know,
Speaker 1: if we just do this, accomplish that spent these years
Speaker 1: paying our dues, if we do these things, will eventually
Speaker 1: be happy. She can't imagine leaving Peter. She grew up
Speaker 1: in an atmosphere of scarcity, and she's afraid of going
Speaker 1: back there. Peter represents security to her. She's put her
Speaker 1: career at a far distant second to his. What can
Speaker 1: she do? Do you think that that kind of allowed
Speaker 1: you to adjust to what was not a happy situation,
Speaker 1: sort of like a frog in boiling water, where you know,
Speaker 1: you put the frog in the pot and you turn
Speaker 1: the heat on the frog never really realizes that the
Speaker 1: frog is boiling until the frog is boiled. That is
Speaker 1: a perfect and I and I won't even let myself
Speaker 1: off the hook that much. I do think there was
Speaker 1: a feeling that, you know, I was a freelance writer
Speaker 1: working part time because Peter could not parent. He was
Speaker 1: busy and exhausted, so he did what he could, but
Speaker 1: it was not much, and I knew that that was
Speaker 1: the deal kind of, so I did feel like if
Speaker 1: I were to leave him, it would be back to scarcity.
Speaker 1: I mean, he earned all the money pretty much. I
Speaker 1: think at that point I was probably earning as a
Speaker 1: freelance writer, and I was also writing for the New
Speaker 1: York Times. I was probably making thirty five dollars a year,
Speaker 1: so you know, like in Buffalo, New York or Cleveland,
Speaker 1: maybe I could make it. Not in San Diego, where
Speaker 1: gas was, you know, four dollars ago, and it was
Speaker 1: just not possible. And knew it, and he knew it.
Speaker 1: Was it something you entertained. I thought about leaving in
Speaker 1: law school when things were like that. I just always
Speaker 1: felt like, and I think this is on me, but
Speaker 1: I think I was raised in my family to believe
Speaker 1: that I didn't really have a lot of value. I
Speaker 1: have a scene in the book where I tell my
Speaker 1: dad I'm getting engaged, that we're getting married, and when
Speaker 1: Peter goes to the bathroom, my dad looks at me
Speaker 1: and says, don't blow it. And it was clear I
Speaker 1: was the lucky one. I believed it. I believed he
Speaker 1: was right. When I was little, he used to say, Oh,
Speaker 1: it's a good thing you're smart, because you're not pretty.
Speaker 1: Jewish families they're so great, all families really. I mean
Speaker 1: those like sort of internalized messages, they can be so damaging,
Speaker 1: so because they become the stories that we tell ourselves
Speaker 1: that have absolutely no correlation to the truth. You know,
Speaker 1: you're sitting here with me in this room, and you
Speaker 1: know you're you're this beautiful woman, and like, I just
Speaker 1: you know, you just think, like you internalize a message
Speaker 1: like that, and then it becomes kind of your reality
Speaker 1: in a certain Even as you say that, I'm thinking, no, no,
Speaker 1: I'm not, like, You're right, It's it just took a
Speaker 1: few words, you know. And my dad did a lot
Speaker 1: of that ground. He'd call it hey stoop, like a
Speaker 1: nickname for stupid, because I had trouble with math, and
Speaker 1: so I always thought I'm not good at numbers, and
Speaker 1: Peters so and he was so smart. He was a really,
Speaker 1: really and probably one of the smartest people I've ever known,
Speaker 1: super intelligent about everything, and so you start to feel
Speaker 1: like maybe you are lucky. And I felt really afraid.
Speaker 1: I felt really afraid to leave. And part of that
Speaker 1: was like, who's going to be with me. I'm in
Speaker 1: my forties, and am I going to really leave? He's
Speaker 1: making half a million dollars a year and I make forty.
Speaker 1: I was terrified. And you know, sometimes the misery you
Speaker 1: know is better than the misery you don't, So I
Speaker 1: think that's what I did. So what was the last straw?
Speaker 1: The last row was Peters started having a relationship with
Speaker 1: someone else. But I had told him many times. I said,
Speaker 1: we need to go to counseling, and we did, but
Speaker 1: he didn't show up half the time because of work.
Speaker 1: He would say, I can't make it. We have a meeting,
Speaker 1: So of course it didn't work. And I remember one
Speaker 1: time saying to him, if things don't change somehow, then
Speaker 1: I'm going to leave when our son graduates from high school.
