Tell Me About Your Father

 “ 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.

In our annual Pride episode, Matthew is joined by film and culture critic Richard Lawson for a living room conversation over cocktails. Starting with Richard's fresh-out-of-the-theater reaction to He-Man: Masters of the Universe and Matthew's just-finished viewing of Richard Gadd's HBO series Half Man and what they have in common, they move into queer coding in animation, Pedro Pascal's career calculus, the relentless nihilism of Half Man versus the false resolution of Masters, and what it means when a creator tears themselves open onscreen.

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A couple weeks after The Pitt’s second season ended, we’re still thinking about Kathryn VanArendonk’s essay “Robby Has Never Been Your Daddy.” Kathryn joins Erin and Elizabeth to discuss Noah Wyle’s vision of Robby, the show’s shifting ideas about masculinity and caregiving, and why people seem to have forgotten how to watch TV anymore. Especially this one, omg!

Kathryn was also on set for the filming of the "wild pregnancy" emergency C-section scene in the Season 2 finale. (Three words: whipped cream cheese.) Plus, we get into the Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance of it all, Robby/Whittaker/Abbot dystopian pregnancy fan fiction, and the internet’s need for this man to check himself into 90-day inpatient for mean guys at work. Hit play.

“ Am I just becoming my father and there’s really nothing I can do about that?”

What does it actually feel like to change? Not the story you tell about it afterward. Not the version you post. The actual, messy, doubt-filled experience of becoming someone different — or realizing you already have.

On this episode of Tell Me About Your Father, Matt Phillp is joined by New York Times Bestselling author, journalist, and professor Benoit Denizet-Lewis to talk about his new book You’ve Changed: The Promise and Price of Self Transformation. They talk about how transformation can sometimes happen slowly and it can hit you like a revelation about your sexuality on a street corner or at a Christian youth convention telling you to give you life to God. They also discuss kind of change you can’t fully take credit for because other people made it possible…like your parents whom you’ll inevitably resemble.

Some of what we get into:

Why do we often insist that real change has to come from within — when almost none of it actually does?

What does doubt during a major life shift actually signal? And why can’t we talk about it publicly?

What does it mean when the person you’ve become turns out to look a lot like your father?

Benoit has spent his career writing about identity — sexuality, addiction, the stories we tell about who we are and who we’re becoming. This book is his most personal yet, which comes across quite clearly in this episode.

Listen by clicking play above, or find this episode on Apple podcasts and wherever else you may attend to your podcast listening.

By the time Dan Pelzer died last year at the age of 92, he'd accomplished many admirable things. Over the decades, he'd worked as a Marine, a Peace Corp volunteer in Nepal, a seminary student, a passionate campaigner for Jesse Jackson's presidential run in the 80s, a security guard, and as a beloved social worker for incarcerated juvenile delinquents in Columbus, Ohio. Dan was a loving husband to his wife of 52 years, Mary Lou, a hands-on father to their kids Marci and John and his grandchildren, and an engaged member of the community, where he regularly volunteered to feed the hungry. A life well lived by all accounts.

But there was something else notable about Dan's life: between the years pf 1962 and 2023, he kept a handwritten record of every book he read, stopping at the very end of that year, a list totaling 3,599 titles of every possible genre, from the pop science classic Rats, Lice and History (1935), to contemporary memoirs by Sinead O'Connor and Jennette McCurdy, and every novel by his beloved John Grisham since A Time to Kill.  

On this episode, Dan's daughter Marci reminisces with Erin about reading Gabrielle Zevin's Tomorrow & Tomorrow & Tomorrow with her father, finding the full list after his death, the surprises therein, and what she's learned from strangers about her dad's life since sharing the list with the world. You can see a digital copy here at Dan's exclusive literary destination, the Columbus Metropolitan Library. And the original handwritten list via What-Dan-Read.com. 

It’s that time of year again. Every year, we put the 10 Best Picture nominees under the same deceptively simple microscope: How are fathers portrayed?

Joining this conversation, as always, is: member of the New York Film Critics Circle, author of the Premier Party newsletter, host of the Critical Darlings podcast, culture writer Richard Lawson.

At 15, Natalka Burian’s last words to her father were “I hate you.” That afternoon, he died at 44. Now a parent the same age he was, Natalka joins Erin and Elizabeth to talk about regrets, the fear of repeating a parent’s fate, and how to make peace with what you cannot know.

 2025 began with Elon Musk's 4-year-old son X telling Donald Trump to shut his mouth, and it ends with us - the father of all award shows. We're rounding up the men who surprised and delighted us this year, and the one who repelled, in pop culture, politics and beyond. Love you and thanks for listening!

Christian Nightmares, our favorite chronicler of evangelical Christianity’s tightening grip on American politics in 2025, returns to Tell Me About Your Father for a look back at a truly frightening year in Christian Nationalism that aims to ensure that America is truly one nation under God Trump.

In this episode, the anonymous editor of Christian Nightmares, who goes by “Christian”, walks us through his top 5 purveyors of Christian Nationalism this year, which feature such luminaries as pastor Joel Webbon, who matter of factly believes women don’t belong in public life and shouldn’t vote, much less podcast, and Eric Orwoll, whose white power organization Return to the Land is hard at work building a “fortress for the white race” in Ravenden, Arkansas.

We also talk with Christian about how the year has given rise to a glut of militarized Christian branding and survivalist drag, complete with camo, tactical gear, and merch for battles that don’t exist. (We know what this country needs: more gun-toting men and boys.)

Then there’s the growing Christian Nationalist war on “empathy.”

As another gruesome grifter, pastor Josh McPherson says: “Empathy is toxic. Empathy will align you with Hell.” We try to parse why Charlie Kirk also couldn’t “stand the word.” It’s a world view in which care for others is a trap set by childless uggos and fat Army generals. Compassion is always a weakness, and the people who believe it wholeheartedly are right in the center of power in the US. It’s not your mama’s Golden Rule(book).

And, as Christian explained in the interview he did with us back in 2021, he knows this world well. Raised in an evangelical church that instilled constant fear of a punitive god in its members, his work has become a living record of the fundamentalism that shaped his childhood and has since crept its way into the White House under the cloak of Russell Vought’s Project 2025, curling up at Stephen Miller’s feet.

Rob Reiner tried to warn us, but we’re not sure the country will listen until Vought takes away their porn.

We are wishing you all a happy and healthy holiday break from your jobs, surrounded by the love of your chosen family, favs and friends.

Yours,

Erin, Elizabeth and Matt

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