Dear Dealer by Nadia Bowers is an unflinchingly honest, wholly unique portrait of a sister left behind, charting the messy unraveling of a loved one’s addiction and the complicated search for acceptance in the aftermath. In the summer of 2015, Bowers’s beloved older sister, Sasha—an Ivy League-educated social worker—was found dead in her car from a fentanyl overdose. Stricken with grief and just weeks from giving birth to her first child, Bowers armed herself with Sasha’s cell phone and began to investigate her sister’s secret life to answer the nagging questions she couldn’t shake: Who sold Sasha the drugs that killed her? How did they know each other? Did the dealer really know Sasha in the way she deserved to be known?
Part epistolary, part mystery, part family history, part love letter, part diary, and part personal reinvention, Dear Dealer is an unputdownable homage to her sister and a reckoning with the steep cost of addiction and the way tremendous loss remodels one’s sense of self.
I spoke with Bowers about her evolution from private writer to published author, avenging her sister’s death the best way she knew how, and what she’s learned from the processes of writing, publishing, and living the ending in real-time.
Coutney Kocak: I feel like acting is a natural training ground for writing with its emphasis on character and story, and especially classical theater with all its deliciously heightened language. I went on my own actor-turned-writer journey. Tell us about yours. Was this book your first foray into writing, or had you been dabbling prior to Sasha’s death? I’m thinking of the “Grey Gardens Vacation” section of the book—were you thinking of yourself as a writer at that point?
Nadia Bowers: I think I’ve always been a writer. It’s just taken me a long time to share it. It was sort of a secret. I’ve been writing since I could write in a notebook, but I’d say it really became cellular in middle school with more creative writing classes. My eighth grade English teacher, Ms. Beccia, had us keep a journal. She’d give us prompts, but we also had to write on our own. If there were pages we didn’t want her to read, we were to fold them over. I loved this so much, and I just never stopped. Having this space to know myself, figure out how I thought about the world became a necessity for me. I wrote for classes in school, of course, an op-ed here or there for a college newspaper. I wrote a thesis for my major, sociology. But I also have boxes and suitcases of journals. I started another one on my computer backstage at Circle in the Square Theater when I was an understudy in Mary Zimmerman’s Metamorphoses in 2002. (I’ve done a lot of understudying as an actor, which means lots of time sitting backstage, which means time to write.) The computer document is many hundreds of pages now, single spaced. I grandly named it “State of the World” and it starts: “THE STATE OF THE WORLD AS OBSERVED STARTING AUGUST 2, 2002.” I then launch into the “task of the actress in society today…” Bless my heart. It makes me laugh a little, but I also love this idealistic younger me who loves her work so much and is such a serious champion of art and artists, critical of what she sees as a materialistic, greedy society. I was never an actor in it to get famous. I have always seen our work as service and critical for a healthy society.
I wrote a one-woman show in graduate school that I also did at the NYC Fringe Festival, and I have written screenplays and essays. But most of my writing has been private. At times I wish I’d started putting it in the world earlier, but there’s also something wonderful about writing for a long time not to impress anyone but yourself. Just trying to get thoughts right for yourself. Still trying to write well, as if someone might read it, but not having to seek permission or approval from anyone else. I was able to tune into my voice and strengthen it that way.
At the time of the Grey Gardens Vacation I was definitely thinking of myself as a writer, but quietly. I wasn’t sure to whom I would show what I was writing. Writing helps me never really feel lonely. And it’s a way for me to lock into the present, record what is happening in case I don’t want to believe it later. It’s a way to trust myself.
I love acting. But waiting for jobs has become more and more frustrating for me as I get older. The lack of agency can make me feel insane. For years I’ve felt there’s more I’ve wanted to give back to the world creatively than acting work was allowing. (Most actors feel this.) Every journal of mine is littered with the sentence: “You need to be writing more.” Writing has always been a home for me.
With the pandemic, the silver lining for me was that with no acting work, there were no interruptions for my writing. That began to move the needle for me. I never had the courage to take a break from auditions to write. When auditions started up again, the book was underway, something in me had shifted, and I started to be more selective about how I was spending my time. Did I want to go out for parts that didn’t particularly inspire me just because I “should”? I began to choose writing.