Speaker 1: And he said to me, if you leave me before
Speaker 1: they are grown up, I will never see the kids
Speaker 1: because I work so much. And I remember thinking, Okay,
Speaker 1: I'm going to have to stick it out until my
Speaker 1: youngest can drive, and then he can go see Peter
Speaker 1: whenever he wants another, another goal post another. I was like,
Speaker 1: five more. I just gotta make it five more years.
Speaker 1: And I thought, well, then when we split everything, at
Speaker 1: least there'll be more money for me. And then Peter
Speaker 1: had an affair and it ended a year later, and
Speaker 1: I begged him to stay. I was terrified of him leaving,
Speaker 1: and he his idea was that I would allow him
Speaker 1: to have this relationship and still be married. And that's
Speaker 1: when I thought, you know what, I'm really unhappy he
Speaker 1: wants out. Let's have this. So we did. We stayed
Speaker 1: married for a while, we stayed connected physically for a while.
Speaker 1: It was hard, but eventually we did get divorced. We'll
Speaker 1: be back in a moment. Peter moved out in two
Speaker 1: thousand nine into a one bedroom apartment a mile and
Speaker 1: a half from the office. It seems not to have
Speaker 1: occurred to him that this meant his kids would have
Speaker 1: nowhere to stay, so then he moved again to a
Speaker 1: condo in another beach community, and the following year he
Speaker 1: bought his dream house, a gorgeous architectural marvel with a
Speaker 1: view of the ocean and the lagoon. His upward trajectory
Speaker 1: in real estate helped hide the fact that Peter, the
Speaker 1: bench chemist, number one in his law school class, was
Speaker 1: losing control. So the way that you write about it
Speaker 1: and smacked, there's very much a sense that there's this
Speaker 1: downward spiral, yes, that begins to happen. Your kids are
Speaker 1: witnessing something. You're witnessing something, but you don't know what
Speaker 1: it is. Can you talk about that a little bit?
Speaker 1: Because that to me, the subtitle of your book is
Speaker 1: a story of white collar ambition, addiction, and tragedy. The
Speaker 1: white collar ambition part can really obtiscape so much in
Speaker 1: terms of what we can allow ourselves to believe or
Speaker 1: not believe about what might be going on. Absolutely, it's
Speaker 1: like a perfect cover. I just figured Peter was being honest,
Speaker 1: you know, like I didn't see why he would lie,
Speaker 1: which maybe is my again my naivete. Well let me
Speaker 1: stop you there, though, Like it was it you felt
Speaker 1: he was being honest or that because he was successful.
Speaker 1: It couldn't be street drugs. It couldn't be I didn't
Speaker 1: even consider it was drugs. I just thought like, well,
Speaker 1: that couldn't possibly be it. I mean, he's And that's
Speaker 1: where I recognized I had these implicit biases that I
Speaker 1: hadn't really been aware of because I'm I'm pretty, I'm
Speaker 1: very liberal, I'm progressive. I'm studying social work now. And
Speaker 1: here I was, you know, my ex husband was this rich, white,
Speaker 1: well educated lawyer. I was like, well, he's not going
Speaker 1: to be using drugs. That's not what it is. It
Speaker 1: must be an eating disorder, or he's bipolar, he's having
Speaker 1: a psychotic break, or it's the stress, the chronic stress.
Speaker 1: And I knew about all of that just as a reporter,
Speaker 1: and I tried to figure it out. But I was
Speaker 1: watching him die. We all were this kind of slow,
Speaker 1: torturous death from drug addiction and then from this infection
Speaker 1: from drug addiction. But I didn't recognize a single symptom.
Speaker 1: And it was precipitous. I think it started about fourteen
Speaker 1: or fifteen months before he died. So I know from
Speaker 1: my research and my sleuthing that he had started ordering
Speaker 1: pills off the dark web almost immediately upon moving out,
Speaker 1: and those might have been stimulants and supplements, so he's
Speaker 1: doing oral drugs. Whatever they were, I think they became opioids, which,
Speaker 1: by the way, in addition to being great pain killers,
Speaker 1: they're also kind of antidepressants. They make people feel much better.
