“I said, ‘Mom, I want this guy to be my dad.’”

We’ve had many authors on the show who have written books about their fathers, but Josie Adams co-wrote a book with her dad, Tony Shalhoub (your favorite actor from Monk, Wings, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel and Big Night), embodying his voice as she researched his family origin story.

What started as a cookbook of family recipes inspired by their enormous annual Shalhoub family reunions in Wisconsin became so much more: We Thought They’d Never Leave: Musings on Food and Family is out now.

In this episode, Josie talks with Erin and Elizabeth about her unusual adoption story - being adopted by single mom and Invasion of the Body Snatchers actress Brooke Adams, then choosing Tony to be her dad when she was three. They also discuss the enormous extended family she inherited from Tony, one of ten children, and the story of how his father came to Wisconsin as a starving eight-year-old orphan from war-torn Lebanon.

The book is also filled with tips and tricks on how to keep the peace with family members you don’t agree with on politics, religion, or reality at a holiday gathering. It’s also a surprising and delicious primer on the family’s “Middle-Western” recipes, ranging from tabbouleh and fattoush salads to Wisconsin’s finest mac and cheese, and a recipe for the moistest chocolate cake you’ll ever have. The secret sauce is mayo - and it’s great!

 “ 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.

“When your child is having an extreme outburst of emotions, for whatever reason it might be, repeat to yourself, ‘He's not giving me a hard time. He's having a hard time.’"

The dad-themed books of my childhood were always found on the back of the toilet, or nearby. Filled with jokes about golf, alone time, toilet seats, alcoholism and contact sports, these short, often illustrated paper products reflected the expectations we had of fathers as the man in the house who most deserved a nap.

On this Father’s Day episode of TMAYF, Erin and Elizabeth talked with Kevin Maguire of The New Fatherhood.org, and author of the new book of the same name, about the stark history and new realities of being a dad in the 2020s, his own experience with post-natal depression, how men have evolved as a species, breaking the cycles we inherit, and why psychedelics may hold the key to a personal paradigm shift for parents.

Here’s to the guys who are doing the work like their children are watching.

Happy Father’s Day to you and yours,

Erin, Elizabeth & Matt

It’s cool. Just do it.