I completely agree with you about acting being wonderful writing training. Character and story, as you say, and dialogue too. A way of listening. Acting has helped me understand that words have a physicality to them, in a mouth and in a body.
CK: From what I can tell, the book began with an essay in Time and then a This American Life story. I just listened—it’s so good; I’m sure the audiobook will be fantastic. What a dream to do TAL. How did that radio story come to be, and what was that experience like?
NB: Thank you for those kind words and for listening! And you are not wrong. It was an absolute dream to do TAL. This is how it went down: I wrote that first letter and I thought I’d try to place it somewhere. I’d never submitted my writing to a publication before. Lauren Wein at Avid is a friend of a friend. She read it and was generous in making the connection to Time. Meanwhile, our friends Tommy Kriegsmann and Shanta Thake were over for dinner and I told them about the piece I’d written. Shanta is at Lincoln Center now, but at the time, she was the Director of Joe’s Pub here in NYC. She said, “Hmm. I should introduce you to Elna Baker at This American Life.” Shanta is one of the most amazing connectors. This is one of her superpowers. She knew Elna from shows at Joe’s. The next day, Shanta put us in touch. A few days later, Elna said she was going to pitch it. A few days after that, she told me, “Ira and I are going to produce your piece.” It was stunningly fast. I nearly fainted.
Working with them was exactly as you’d imagine. Collaborative, fun. They took such good care of me and the piece. I didn’t want to leave their office.
CK: When did you realize you were actually working on a book? What was your writing process from there, including the “field research” you did to try to piece together what happened?
NB: I had been writing about Sasha in my journals for a while. After reading Ann Patchett’s Truth & Beauty a couple years before Sasha died, I had the very clear thought, Oh, I’m going to write about Sasha someday. The way Ann wrote about her friend Lucy so lovingly but so honestly showed me that there was a way to do that. That you could do both.
At the end of the TAL piece, Ira says, “That was Nadia Bowers. She’s writing a memoir about her sister.” And that was true. I knew that I was. But I wasn’t quite ready. No one wanted the book I was going to write at that time. I needed to do some waiting and listening. I didn’t know what I wanted from it or how I would do it. If I even had the right to. So, I did a year of plays, writing when I could, and then TAL re-aired the piece in February 2020. J.J. Abrams heard it and was interested in making a movie of it. He asked if I might be able to write the movie and the book at the same time, and even though I hadn’t done either of those things ever, and certainly not simultaneously, I said sure. Because that’s what you say in a situation like that. But I got some advice from an agent I was working with at the time who said to write as much of the book as possible first. So when Covid started and everything shut down, I got to work. But, needless to say, Covid shook things up, and the movie with J.J. eventually went away because he had other priorities. But he and his people were really good to me. He really lit a fire under my ass to sit down and write every day.
I didn’t know where to begin, but what kept coming back to me was another letter. I kept hearing the words, “Hey man, it’s me again.” So, I started there. Every day I woke up and thought what am I going to write to him about today? I gave myself no rules. Sometimes it was angry, but other times it was just stories about me and Sasha. Or my current life. I had my son just over two months after Sasha died, and as a new mother, I didn’t want to worry people about all the feelings that I had. So I used the dealer to be able to get them out. I think ultimately, I wanted him to know us. That was the engine beyond the expression of anger.
Meanwhile, I wanted to know Sasha better, know where maybe I had some blind spots, or maybe I had failed her. Or we all had. I wanted to know what I’d missed. Also, as an actor, especially in a play, you see where a character begins and where they end up. And it’s my job as an actor to figure out the emotional arc of their journey in the play. It’s just instinct for me to do that. And now I knew the end of my sister’s life and I desperately wanted to know how she got there. So I started reaching out to people who I thought might be able to help me understand.
My writing took center stage as much as it could for a mother of a young child who was still trying to work as an actor. Sometimes it was shoehorned into the corners of my life, and often late at night when my husband and son were asleep because that was when I felt like I had time for myself. Having a young child takes a lot of energy, and my husband was working out of town a lot at that time. It was a lot to do all this excavating. But it also felt imperative. I knew Sasha was important to me, but I don’t think I understood how much she’d shaped me. I didn’t know who I was without her here. Which meant I needed to really understand who I was because of her. As a new mother, for my son, I needed to make this conscious.