Speaker 1: Some people, so when I take if I could in,
Speaker 1: I vomit. When Peter took it, he felt fantastic. And
Speaker 1: this is a man that had a lot of anxiety,
Speaker 1: who I think was clearly depressed, and this made him
Speaker 1: feel better. So he would take those, and then he
Speaker 1: always liked coke. When we were younger, I didn't do it,
Speaker 1: and then I figured we that was over for him.
Speaker 1: We had kids in a family. But I think he
Speaker 1: started doing that too, because he would stay up he
Speaker 1: was dating, and he would be up really late, or
Speaker 1: he'd go to l A to these clubs really late,
Speaker 1: and I'd think, how is he doing that? He used
Speaker 1: to be like so tired, and he was switching nights
Speaker 1: a lot for the kids, So I think that happened
Speaker 1: and then he fell in with a crowd of people.
Speaker 1: I think from what I could tell, that kind of
Speaker 1: kicked it up a notch with him. And decided that
Speaker 1: they would try injecting. And the thing is, Peter was
Speaker 1: a chemist and really smart and knew a lot about
Speaker 1: the body and pharmaceuticals, so I have to believe he
Speaker 1: knew how it would affect him. But there's also a
Speaker 1: level of arrogance at that point where you feel like
Speaker 1: I'm not going to be an adict, like I'm going
Speaker 1: to control this, And I think it was much more
Speaker 1: powerful than he ever anticipated. Yeah, I was thinking as
Speaker 1: you were talking just now, the phrase better living through
Speaker 1: chemistry kept on running through my mind, like his history,
Speaker 1: his knowledge base, his arrogance, his being smart is being
Speaker 1: the smartest, is being the best um and having you know,
Speaker 1: both the chemistry and background and this sort of the
Speaker 1: legal analytic background, the whole idea that it wouldn't be
Speaker 1: bigger than him, that he would be bigger than it.
Speaker 1: And I think we see that a lot in powerful
Speaker 1: men and women, especially powerful men. Just like if you
Speaker 1: look at like Bill Clinton having an affair with an intern,
Speaker 1: nobody's going to find out, you know, he's you know
Speaker 1: that kind of thing or what we see now. And
Speaker 1: I think Peter just thought, I'm not like those other people.
Speaker 1: I'm you know I I can control this um and
Speaker 1: I think because I probably didn't recognize the science because
Speaker 1: I felt like, well, I don't need to be familiar
Speaker 1: with these signs. This isn't in my life. That you know,
Speaker 1: it is a terrible thing, but I this isn't gonna
Speaker 1: happen in my world. So what were the signs? So
Speaker 1: he had every one of the signs. And also I
Speaker 1: should say people that are struggling with addiction are also
Speaker 1: fantastic liars. So he was very good at keeping this
Speaker 1: secret from all of us and his family, from his children,
Speaker 1: from me, from his extended family. Some of the signs
Speaker 1: that he had, for instance, are very common. There's a
Speaker 1: lot of weight loss. There's very big mood swings from
Speaker 1: euphoria to very deep depression. There's irritability. His skin was
Speaker 1: very gray, he was losing his accelerated hair loss. He
Speaker 1: was also using meth amphetamine. I found out later on
Speaker 1: after he died, so he had kind of the yellowing teeth.
Speaker 1: He had a lot of sores on his hands on
Speaker 1: the sides of his face from scratching. We oddly enough,
Speaker 1: stayed good friends. He didn't have a lot of friends,
Speaker 1: and so even after we divorced, he would still kind
Speaker 1: of talk to me about his family and stuff. And
Speaker 1: he called me one day and said he was having
Speaker 1: a terrible problem with constipation, and I said, well, are
Speaker 1: you drinking water? Eat blueberries? It's incredibly common with opioid addiction,
Speaker 1: is opioid constipation, Like that's what he was having. And
Speaker 1: he had terrible, terrible stomach pain because if you're injecting,
Speaker 1: you know, opioids and ampheta means it's going to affect
Speaker 1: your guests or intestinal tracts. So he was living on
Speaker 1: Tom's and I kept saying him, maybe you should stop
Speaker 1: eating dairy, you know, It's like, no, maybe he should
Speaker 1: stop shooting up. It's really but I decided that it
Speaker 1: could not be that. So it was not going to
Speaker 1: be that the country was in the throes of an
Speaker 1: opioid epidemic. This was two thift Sam Queen noniez Is
Speaker 1: best selling book Dreamland about opioid addictions, had just come out.
