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.
Continue reading “Nadia Bowers on Bringing Her Sister Back to Life in Dear Dealer”