I was also spurred on by the many people who reached out to me after the TAL piece. I was far from alone. People said that I had told their story. I realized that if that one letter had resonated with so many people, a book might as well.
CK: What was the publishing process like—both landing the book deal and seeing the book through to publication? Did anything surprise you?
NB: It was long! Ha. But when you start, you just don’t know. One foot in front of the other and it’s different for everyone.
I wrote for a year, 2020–2021. I got a draft together, but it was messy. I imagined the book at that time to be all letters, so that’s what it was. I started working on a proposal. I was working with an agent at the time who thought I might be able to sell the book on an outline and sample pages. I worked for a long time on the proposal. All told about a year, which brought me to the end of summer 2022. At that time, I parted ways with the agent I had been working with, but I got connected with the amazing agent I have now, Erin Hosier. She got me and the book from the start. We worked on the proposal some more and a couple months into 2023, we went out with it. The goodwill toward this book has been astounding. A few publishers passed because the material was perhaps going to be difficult for some members of their team, but they made it clear that they were cheering it on in the world. That touched me deeply.
But it was Pamela Cannon at Gallery who brought it to Aimee Bell. She circled back to Aimee to make sure she’d read it. She had not. And when she did, she realized she knew me and Sasha. We’re from the same hometown. Her younger brother Chris was voted Class Brain with Sasha at Branford High. We all knew one another. I kid you not. So, when I went into my meeting with them, Aimee threw her arms around me and said, “I remember your sister. She was legendary.” And that was that. It was crazy serendipity.
But that night, I didn’t have a party. We ordered Chinese food at home and opened one of those half bottles of champagne. I remember feeling sort of subdued. It was a huge, life-changing moment for me, a dream come true. But I also knew it would cost me something. I was staring down the barrel.
In my contract, we talked about writing the book in one year. It took three. I only really finished it at the beginning of this spring of 2026. That surprised me, how long it took. But it only surprised me when I looked back. Every moment I was in made sense at the time it was happening. Every moment needed to happen to get where I ended up.
When I sold the book, I didn’t have the ending yet. All the stuff that happened at the end happened after I sold it.
Writing a present tense memoir is somewhat harrowing (I have learned). Because you are having to look back and make sense of things while you still may be living through them. And you have to re-enter the scenes of the past in the present tense—relive them. Make them alive again. Over and over.
Another thing that surprised me was how good I had become at recognizing my own voice. That when I was perhaps asked to do something that didn’t feel true to me, I just couldn’t.
CK: Your acknowledgements are full of writing community. How did you find those folks and what was their impact on the project?
NB: I found everyone organically really. I met Dani Shapiro after getting to go to the Sirenland Writers Conference. So, I sought her out as a teacher, but our connection remained after the conference. And I have other dear friends from that conference. I queried Betsy Lerner when I was looking for a new agent, and she wasn’t looking for this kind of book at the time, but she referred me to her colleague, Erin, in the same agency. So, Betsy has been a wonderful guardian for us both during this process. And I met Amy Bloom because of the world being small. Ada Limón—I am lucky to call her a friend. She was friends first with my husband for a long time before I met him—young artists running around NYC. She wrote us a poem for our wedding—how stupid lucky is that?
I have been very lucky in my life as an artist in NYC. You’re just living your life, doing your thing, and then you look around after some years and say, “Wow, I know so many incredible people.” People can think New York City is all cutthroat, but there’s so much love here. So much.
And I have to tell you. This book has some strange magic—a life force all of its own. I just kept thinking, I need to serve it, not get in its way, and let it be what it wants to be. People kept appearing along the way when I needed them. I will not say the whole thing was easy. It was not. There were huge bumps. A couple mountains. At times, I felt like I was going to crumble, and occasionally I did. It took a toll on me. But people have been really good to me and the book. I had to learn to ask for help. That was another thing. I always say, “This book found its people.”