Speaker 1: But it never entered Eileen's mind that Peter could be
Speaker 1: an addict. She imagined everything and anything. But I have
Speaker 1: occasionally on this podcast talked about a psychoanalytic term I
Speaker 1: came across while doing research for my book Inheritance. The
Speaker 1: term is the unthought known. The psychologist Christopher Bolas coined
Speaker 1: it and describes the unthought known as something that we
Speaker 1: absolutely know in our deepest into earreer, but cannot allow
Speaker 1: ourselves to think. To think it, to bring it to
Speaker 1: the surface of our consciousness is impossible, dangerous, so we
Speaker 1: just don't. It certainly wasn't conscious. I mean, I was
Speaker 1: shocked when the medical examiner said she thought he died
Speaker 1: of an overdose. I was like, are you crazy? You
Speaker 1: know I had still even at that moment. I was like, no,
Speaker 1: that is not it. So walk me through that morning
Speaker 1: and why you go to his house that day and
Speaker 1: what happens. So he had been behaving increasingly erratic, and
Speaker 1: he wasn't reachable, and when he was reachable, he would
Speaker 1: say I'll call you back in ten minutes and it
Speaker 1: would be three hours, and he would come up with
Speaker 1: something like I, well, I was dehydrated and I had
Speaker 1: to get something to eat. And then he would tell me, oh,
Speaker 1: and I lost my wallet, and then like I got
Speaker 1: a call from a neighbor that found his wallet, and
Speaker 1: I would have to call a secretary and say, can
Speaker 1: you find him and she's like, well, he hasn't been
Speaker 1: in in three days. It was nothing made sense. So
Speaker 1: my kids had gone to his house on a Monesday
Speaker 1: night and he just had a complete meltdown and was
Speaker 1: screaming at them. And he was not a yeller. He
Speaker 1: had a very long fuse before he would raise his voice.
Speaker 1: Probably I could get him to raise his voice, but
Speaker 1: not his kids. He was in his bedroom the whole time.
Speaker 1: He would only leave. He left, he would cross the
Speaker 1: kitchen to get a brownie out of a pan of
Speaker 1: brownies he made, and he'd go back into his bedroom.
Speaker 1: And craving sugar is also a symptom of obiloid addiction.
Speaker 1: And my son walked in his room to say, like,
Speaker 1: are you okay, dad? Because he was really sick. He
Speaker 1: said he had the flu. This was going on like
Speaker 1: eight months. And Peter got up and vomited onto the
Speaker 1: floor and threw a washcloth over it and went back
Speaker 1: to bed. My son said, I'm taking you to the hospital.
Speaker 1: That's it, and his dad snapped at him and said no,
Speaker 1: you're not, Like, I'm not going because he he was
Speaker 1: not gonna have anybody find out how old is your
Speaker 1: son at this moment. He's sixteen, and Peter even held
Speaker 1: she was eighteen. She was home for the summer, and
Speaker 1: he yelled at my son, who ever yells at And
Speaker 1: he went downstairs to his sister and he said, I
Speaker 1: think he was close to crying. And he was just like,
Speaker 1: we have to get dad. We have to take dad
Speaker 1: to the hospital. And she said, what's the use. He's
Speaker 1: not going to go. I think they my son's just
Speaker 1: calling an ambulance. And my daughter said, he'll kill us,
Speaker 1: like he'll be so angry. So they left it. And
Speaker 1: the next morning I called my son and said, is
Speaker 1: dad okay? And he said, I'll talk to you about
Speaker 1: it when I get home. And I said, look, I
Speaker 1: could come up and make him some soup, because you know,
Speaker 1: he was all alone. He had some relationships, but nobody
Speaker 1: was in his life that much. He said, no, don't
Speaker 1: do that. He doesn't want you to come up here.
Speaker 1: So he came back to my house and he told
Speaker 1: me that he had been screaming and that Peter had said,
Speaker 1: you and your mother are making me sick. She's always
Speaker 1: telling me to go to the doctor. So that's why
Speaker 1: my son had said, don't come up. He doesn't want
Speaker 1: any help. So I thought, all right, well, fine, I
Speaker 1: want then. And that was then Thursday morning, and then Friday.
Speaker 1: We kept trying to reach him and he wouldn't answer,
Speaker 1: and I said, no, I'm going to go up there
Speaker 1: and I'm going to take dad to the hospital. I
Speaker 1: don't care what happens. He's going. And so I drove
Speaker 1: up there and I had a book in my bag,
Speaker 1: and I was all set for like a hospital stay.
Speaker 1: I thought, maybe he's going to be unconscious, maybe he
Speaker 1: will have soiled the bed. I don't care. I'm gonna
Speaker 1: call nine one one if I have to, but I'm
Speaker 1: getting him to a hospital. And then I walked in
Speaker 1: the house, which I had a key too, and I
Speaker 1: found that he had died. Did you understand as soon
Speaker 1: as you saw him that he was dead? No, I didn't.
Speaker 1: That's how powerful he seemed. I thought, well, maybe he's
Speaker 1: just lying down. And then I went over to him
Speaker 1: and I could see his arm with stiff and I
Speaker 1: had called nine one one and they said an ambulance
Speaker 1: is coming. Do chest compressions. And I couldn't move his arm,
Speaker 1: and even then, and I could see his fingernails were blue.
Speaker 1: I didn't think he had died. And then I looked
Speaker 1: up at his eyes and they had risen out of
Speaker 1: their sockets, which, um was obviously horrifying, and I was thinking,
Speaker 1: that does not look like someone who was alive. But meanwhile,
Speaker 1: I'm standing over this man's almost naked body. He's only
Speaker 1: in his underwear in socks, and there are track marks
Speaker 1: and holes all over his arms, his legs, his hips.
Speaker 1: I see nothing. All I saw was one hole that
Speaker 1: had bled out, and I thought, well, that's weird. He
Speaker 1: must have cut himself falling down. And I just ran
Speaker 1: out of the house to wait for the ambulance. I
Speaker 1: just I just couldn't even you know, imagine that it
Speaker 1: was anything but a cut. So then it's when the um,
Speaker 1: the police come, the detective and one of them tells you, right,
Speaker 1: I said. She was asking me all these questions about
Speaker 1: alcohol and drug use, and I was like, what is
Speaker 1: the point of this? And then I said, well, what
Speaker 1: do you think it was? And I assumed, you know,
Speaker 1: I assumed at that point he had a heart attack
Speaker 1: from working too hard, and she said, um, no, I
Speaker 1: think he had an overdose. And even then I was like,
Speaker 1: an overdose of what? And she was like I think
Speaker 1: it's probably amphetamines. And then I realized, oh, she thinks
Speaker 1: he was using drugs, Like that's impossible. It's remarkable what
Speaker 1: your brain will do. But it took a long time.
Speaker 1: It took several hours for me to understand that, no,
Speaker 1: this was what happened. But I think it did seem
Speaker 1: to my kids and me that he was too smart
Speaker 1: and too powerful, like he had so many resources if
Speaker 1: he was unhappy or needed to escape. Why pick this?
Speaker 1: Why would you do this when you have kids sleeping
Speaker 1: down the hall. So there's a very, to me, very
Speaker 1: moving part of your book where it sinks in for
Speaker 1: you that he's died of an overdose, and there's a
Speaker 1: social worker there, and there's the question of what you're
Speaker 1: gonna tell your kids. I'm gonna get choked out people
Speaker 1: talking to you about this, and the social worker has kids,
Speaker 1: you like sort of ascertained that. So you say to
Speaker 1: the social worker, like, what would you do? And her advice,
Speaker 1: one mother to another, an incredibly human moment in the
Speaker 1: midst of searing pain, her advice was, I would tell
Speaker 1: them because really, what other option is there? What other
Speaker 1: path to any future healing? This is what family secrets
Speaker 1: is all about. So I thought like, Okay, I'm gonna
Speaker 1: try this. And then when I did tell them, especially
Speaker 1: for my son, who had seen the worst of it
Speaker 1: because he was with Peter every other weekend and during
Speaker 1: the week um my daughter had been at college, so see,
Speaker 1: he had seen the decline and he was lying to
Speaker 1: himself too. He was like, oh, it must be you know, Dad,
Speaker 1: he's always working. He's crazy, you know, it's this way
Speaker 1: he is. Um. He felt completely responsible for Peter's death
Speaker 1: because he hadn't taken him to the hospital, and so
Speaker 1: when he heard this news that no, he was already
Speaker 1: quite sick. You could just see him physically let down,
Speaker 1: like he was like okay, okay, so I couldn't have
Speaker 1: done anything. And and then I thought, Okay, this was
Speaker 1: the right thing to do, because as hard as it was,
Speaker 1: it was also oh, now we know what it was.