CK: Did the Dear Dealer letters start as an earnest outcry of your determination and rage or were they a sort of stand-in for the feelings you were working through in your head for the radio story and subsequent book?
NB: Earnest outcry. A real need. A longing to know this person who completely changed my life, Sasha’s. A rage. At first I thought I might smoke the guy out with an op-ed in the New Haven Register. Get him to confess his sins. Disturb his sleep, his conscience. In the book, I mention wanting to get a billboard. Or do a Craigslist Missed Connections. Almost immediately after she died. That was all real. None of it was device. Or a gimmick. I didn’t yet know what the letters were doing for me or where they were going to go. I was too in it. The idea of a radio piece had not even occurred to me.
CK: Your evolution with the letters in the final pages was poignant. I wasn’t sure you’d come to a place of being able to understand this faceless villain in all their humanity and recognize Sasha’s agency in the situation—even the fact that she could have been dangerous to others in ways you weren’t aware of—and it was so heart-wrenchingly satisfying when you did. How did it feel to live that journey?
NB: I mean, the journey itself was… rough. But I think being able to see her fully was a result of me finally separating out from her. Seeing her as a whole person, and me as well. And him, of course. In some way, it was a relief to admit that she played her part in all this too. It doesn’t feel good to hold on to anger and blame. It eats at you. It feels young, like I was still the avenging little sister. But now, I could grow up. I wasn’t a little sister anymore, so I could just be a mildly wiser older woman who knows that we are all flawed and connected, that we are all responsible for one another, and that love is the only way forward.
I knew something had to transform in me but I also didn’t want to lie about it. I couldn’t force some bow and make it tidy. If I couldn’t accept or forgive or whatever, well, then that was what it was, and we can look at that. But after that pivotal scene at the end of part three, something released in me. A lot of my anger toward him was a stand-in for anger toward her. And when I let myself feel that, I could see the truth more clearly.
CK: You clearly put so much of yourself into this book. What did you learn about yourself in the process?
NB: Could maybe write another book about that. But here are a few: I can get a lot done after my husband and son go to bed. That dance breaks are imperative in writing and in life. And I am a writer.
CK: I have three younger brothers. I have to admit I was relieved to not have a sister growing up, but now I yearn for that relationship. Dear Dealer is an homage to the beauty and violence of sisterhood. How has that relationship shaped you for better and worse?
NB: I don’t know that we can say better or worse. It’s just what is. I like who I am, messiness and all. And I know she has a lot to do with who I am. Like I say in the book, I probably got interested in acting because she took up a lot of space in our family. It used to be more highlighted in earlier drafts, but there’s a thematic undercurrent of being an understudy. In acting school, teachers could sense that I was holding back, afraid to take up space. It’s something I had to work on.
She was always telling me I was a “storyteller.” That I needed to be writing more. It’s not lost on me that it’s her and her big life force kicking me and my writing out of secrecy and into the world.
CK: My impression is that, much like her golden-titted, crystal-nipped urn, Sasha would be honored by your writing of this book. What do you think she would feel about Dear Dealer?
NB: Thank you for saying that.
She came to see me perform a one-woman show I wrote at the NYC Fringe Festival in 2003. It was about a woman who becomes obsessed with a larger-than-life folksinger from the 70s who died in a bathtub. It was deemed an accident, but this woman thinks it was a suicide. So, she performs a psychological autopsy, a real thing, when it’s unclear if a death was intentional or not. No suicide note. People go around and interview others who knew the person to see if they were someone who might commit suicide. So, I played the “detective” woman and all the people interviewed for the psychological autopsy. She tells the audience at the beginning that if she concludes that her hero did indeed commit suicide, she too will kill herself. There’s a bathtub on stage ready to go. The parallels to that show and what I ended up doing for Sasha many years later in my book are chilling to me now. At the time I wrote it (started in 2000) I had no conscious worries about Sasha dying. I thought I was just making up this story.
But when Sasha saw my performance at the Fringe, she ran to me afterwards in the lobby, bawling, and nearly tackled me. She hugged me so tight, snotting on my shoulder, saying over and over, “Nad! You wrote that? I can’t believe you wrote that!”