Speaker 1: There was this big secret he was keeping from all
Speaker 1: of us, and he was lying to all of us.
Speaker 1: But now everything makes sense. And as sad and hard
Speaker 1: as that was to hear, I have to say it
Speaker 1: was the biggest relief. It was like, Okay, now I
Speaker 1: can clean this up and I can move on with
Speaker 1: my family. Imagine if Aileen had made a decision in
Speaker 1: that moment not to tell her kids. They had already
Speaker 1: been kept in the dark because of their dad's addiction,
Speaker 1: and now in the wake of Peter's death, Imagine if
Speaker 1: their mother had decided to also keep a secret. Secrets
Speaker 1: on top of secrets, a house of cards built out
Speaker 1: of fear and shame just waiting to blow over. As
Speaker 1: a journalist, I really, I do believe the truth is
Speaker 1: very freeing. And it's funny because there were some members
Speaker 1: of Peter's extended family that did not tell his parents
Speaker 1: why he died. And I didn't feel I mean, I
Speaker 1: wasn't their daughter in law. I didn't feel like it
Speaker 1: was my place. But before I wrote a piece about
Speaker 1: this for The New York Times that focused much more
Speaker 1: on the legal profession, the Times had decided they wanted
Speaker 1: to run some photos of Peter, so I allowed it.
Speaker 1: And I called his mo um a few days before
Speaker 1: it was going to run, and I said, I have
Speaker 1: to tell you something, And honestly she was so relieved.
Speaker 1: She said, you know his father, And I kept thinking,
Speaker 1: this does not add up, this does not add up.
Speaker 1: I mean, he was fifty one he didn't have a
Speaker 1: heart problem, and she was like, how do you get
Speaker 1: an infection in your heart? You know, you get it
Speaker 1: when you have a lot of openings into your veins
Speaker 1: and your skin. That secret had been really bothering her
Speaker 1: for two years, and now she was like, Okay, I
Speaker 1: get it. And it turned out. I think the decision
Speaker 1: was made to protect them, was made out of love,
Speaker 1: but really it probably caused them more aggravation and pain.
Speaker 1: You know, well, it's interesting too, that phrase you used
Speaker 1: that she said of you know, it didn't add up.
Speaker 1: It didn't add up. You know, there's this kind of rumination.
Speaker 1: I think that then starts to happen, you know, people
Speaker 1: like lying awake at night just thinking this doesn't make sense,
Speaker 1: This doesn't make sense, this doesn't make sense. And and
Speaker 1: in a way it then kind of boomerangs back on
Speaker 1: the person who's doing all the ruminating. You're carrying a
Speaker 1: burden because you don't and you don't even know you're
Speaker 1: carrying it. And that is such a good description of
Speaker 1: what it felt like. Before I wrote that story in
Speaker 1: The Times, I felt like I had to keep it
Speaker 1: a secret for almost two years. I just I came
Speaker 1: up with this line to tell people when they because
Speaker 1: I think when someone dies young, you know, it's a
Speaker 1: normal human instinct to be afraid, and you want to
Speaker 1: think what can I do to fix my own life
Speaker 1: so I don't die this way? So to a one,
Speaker 1: everybody said, how did it happen? And I said, well,
Speaker 1: he was living a very unhealthy life. I just said,
Speaker 1: you know, he was working a lot, and he was smoking,
Speaker 1: and he was taking tough to sleep and to stay up.
Speaker 1: And so I wasn't lying, but I wasn't telling the truth.
Speaker 1: And then when I finally did in the Times and
Speaker 1: I got mostly positive feedback from other people who've been
Speaker 1: through it, it was like magical, you know. I was
Speaker 1: just like, oh my gosh, I'm not alone. And also
Speaker 1: it started a conversation in the legal profession about you know,
Speaker 1: this issue and lawyer mental health, and I it made
Speaker 1: me think like we should be talking about this because
Speaker 1: he wasn't the only one suffering. It's a beautiful thing
Speaker 1: when we have the opportunity to make meaning out of trauma.
Speaker 1: I think Eileen personifies this. She takes a tough, tough
Speaker 1: experience and shapes it, shares it in order to help others.
Speaker 1: But first she needs help. She begins a kind of
Speaker 1: therapy called e M d R, or Eye movement desensitizing
Speaker 1: and reprocessing. This may sound a little weird to some listeners,
Speaker 1: but look it up. E M d R. Eileen is
Speaker 1: a huge believer, and so am I. E M d
Speaker 1: R is a method that allows the patient to literally
Speaker 1: reprocess and desensitize a traumatic memory, not to erase it,
Speaker 1: not to forget about it, but to diffuse it, to
Speaker 1: learn to live more comfortably with it, to move on. So,
Speaker 1: and is that experience part of your decision to go
Speaker 1: to social work school? You know, it was part totally
Speaker 1: part of my decision, and I had I have and
Speaker 1: I had a great therapist who administered it and helped
Speaker 1: me through so much of it. But also I think
Speaker 1: when I found Peter and I was kneeling by his body.
Speaker 1: It may sound odd, but at the time that I
Speaker 1: saw that, I realized that he was dead. I thought,
Speaker 1: I can't keep doing what I'm doing anymore. Like I
Speaker 1: just felt like I'm going to have to change my life.
Speaker 1: I was writing a lot about startups and technology for
Speaker 1: The Times and other publications, and I just thought, this
Speaker 1: doesn't feel meaningful. To me, I think I need to
Speaker 1: write about other things, and I think I need to
Speaker 1: be more involved with end of life things. And I
Speaker 1: just I kept thinking, you know, ex husbands and ex wives,
Speaker 1: there's a lot of it's hard to be divorced. And
Speaker 1: Peter was my friend and also sometimes my biggest nemesis.
Speaker 1: But I loved him, and seeing your friend there like that,
Speaker 1: and thinking was he scared? Was he in pain? Was
Speaker 1: you know? Was he regretful? Like I thought. I couldn't
Speaker 1: have saved him at that point, but I could have
Speaker 1: held his hand, so he wasn't alone. But I've always
Speaker 1: been an activist, and so I thought, I'm going to
Speaker 1: go back to work for social work and think about
Speaker 1: end of life care. I guess there's a way to
Speaker 1: make up for what I couldn't give Peter because I
Speaker 1: didn't see what was happening. I didn't know his secret
Speaker 1: and I have. But I wound up my first year.
Speaker 1: They said, you know, where would you like to do
Speaker 1: your field work? And I said, anywhere with addiction. I
Speaker 1: don't want to do addiction. That's exactly what I did,
Speaker 1: and it was actually remarkable and rewarding, and I learned
Speaker 1: a lot. So that was where I made that pivot.
Speaker 1: You know, I think we all know we're going to die.
Speaker 1: I've never seen someone dead. I was like, this is
Speaker 1: going to happen. Man, that's not gonna happen this way,
Speaker 1: and it may not happen tomorrow, but it's like, this
Speaker 1: is really going to happen. And so I have to
Speaker 1: think really carefully, what do I want the rest of
Speaker 1: my time to look like. My friend Sylvia Borstein, who
Speaker 1: was my guest during season one of this podcast. If
Speaker 1: you haven't heard her episode, go back to season one
Speaker 1: and listen to her episode. Don't duck. You'll thank me
Speaker 1: later anyway. Sylvia, who is one of the most beloved
Speaker 1: teachers of mindfulness meditation in this country, recently told me
Speaker 1: a Buddhist parable. A monk is walking through the woods
Speaker 1: when he realizes he's being stalked by a tiger. The
Speaker 1: monk walks faster, the tiger picks up speed. The monk
Speaker 1: gets to the edge of a cliff. There's nowhere to go.
Speaker 1: The tiger's closing in, but then the monk notices a big,
Speaker 1: thick vine hanging from the side of the cliff. He
Speaker 1: jumps off, clinging to the vine. His salvation for the
Speaker 1: moment his life has been saved. The tigers up there salivating.