That’s what I feel from her. What I hear. And I feel like we wrote this together. I really do.
CK:I was struck by the sliding doors of it all—if only this or that would’ve gone down slightly differently, perhaps Sasha would still be alive, maybe even sober. How did this experience change your thinking about the butterfly effect, and has it altered how you live your day-to-day life at all?
NB: I still worry about things. But I think I have accepted more that we don’t have much control. We have some. But if that’s your main game, what you’re after, you’re missing a lot. I really do think I am appreciating what is in front of me, right now, this moment, a lot more. The What If should not have more pull than the What Is.
CK: What, if anything, has changed in the three years since the end of the book? What’s your relationship to the phantom dealer and Sasha’s memory today?
NB: Well, the end of the book happened and then I had to write the thing, ha! So, my life has changed in that writing has taken the front seat. Took over my life. That’s a huge change, and one I love.
Sasha is a partner to me in this life. Will always be. I sometimes feel a deep longing when there’s something I know only she would get. I’ll burst out crying still at times. Or I’ll laugh. I talk to her. I see her. She’s right here. Sometimes I still have to remind myself that she’s not actually here. She has taught me so much. She brought a lot of magic, and when life gets a little too serious, full of “shoulds,” she points me toward the ridiculous.
I see this book as an extension of her work, and she will live on and on and on.
As for the dealer, I won’t give too much away, but where I start with him is very different from where I end up. He does not live in my body in the same way. That fight is gone. I still think about him, of course. I wonder if he’s still alive. An old friend. I still imagine us looking into one another’s eyes. Who knows for sure what that moment would be?
I do know that as I investigated Sasha’s life, looking at her as a human being, I had to look at him that way too. It was the only way forward.
CK: As you mention in the beginning, over the eight years you were working on the book, 398,884 people died in the United States from fentanyl overdoses. Hayden Panettiere just died of a suspected drug overdose. It’s such a widespread problem from which no demographic is immune. Have you come across any possible solutions in your research?
NB: So heartbreaking about her. And that’s right, it hits everywhere.
I’m going to take a moment here to plug a book that just came out by Stephanie Wittel Wachs called Last Day: How to Stop Losing Our Loved Ones to the Opioid Crisis. She lost her brother Harris in 2015, same year I lost Sasha. She started the podcast Last Day. This book is a well-researched manual essentially, for people struggling with what to do. It’s fantastic, practical, full of useful information, funny even, and actually hopeful. So, please get it!
Steph talks about radical love, and that is something I landed on as well. Unfortunately, the addicted person is often doing things that are enraging, and it is very, very difficult to see beyond that at times. We try to keep score like we would in the relationship when that person wasn’t using drugs, and it’s just not the same. They are not the same. Opioids hijack your brain. They make people do things that create a lot of shame, and shame is the thing that generates more lies, more deceitful behavior, more using. We take what they are doing personally, and even though we have been told that addiction is not a moral failing, I really think deep down most people don’t feel that way. We have to recondition ourselves. Really. Not just say it. Like, do some work around it. The idea of radical love is, you’re using, I love you. You want to use in front of me to be safe, I love you. That’s essentially harm reduction. There aren’t conditions on the love.
The shame around all of it is the other killer. It stops us from talking. From reaching out. From being honest.
CK: What advice would you give to someone whose loved one, especially a sibling, is struggling with drugs? Is there anything you wish someone would’ve told you?
NB: I would say that your story matters too. When there is an addicted person in a family, it sucks the energy, takes up all the space, makes everyone’s life about it. It’s a bully. But you are in this too. They have what they are going through, but you matter too. Make sure you are taking care of yourself. This is happening to you too.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Nadia Bowers is an actor, writer, and voice-over artist. She has a BA in sociology and French from Dartmouth College and an MFA in acting from NYU’s Graduate Acting Program. Nadia works in theater, television, and film. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her husband, actor Corey Stoll, and their son.
ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER: Courney Kocak is a writer, podcaster, and comedian who splits time between Austin and Los Angeles. Her bylines include The New York Times, The Cut, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, Cosmopolitan, Slate, and more. Her debut memoir, Girl Gone Wild, with Trio House Press, is out now.