Speaker 1: The monk sees that there's one beautiful, big, red ripe
Speaker 1: strawberry on the vine. He's looking at the strawberry, and
Speaker 1: then he sees that a little mouse has also just
Speaker 1: noticed the strawberry and has poked its head from the
Speaker 1: cliff where the vine is attached. The little mouse starts
Speaker 1: to gnaw on the vine. So what does the monk do.
Speaker 1: The monk plucks the strawberry and eats it. We're always
Speaker 1: hanging on the vine. I tried to be more present,
Speaker 1: and Peter always used to make fun of it, like,
Speaker 1: oh yeah, But I feel like Peter and people like
Speaker 1: him are kind of running away from the existential reality
Speaker 1: because if you're really really busy and important, you're not
Speaker 1: going to die, you know, you're you're too busy. And
Speaker 1: I thought that. I thought, he's so busy, he's not
Speaker 1: going to die. You know, Peter doesn't die, but we
Speaker 1: all do. You know, we live in a world where
Speaker 1: everyone's always asking me, so what are you gonna do?
Speaker 1: Are you going to do social work? And you know,
Speaker 1: are you gonna this? And it's like it's so nice
Speaker 1: to talk to you. Sometimes I feel like saying, you know,
Speaker 1: I don't know. I'm gonna get through this and just
Speaker 1: sort of see what happens. But that is an uncomfortable
Speaker 1: place for most people to be. They want my plan.
Speaker 1: If you compare are your inner life now and say
Speaker 1: your state of whatever you want to call it, contentment, happiness, peace,
Speaker 1: two where you were when you were, you know, in
Speaker 1: that house in San Diego, still married, thinking okay, well
Speaker 1: one more goal post. I'm going to stick it out
Speaker 1: until until my my son can drive. Um. If you
Speaker 1: compare the you now you know, the Eileen now to
Speaker 1: the Eileen, then how would you describe your inner state
Speaker 1: now as compared to them? I was so lonely. I mean,
Speaker 1: I think marriage can be the loneliest place if it's
Speaker 1: not a good one. And I remember thinking, this house
Speaker 1: is full of people, and I am so terribly lonely.
Speaker 1: I felt disconnected from everything, and I was so caught up.
Speaker 1: In five more years ten, this will be at she'll
Speaker 1: be out of college, and I feel like I have
Speaker 1: more space inside me. I feel much more content and
Speaker 1: I feel much more at peace, Like I feel like,
Speaker 1: you know, the world is can be a somewhat bleak
Speaker 1: place right now. I feel scared, but I sort of
Speaker 1: feel like I'm just going to be open to it.
Speaker 1: And my kids and I will often remind each other
Speaker 1: because sometimes my son too. He just graduated from college
Speaker 1: and he's like, so I'm going to do this for
Speaker 1: three years, that I'm gonna try this, And just the
Speaker 1: other night he was saying it, and he said, of course,
Speaker 1: I don't know if any of that's going to come true.
Speaker 1: And I used to say, remember, Dad, if you would
Speaker 1: have asked me. I used to be rehearsing, how am
Speaker 1: I going to manage if he has a girlfriend at
Speaker 1: my son's graduation, I'm gonna have to where am I
Speaker 1: going to sit? But he was dead by my son's graduation,
Speaker 1: and I thought, you can plan as much as you want,
Speaker 1: but really I just have to sort of go with it.
Speaker 1: I feel much more at peace. I can handle it.
Speaker 1: I can get through this. I'd like to thank my guest,
Speaker 1: Eileen Zimmerman. You can learn more about Eileen's memoir Smacked,
Speaker 1: a story of white collar ambition, addiction, and tragedy, at
Speaker 1: Eileen Zimmerman dot com. Family Secrets is an I Heart
Speaker 1: Media production Dylan Fagan is the supervising producer. Julie Douglas
Speaker 1: and beth Ann Macaluso are the executive producers. Special thanks
Speaker 1: to Derek Clements for his help with this episode. If
Speaker 1: you have a family secret you'd like to share, you
Speaker 1: can get in touch with us at listener mail at
Speaker 1: Family Secrets podcast dot com. You can also find us
Speaker 1: on Instagram at Danny Ryder, Facebook at Family Secrets Pod,
Speaker 1: and Twitter at FAMI Secrets Pod. For more about my
Speaker 1: book Inheritance, visit Danny Shapiro dot com. For more podcasts
Speaker 1: from My Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app,
Speaker 1: Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows,